Released by Exidy in 1976, Death Race became the first arcade game to spur a national controversy over violence in video games.  A player of the game navigated a white car across the black screen as white stick figures, which developers called “gremlins,” ran back and forth. The driver attempted to run over the gremlins, which let out high-pitched screams and turned into tomb stones complete with crosses. With each kill, a player gained a certain number of points. Though the game featured minimal graphics, protestors soon claimed the title promoted excessive violence. Exidy responded that, despite the gremlins’ humanoid shape, they weren’t meant to represent people, but several flaws exist in this explanation.

Only a year before the game’s release, director Paul Bartel created the action movie Death Race 2000, starring David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone. The movie depicted a dystopian America that hosted the violent Transcontinental Road Race. During the race, motorists won prizes based on speed and how many innocent pedestrians they killed. The more violent the kill, the more points the drivers earned. While it remains unconfirmed whether or not designers based the game Death Race on the movie, people associated the two.

Additionally, Exidy’s working title of the game, Pedestrian, hints that developers originally envisioned the gremlins as humans. And Death Race was the first arcade game to present a human-shaped target. Previous games either featured alien enemies, such as the “flying saucers” in Computer Space by Nutting Associates, or possessed no fixed enemies at all, like Atari’s Pong. Lastly, protestors disapproved of the graphic artwork on the side panels of the arcade machine, which featured a skeletal Grim Reaper driving a racecar. This gave the game a sinister appearance.

Death Race’s attributes sparked the first video game-based mainstream media protest. Dr. Gerald Driessen, a behavioral scientist and manager of the National Safety Council’s research department, called the game “gross” and claimed it added to the nation’s “war and killing” mentality.  David Row, safety consultant for the Automobile Club of California, called the game “sick, sick, sick,” because it taught the “morbid” skill of how to hit pedestrians. In 2007, CBS’s 60 Minutes held a discussion on the psychological dangers of video games. Due to these protests, Exidy only manufactured 1,000 Death Race units. Ironically, the controversy boosted the sales of arcade games in general, and Exidy products in particular. In his book The Ultimate History of Video Games, Steven Kent quotes Exidy president Pete Kauffman: “It seemed like the more controversy…the more our sales increased.”

The rarity of the console combined with its role in the narrative of video game violence makes Death Race a valuable piece of cultural history.

Because eGameRevolution chronicles a wide range of video game history, the cabinets must share exhibit space with other aspects of gaming such as consoles and computers. Consequently there’s room to display publicly only part of ICHEG’s growing collection of nearly 150 arcade games. Also, some games in our collection, such as the laser-disc classic Dragon’s Lair, are too fragile or rare for everyday use. So to help museum guests better plan their trip, we’ve recently added a web page that provides an updated list of the cabinets currently available for play in eGameRevolution. Here’s the list as it stands now:

Recently we’ve featured more of our vector-graphics games such as Eliminator, Star Wars, Lunar Lander, and Asteroids Deluxe. Racing fans will like the addition of Road Blasters, one of the first games to combine racing and shooting. Track and Field gives players a button-mashing workout.

We’ll continue to rotate new titles into the arcade. What games would you like to play during your next visit?

In reviewing the gameplay experience, Rungetta said “you eat a flower that lets you spit fire…and there’s this guy that throws armadillo-type things from a cloud. These sound like the ravings of a mad man.”  Of the surrealist experience, he explained, when it commenced, non-sequitur art proved radical but today the absurd rarely fazes us. Given the episode’s short length (only two minutes), Rungetta’s simplified version of the movement loses an essential point. As a cultural movement, surrealism insisted on a higher reality. Artists typically underwent psychoanalysis to explore complex, often repressed, emotions. While visual elements of Super Mario Brothers might resemble a Dali or Kush canvas, surrealism is not about the absurd and the game is not either. In a 2009 interview with Wired, Mario’s creator Shigeru Miyamoto said, “My feeling is that with the Mario games, you don’t need to have such a complicated setting where you have these particular characters with complicated back stories that can weigh down the bright and fun feel of the game.”

While I’m a little aggravated by Rungetta’s simplification of a complex movement, I do agree that video games are art. I especially appreciate something else he said, “video games constantly challenge our ideas about what is normal or even possible.” Games like Portal, The Sims, and Bioshock confront perceptions of free will and mortality. While the visuals of these games don’t look like a surrealist painting, the emotions they evoke might well fit into the movement. Playing Jason Rohrer’s 2007 memento mori game Passage feels much like a therapy session. On his website, Rohrer wrote, “your interpretation of the game is more important than my intentions. Please play the game before you read.” The game fits into the smallest, most irregular aspect ratio 256×256, lasts exactly five minutes, and presents an entire life from young adulthood to death. The game challenges a player’s perceptions about an individual’s life and death.

What if the Idea Channel team had instead titled the episode, “Video Games as Surrealist Art”? Perhaps I’d be less resistant to the argument. And I’d certainly like to play a game modeled after a surrealist painting. Then I could finally understand what it would feel like to build a sand castle in a desert littered with melting clocks or cruise on a ship with enormous butterflies for sails.

Some hardcore, purist players, Consalvo says, claim beating the game on anything other than merit constitutes cheating. It takes away from the personal joy and satisfaction of solving a difficult puzzle. Such players refuse to read any guides, consult any websites, or learn any special codes. On rare occasions, they may ask a friend for advice, but only if the alternative means quitting the game out of frustration.

Other players maintain more lax views and refer to strategy guides. The collection of more than one thousand game strategy guides in ICHEG’s archives at The Strong provide detailed plot walkthroughs, charts with statistics on weapons and armor, and lists of side quests and rewards. Many early game creators, such as Infocom, published “hint books” that offered tips and tricks on how to get past difficult areas. Some, like the InvisiClues book for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, were interactive. Hints remained invisible until a player highlighted the guide with a special marker. Because game publishers approve guides as official merchandise, some gamers believe using a publication is not cheating.

With the advent of the Internet, sites such as GameFAQs.com allow players to submit their own hints, tricks, and walkthroughs, many of which are far more detailed than the official guides. These sites also often include cheat codes that instruct players to press a string of buttons in rapid succession to gain advantages like full health or unlimited lives. The most infamous of these, the Konami Code, first appeared in 1986, when developer Kazuhisa Hashimoto created a Nintendo port of the arcade shooter Gradius. To ease testing, he programmed a code that gave him instant access to all power-ups granted throughout the game.  Kazuhisa forgot to remove this code upon publication, and a group of players discovered it. The code appeared in subsequent games and became especially popular in Contra, where players could submit the code on the title screen and gain 30 lives.

A much more invasive form of cheating involves manipulating a game at the technological level. Third-party accessories such as Game Sharks and Game Genies temporarily alter a game to the player’s advantage, providing full access to weapons, access to an endless number of lives, and by opening all levels. Another accessory called a mod chip can be permanently attached to a console and allow gamers to play pirated, home-brewed, and foreign games. Mod chips are illegal in many countries, and installing one violates the console’s warranty.

Finally, some gamers believe cheating only occurs in multi-player games. Competing against a computer or console doesn’t count. Players must instead gain advantage over one another through underhanded means. Popular examples include botting, or programming a script to play the game when the gamer isn’t physically present; installing third-party software to allow a character to run faster or claim monsters easier; and hacking into another player’s account to steal their gear and money. To combat these issues, online games either employ Game Masters or run automated programs to detect illegal activity and ban cheaters.

With such varied definitions of cheating, it’s easy to understand why players argue over whether or not their actions should be considered wrong. It’s clear, however, that shattering the “magic circle” in any form changes the gaming experience by linking the game’s fantasy world to our own. How do you define cheating in video games? What outside assistance, if any, do you seek when stuck?

While Minecraft is relatively new, what strikes me most about it is how ancient the game play is. Play theorists recognize construction play as one of the oldest and most common forms of play. Real-life sandboxes make possible infinitely open-ended sessions of construction play while offering plenty of latitude for players to pretend with the miniature worlds they create.

On that same Saturday morning, we also built a physical castle from building blocks (some from my father’s childhood), Playmobil figures, and random stray toys. The motte-and-bailey fortress we made (shown above mid-construction) featured soldiers, stores, and plenty of enemies lurking outside the castle walls.

The building block has long been a favorite toy. In the 19th century, toy manufacturers such as F. Ad. Richter of Germany and S. L. Hill of New York City began to produce building toys in mass quantities for children. Soon vast quantities of construction materials filled children’s nurseries—the physical playgrounds of middle-class and upper-class children. In the 20th century, Erector Sets, LEGO blocks, and other new forms of building toys delighted kids.

Perhaps no writer has so expertly captured the joy of building with blocks as the pioneering fantasy writer Edith Nesbit in her wonderful 1910 novel Magic City. In the story, Philip, a lonely boy staying in a strange house, uses the blocks, toys, and odds-and-ends he finds to construct vast cities. Nesbit writes:

Philip drew a deep breath of satisfaction, went straight up to the nursery, took out all the toys, and examined every single one of them. It took him all the afternoon.

The next day he looked at all the things again and longed to make something with them. He was accustomed to the joy that comes of making things….

By armfuls, two and three at a time, he carried down the boxes of bricks and the boxes of blocks, the draughts, the chessmen, and the box of dominoes.…

He cleared a big writing-table of such useless and unimportant objects as blotting-pad, silver inkstand, and red-backed books, and there was a clear space for his city.

He began to build….

He put everything you can think of into it: the dominoes, and the domino-box; bricks and books; cotton-reels that he begged from Susan, and a collar-box and some cake-tins contributed by the cook. He made steps of the dominoes and a terrace of the domino-box. He got bits of southernwood out of the garden and stuck them in cotton-reels, which made beautiful pots, and they looked like bay trees in tubs. Brass finger-bowls served for domes, and the lids of brass kettles and coffee-pots from the oak dresser in the hall made minarets of dazzling splendor. Chessmen were useful for minarets, too.

And the city grew, till it covered the table. Philip, unwearied, set about to make another city on another table….

He worked hard and he worked cleverly, and as the cities grew in beauty and interestingness he loved them more and more. He was happy now. There was no time to be unhappy in.

What a marvelous description of play! And what a marvelous explanation for why, when we build things in play—whether with blocks in a physical space or with blocks in the virtual world of Minecraft—we find such joy.

After all, when we work hard and we work cleverly and our creations grow in beauty and interest, we not only love them more and more, but we’re happy, because we have not time to be unhappy in.

So Minecraft players, happy building, because when we play there’s no other type.

In 1985, Island of Kesmai allowed 100 people to play simultaneously, making it the first commercial MMORPG. In 1991, Don Daglow’s Neverwinter Nights became the first graphical MMORPG and ran on AOL servers until 1997. I learned a lot about the detailed development of this historic game from Daglow’s personal papers and design notes, which he generously donated to ICHEG. A year after the release of Neverwinter Nights, Sierra On-Line created the first of three online RPGs, The Shadow of Yserbius, which ran until 1996. Critics cited it as the standard by which to judge all subsequent graphical online games. Details about the development of this and other Sierra games are available in the personal and professional papers of company founders Ken and Roberta Williams, who also donated their archives to ICHEG.

In 1997, developer Richard Garriott coined the term “massively multiplayer online role-playing game,” which he used to describe his new multiplayer game Ultima Online. It wasn’t until Sony’s 1999 release of EverQuest, however, that fantasy-based MMORPGs became popular in the United States. Previously, such games flourished mainly in Asia, where video game piracy ran so rampant that developers needed MMO subscription fees and micro-transactions to compensate. Because of its popularity and compelling gameplay, EverQuest remained the most successful MMORPG in the country for five years and spawned 16 expansions.

Even though EverQuest made MMORPGs popular, many gamers still considered these a niche genre. To keep up with an MMO required a commitment (often several hours a day) that appealed only to those deemed “hard core” players. The introduction of World of Warcraft in 2004 changed all of this. While still requiring dedicated players, WoW appealed to those interested in casual game play. Gaining experience and leveling characters took less time and provided an opportunity for players to socialize with friends during game play. WoW also offered high-level raids that might require up to 40 players working together, giving even the most hard core gamers a challenge. To facilitate these raids, players formed groups called Guilds, where all members worked together toward common goals. Guilds often formed the basis for new friendships and out-of-game chats.

With three expansions and a fourth on the way, WoW’s popularity remains strong. Here at ICHEG, we strive to capture and preserve such games, along with physical memorabilia such as the Barthilas Realm server blade. If you have stories of your own massively multiplayer online experiences, share them with us either in the comments or using our America at Play: Play Stories site. And to learn more about MMORPGs, check out Kerrie Lewis Graham’s “Virtual Playgrounds? Assessing the Playfulness of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games” in the American Journal of Play, Volume 3, Issue 1.

1. I was so worried about such and such, I couldn’t sleep.
2. I got so bored running on the treadmill, I just wanted to slide off the back of it at full speed.
3. I should not have ordered that ______ (fill in the blank) last night.

For most of my adult life, I have said at least one of these each week. However, I have found a few fun, innovative video games to help.

When a friend told me that I wear my temper on the tip of my nose, I decided to try meditation. My silent, yoga-mat days were short-lived, but when I heard Kellee Santigo of thatgamecompany describe their 2009 game Flower as a “video game version of a poem,” I was intrigued. Jenova Chen, the company’s co-founder, considered Flower a spiritual successor to his early game Flow. Chen wanted the game to evoke a positive emotional state. Flower’s team removed all elements and mechanics including speech that might inhibit the intended response. The gameplay explores the difference between “urban bustle” and “natural serenity.” The player controls the wind, which in turn, blows a single flower petal through the different environments (six levels of gameplay). As with our real world interactions with nature, the flower’s movements trigger certain environmental cues—turn dead grass to vibrant fields, start a wind turbine, or grow more flowers. As I watched the city become more vivid, I took a deep breath of what felt like fresh air.

Zombies, RUN! triggers the opposite emotional response, but if you play this running game on your Smartphone, you’ll never complain about boredom during a jog again. While participating in an amateur running class, writer Naomi Alderman heard a classmate say, “I want to be able to outrun a zombie hoard.” Alderman thought her peer’s sentiment made for a clever game, and so she paired up with game studio Six to Start. Your mission proves simple—avoid zombie hordes and rebuild your base. Gameplay is just as straightforward—put on your running shoes, headphones, and hit the pavement (or treadmill). The app provides 13 audio missions and you can select a custom playlist before you start to run. Before you cover 100 yards, you’ll start to hear zombies. And there’s only one way to save yourself, run! The first time a zombie catches you, you get a warning, “The zombie has caught you.” However, after a number of zombie attacks, you fail a mission and you have to start over again, which means logging more miles. Now this game might not be good for your nerves, but it will keep you on the move.

Regret the fast food you ate last night? Sick of potato chips for dinner? Learn how to cook healthy meals with Nintendo’s Personal Trainer: Cooking. While it’s not technically a video game, but rather a virtual cookbook accessed on Nintendo DS, amateur chefs who tackle the 241 or so recipes deserve a win as far as I’m concerned. Personal Trainer: Cooking includes voice recorded instructions, pictures, and video tutorials that teaches the chef how to julienne carrots, bake a chicken pot pie, and season with bay leaves or rosemary, among other techniques and recipes. I especially appreciate the game’s built-in grocery list. It notes the ingredients you need to whip-up the next recipe and alerts you to how much money you’ll likely spend.

With organizations such as GamesforHealth, it’s clear that play is an important part of a healthy lifestyle. And wouldn’t it be more fun to tell your coworker about how relaxed you felt after playing a video game than to complain about that darn report? And people will certainly be more impressed to hear you outran a hoard of zombies this morning, than to hear that you hit snooze, again. Or what about instead of pulling up to another drive-thru, you invite a friend to dinner and share a new recipe you practiced with the aid of your Nintendo?

By contrast, I recently played another game that similarly starred an explorer escaping with temple treasures, but the play mechanics differed completely. Incan Gold is a card game in which players search a temple for artifacts. As a player ventures deeper underground he finds more and more gold but also meets with traps, monsters, and other hazards. At each turn the player must decide whether to flee to safety with the gold he’s got or keep searching and hope he doesn’t fall victim to the final trap. Whereas Temple Run rewards fast-twitch reflexes, Incan Gold prioritizes the careful calculation of risk, the cool assessment of other players’ actions, and the possession of a steely stomach.

These two games illustrate how designers readily adapt the romantic image of the intrepid archaeologist to various mechanics of game play. There have been plenty of others. Most famously, Lara Croft, star of the Tomb Raider games, was quick with a gun but also had to rely on her wits to solve a series of puzzles. Two games from 1982, the arcade game Jungle Hunt and the Atari cartridge Pitfall, popularized this use of the jungle explorer in video game play.

But the idea of the intrepid explorer and archaeologist is an old one. David Crane, Pitfall’s creator, was inspired by Raiders of the Lost Ark, which came out the previous year. Steven Spielberg, the director of Raiders, in turn spoke of the influence of old movies such as King Solomon’s Mines. That movie was based on a book by the Victorian writer R.L. Haggard, who wrote such thrilling adventures as King Solomon’s Mines and She at the height of the British Empire—a time when European explorers were uncovering ancient civilizations and documenting their exciting exploits. I read both of those books last year, and despite their sometimes fusty prose they’re every bit as exciting and tense as Temple Run and Incan Gold.

Of course none of these books or games resemble real archaeology. My dad’s an archaeologist, and as someone who spent much of my childhood on his digs, I can testify that good archaeology is slow, deliberate work, where patience is a necessity and careful documentation is a must. Plus the artifacts you find are generally potsherds and other evidences of how people lived long ago, not jewel-encrusted idols. That may not be as much fun as enthralling tales of temple robbers, but maybe someday someone will develop an exciting sim game about an archaeological dig. If Will Wright was able to make urban planning captivating, there’s no reason someone couldn’t do the same for the patient excavation of real life archaeology.

Until then I’ll just have fun discovering gold and fleeing from outraged temple guardians!

A few years ago, I went to see The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art. Marina Abramović sat in a chair for nearly three months, and as part of her performance piece, museum guests sat in the chair directly across from the artist in search of an emotional connection. The line to sit with Abramović remained ever present and as it turns out, my patience was not. I got another chance to experience the exhibit, however, when I played The Artists is Present video game. Dr. Pippin Barr from IT University in Copenhagen created the video game to portray the experience of contemporary art. Barr’s game sent me to the museum virtually—through  the ticket line, through a few galleries complete with an 8-bit Van Gogh and Matisse, and then back into another line to wait for Abramović. Just as with the actual exhibit, my patience lasted less than 15 minutes. I attempted to cut the line and was reminded that this seemed “like it would be rude.” Proper etiquette is a must in this game.

I am enchanted by fashion in classic film noir and I admire the cynical and gritty style of the genre. As soon as Rockstar Games released LA Noire I had to give it a try. When it comes to detective work, I am more like Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau than Sam Spade. However, this did not detract from the game’s story and aesthetics, which resemble those prevalent in classic noir scenes (crime, moral ambiguity, femme fatales, and the like). Last year, Rockstar Games recognized the appeal of the game’s juicy plots. The company partnered with Mulholland Books to publish a collection of stories that would explore the lives of the characters. Fiction writers Joyce Carol Oates and Jonathan Santlofer, among others, agreed that the characters proved thrilling enough to spin further tales. Santofer said his story was inspired by the killer. “I wanted to give him a pathology that would be terrifying and also a little bit, if I dare use the word sympathetic.” Some might consider this a cross-promotions marketing scheme, but I think it reminds people that innovation stems from many resources and reading, writing, and video games are all forms of creative play.

Every Wednesday, Daniella Zelli dishes up a snack inspired by a classic or new video game. On her blog Gourmet Gaming, she recently wrote, “I love to play video games and I love to eat….what’s even better is eating the food from the game I’m playing.” Perhaps you’re interested in a slice of Portal Cake or a Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door’s Zess Freppe. Zelli posts these recipes and more on her blog and often provides tidbits about her inspiration. For example, in the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Yeto cooked a healing soup for his ailing wife. Each time he added an ingredient to the soup, the healing powers doubled. In Zelli’s interpretation of Yeto soup, she used the key ingredients from the three healing stages: reekfish (used smoked and white fish), pumpkin, and goat cheese. She wrote “Yeto was definitely on to something with this soup….I can feel my hearts restoring as I type.” With games like Cooking Mama and Food Fight, Zelli has countless resources for recipe innovation.

I am not a chef. When I play The Sims, my avatars eat microwave Ramen Noodles (when I remember to zap them for long enough). I am not a hard-boiled detective. And it’s pretty clear I do not embody Abramović’s patience. But I am curious about the ways that video games and other creative outlets influence one another, and perhaps one day while I am playing an arcade game in the National Museum of Play’s eGame Revolution at The Strong, cataloging a cartridge for ICHEG’s collections, or reading a game designer’s notebook, I will discover my own muse.

SW:TOR puts the player in the center of conflict between the Galactic Republic and the Sith Empire as they battle one another for preeminence in the galaxy. Aside from the epic battle, I most enjoy the variety of options for character creation. Players choose between the Republic and Sith factions, each containing four mirror classes: Jedi Knight/Sith Warrior, Jedi Consular/Sith Inquisitor, Trooper/Imperial Agent and Smuggler/Bounty Hunter. Players then select from among nine species, though some are restricted to certain factions and classes. Physical customization includes such intimate details as tattoos and scars.

The character customization that interested me the most involves light and dark side points, which are not restricted to one’s faction. In the films, a Sith represents the dark side, but in the game, a Sith may choose to follow the light. Likewise, a Jedi may turn to the dark side. Choices made during story conversations earn the player light and dark side points, which affect in-game items such as weapons. Instead of portraying a specific film or story character, these selections allow a player to experience Star Wars as his own stylized character.

It’s no surprise that gamers appreciate SW: TOR, because for the last 30 years players have reveled in the Star Wars franchise’s more than 100 video games. Parker Brothers developed the first Star Wars game in 1982 for the Atari 2600. The company based their game on the second movie, The Empire Strikes Back, and players delighted in flying snowspeeders and attacking Imperial AT-AT walkers in the Battle of Hoth. A year later, Atari published Star Wars the arcade game. This vector-based game simulated the Death Star battle of A New Hope and featured digitized speech from the movie. A sequel arcade game, The Empire Strikes Back, simulated the Millennium Falcon’s asteroid chase and the Battle of Hoth.

Game companies continue to release popular Star Wars games of all genres—some that reflect the movies and others that incorporate the expanded universe. One of the most enduring, the Star Wars: X-Wing series first developed in 1993 by Totally Games, includes four games of space combat simulation as both X-Wing and TIE Fighter pilots. Nearly a decade later, the game Jedi Outcast gave players their first chance to battle with a lightsaber, a technique that continued and evolved in the 2006 game The Force Unleashed. Star Wars: Battlefront games, first released by Pandemic Studios and LucasArts in 2004, maintain a legacy of the most popular Star Wars shooting games, as players face off against enemies in both the prequel and original series eras.

Bioware, which developed SW:TOR, is no stranger to Star Wars games, either. In 2003, they released their highly engaging RPG Knights of the Old Republic, which takes place four centuries before the rise of the Galactic Empire and features a battle between a Sith army and the Republic. The company released a sequel, Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lord, which takes place five years later when the Jedi have been all but destroyed by the Sith. My favorite holiday gift picks up the story after 300 years, as new conflicts arise across the galaxy.

Whether you’ve played all the Star Wars games ever produced or if this would be your first one, I highly recommend SW:TOR as a wonderful edition to this franchise. And while you’re playing, be on the lookout for a Mirialan Jedi Consular wielding a green double-bladed lightsaber. That just might be me.

Good luck, and may the Force be with you!