Pongism - Theory and Practice
A Study Of The Distilled Essence Of The Videogame
(originally published in The Gamer's Quarter, #2)
amandeep jutla / may 27 2005
It’s curious, but true, that the esteem someone gets in the videogame community is nearly always directly proportional to how long that person has been holding a controller. And, in a certain sense, this makes sense--a kid whose first videogame ever was Super Mario 64 probably doesn’t know shit about what he’s talking about, while someone who, like, played the 2600 Defender all the time back in the day has a bit more perspective.
That makes sense. Still, all too often, this kind of logic devolves into a pissing contest, where people “prove” how they have far more credibility as gamers than any mere mortals, and name-drop ancient titles for obscure consoles that five people in the world own, to sound impressive. That irks me, a bit.
It sure irked me three days ago, in a mall in the south part of Springfield, Missouri.
Springfield, after all, is something of a boring place, especially for someone like me. Besides the town’s Best Buy, which I frequent whenever I feel like getting screwed out of my money in exchange for a videogame, there are few other places of interest. The city is middle-sized, generic, and thoroughly devoid of interesting quirks. There are at least one hundred Midwestern cities exactly like it, I am certain--perhaps even more. It is thoroughly depressing.
Such were the lines I was thinking along that fateful night. I was sitting at home, moping, thinking about the stupidity of my situation and waiting for it to get sufficiently late for me to go to sleep. Videogames usually help me at times like this, but somehow my heart just wasn’t in it. The time had come, I finally decided, to go do something bizarre and out-of-character--I would go to the mall and hang out. It would be a silly thing to do--nothing in the mall really interested me, after all. Still, it was something. An idea. A way to murder time.
This is how, two hours later, I found myself standing in line to buy carcinogenic, barely-edible garbage from a small indoor Taco Bell, while eavesdropping on a conversation being carried on by three college kids. They were complete idiots, all of them. I could tell just by looking.
“Dude,” one of them said, “Videogames? I know all about that shit.”
“Yeah?” said another.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Shit, man. I’ve been playing since Super Mario World, back in ’91.”
The other guy raised his eyebrows and let out a long, low whistle.
“Wow,” he said. “I’ve only been at it since Halo.”
The other guy snorted derisively.
At this point, the third college kid cleared his throat and spoke up:
“You know,” he said, “I’ve been playing videogames ever since Pong.”
“Pong?” said the Halo guy.
“Pong!” said Super Mario World. “Holy shit, man! You’re, like, really hardcore. That’s fucking sweet.”
At this point, I decided that I had to butt in.
“No, it’s not,” I said.
The three guys spun around.
“It’s not fucking sweet,” I said. “It’s a lie. What the hell do you mean, you’ve been playing videogames since Pong? Are you stupid? Look at you, you’re not nearly old enough for that!”
“You bastard,” Pong said. “You complete bastard. I have too been playing videogames since Pong. I played it with Nolan Bushnell, even. In California. I played Pong before he even formed Atari.”
“Look,” I said. “I’m not an arrogant person--really, I’m not. At least, not usually. Still, I have to make one thing clear--I know more about videogames than you can possibly imagine. And I’m onto you. You’re too young to have ever played Pong back in your childhood. Just admit it. Lying isn’t going to get you anywhere.”
I should not have said this, but though it was hard, I somehow escaped with my life.
Once home, I raided the fridge; that whole Taco Bell thing had fallen through, after all, and I was slightly hungry.
And then, standing in the kitchen, piece of greenish, diseased cheese halfway to my mouth, I stopped. And I understood.
1. That guy hadn’t played Pong as a kid.
2. He was a bad person. He’d nearly killed me, after all. Just for pointing that out. I mean, honestly.
3. Step 2 followed from Step 3.Yes.
That guy was a bad person precisely because he hadn’t played Pong. He thought he knew about videogames, but really he was little more than a sad, sad poseur, who would most likely die poor and lonely. He didn’t realize that just saying you played Pong back in the day doesn’t mean you understand it, or its genius. The guy, well, he’d probably played some Super Mario World, like his friend, and certainly hung out with the other frat boys and had marathon Halo 2 sessions, but...Pong? The games like Pong that Atari made in its heyday were far, far better than the silly dross packaged and sold as “videogames” today. I think everyone can agree on that. Pong, though, is forgotten. It’s stuck under a rock somewhere in the collective consciousness of all gamers--we know it was the first videogame ever, and we respect it, and we pretend to have played it for status, but...shit. It’s all by itself. It’s bitter. We’ve buried it, but it’s still alive and banging on the inside of its coffin, daring us to ask it for recognition.
We’d better grant its request.
The Pongist Manifesto
Let’s get one thing straight: I didn’t play Pong when it came out, either. I couldn’t have. Still, I have tried to rectify this mistake. I’ve got a pretty close approximation of the original system installed in that California bar so many years ago running on the computer next to me. It runs quickly enough.
And it’s funny, if you think about it, that this simplistic, blocky, black-and-white piece of shit used to be it. There used to be nothing to which Pong could be compared. Before Master Chief and the Flood, Pong was the embodiment of everything a videogame should be. Pong looks like shit, but it was once the shit.
Conceptually, it is simplistic. Two paddles lie on either end of a rectangular playing field, batting a ball back and forth between them. When this ball hits a paddle, it bounces off and begins to move in the other direction. Each paddle is controlled by a player. The objective of both of them is to avoid missing the ball, for a high score.
Avoid missing the ball, for a high score.
But where is the ball? It’s not a real ball. It’s just a white blip somewhere on the screen--it’s even square-shaped, for fuck’s sake. That’s representational abstraction. The paddles are meant to stand for real paddles; the ball represents a real ball. These objects, in-game, are idealized. If Pong is based on the “real-life” sport of table-tennis, then it follows that it is the most perfect version of table-tennis out there. You don’t get tired, when you play it. You don’t have to worry about orienting yourself in three dimensions, and you don’t have to control all the hundreds of muscles running along your arms and legs. Instead, you move this paddle--completely precisely. Your opponent does that, too.
Pong takes this very real, very normal situation--a game of table-tennis--and digitizes it, turning into something which has a firm grounding in reality yet is bizarrely pure and perfect. When the ball hits the player’s paddle, it goes “ping.” When it hits that of his opponent, it goes “pong.” Ping-pong; back-forth.
Years ago, when I was far younger, my family made the transition from being one that didn’t have access to the Internet at home to one that did. We bought this boxy little thing, see, with all these green lights down the front; it was an analog modem. There were telephone cords coming out of it--one went into the back of our computer, and the other went into a phone jack. When we told the computer to dial the number of our ISP, all those lights down the modem’s front would flicker, turning on and off, on and off.
Ping and pong.
The lights were a sort of liberation. They meant communication, with the world at large. I could start up a browser and order it to fetch things for me, and it would talk to the Internet and then show me what it could see. The Internet and I had conversations that lasted long into the night, just based on those patterns of light, and that modem opened up a veritable universe of pornography and illegal games and information that I’d never had access to before.
And that’s what Pong is--a metaphor for access, for communication, at its most basic level. All conversations, whether they be between browsers and web sites or between people and their grandmothers, can be boiled down to a series of pings and pongs.
But it runs even deeper.
The ping, right, begets the pong--and vice versa. There is a real, mutually causal relationship between the two. You get a pong because you sent out a ping, and the nature of the pong you receive determines the sort of ping you will send out. Subjectively speaking, this is a cause-and-effect process.
And, so, of course: Pong is sex..
If you’re playing Pong with someone for ten minutes, the two of you could not be more intimately involved if you were making sweet love all the night. Picture it: Pretend you’re there now, controlling your paddle, your hand twitching, wondering just where that ball is going to strike, furiously calculating trajectories in your head. It blows your mind. Hell, I’m getting excited right now, just thinking about it and looking at this computer screen six inches in front of me.
The feeling is pure and communicative. You get to read the patterns of motion in your partner--just by examining how he plays his paddle. As it were. You start to predict what he’s about to do. You think, yeah, here he is making a feint, and this, this is him getting ready to smack the ball with the very edge of his paddle, only now he’s changing his mind and he’s going to hit it head on. When you hit the ball yourself, and hear that ping, it echoes in the very depths of your heart, and it’s a delightful feeling, squeal-worthy, even, because you’ve seen the inside of your partner’s skull. With the pong, he feels the same way. The two of you are connected. It’s pretty hot. It is a perfect moment.
It is significant that pioneering videogames, such as Pong, were two-player affairs of this nature. The Go-playing, sake-drinking Gods of Atari understood that games come from life. They are life, only modified and fucked-around with, and turned into something else.
THE POINT IS: although table tennis, when digitized, is indeed virtual homosexual lovemaking, it is also communication, cause-and-effect.
Pong was the first Atari title, but it was not the last. Asteroids and Centipede and The Legend of Zelda, among many other classics, followed over the years. All of these, as Atari games, are very eastern, very Japanese, in their sensibilities. They also follow directly from Pong, philosophically speaking. They don’t hide their lineage, either: they make it entirely clear.
They are variations on a theme.
Look at Asteroids, why don’t you. You can only play Asteroids solo, you know--there’s no room for a second player. So you’re by yourself, and you’re controlling a ship. There are asteroids on screen, but you don’t get to mess with them. Your goal is to manuver about, shooting those asteroids, causing them to explode. The ship, therefore, is the ping, and so is the player. The signals the player sends out are filtered and responded to by the in-game environment. That’s the pong.
Thus, the two principal axioms of Pongism:
If the game is the pong, then the philosophy of games is the philosophy of the pong. The pong, like the tao, is at turns inscrutable, and at others mysterious. It’s not something you can understand without living naked in a cave for several years living off nothing but small insects.
But there is also this: the pong, like the yang, cannot exist without the yin--or in this case, the ping. The words of Atari here ring true. You can almost see them in an old Chinese book of wisdom, next to a pretty three-color illustration of a pond..
Atari say: There no ping without pong, no pong without ping. One is other. There no separation.
And this is when it hit me, late that night, thinking all of this, that for years and years I’d been approaching videogames the wrong way.
Videogames, as an artform, are defined by the ping/pong relationship--and nothing else. The player’s input and the game’s output must be considered with respect to one another, and they are two sides of the same coin. Games are a form of theater--a communication, or play-acting, between both participants. Asteroids, without the player to manuver the ship, isn’t a game--it’s just a collection of harsh, angular lines. Pong, played by one person, loses its meaning and becomes boring as hell. The game becomes little more than those ugly blocks of whiteness I’m now looking at on my computer screen.
Look, let me tell you something, here. There was a time, once, when I harbored delusions of becoming a well-known director of art films. I would take my parents’ camcorder and make tedious videos of drying paint or falling leaves. I’d then transfer this stuff to videotape and try to get people to watch it, to see my genius skills in the field of cinematography.
No one ever gave a shit. So, after a while, I stopped.
What’s the point of filming something if no one’s going to watch that film afterwards? What’s the point of putting on a play if no one’s around to watch it? You know, trees often fall over in forests when there’s no one around to hear them. Isn’t that just a waste? I’ll say it again: Videogames only make sense within the context of that ping/pong relationship.
Notice, however, that I keep using the word “videogames,” rather than “electronic games” or something similar. I’m doing this on purpose. I’m really only discussing console games here, after all, as they are more delicate--more Japanese. They owe their existence to Pong and its philosophy. I’m ignoring most computer games, because I find them boring. Most of them are derivative of Dungeons & Dragons, and they are, generally speaking, nearly all pieces of American shit. I should mention in passing, however, that these games too are based on the theme of communication. When you play Zork or Half-Life 2, you’re exploring, yes, but you’re also speaking with the parser (or in HL2’s case, the game engine), who is your Dungeon Master. The principle is the same.
Thus, whether developed by the Japanese or not, all videogames are self-aware. Such is the nature of the medium. The videogame, as an entity, is inherently post-postmodern, on the cutting-edge of the avant-garde, and it depends in large part on the player’s input and the game’s response, which are combined.
As an example of this, take Tetris, another product of the Japanese, which is the most sublimely perfect videogame ever created. In Tetris, the ping is implicit--the player does not control an avatar; there is no little man putting bricks together. Instead, the control he has over the game’s environment is both direct and immediate. As he spins and rotates blocks, he makes decisions, causes things to happen. He’s pushing, and the game, like any good lover, is pushing back, making some bricks disappear, giving him a score (even though he’s already scoring, as it were), giving him responses. The relationship between man and machine, the player and the played, the flesh and the plastic, is here perfectly intertwined. The two sides aren’t black-and-white, as they are in Pong.
The more you give Tetris, the more it gibes you back, and this genius. Everyone loves Tetris. Millions of people play it the world over. They are captivated, but they don’t know why. Well, this is why.
Now they know.
But, again, it’s not that simple. I mean, not all games are Tetris.
It is often said that there are two schools of thought, in game design--the elegant, Japanese school, and the school of gaijin fucktards. Broadly speaking, the differences between these schools can be described in terms of pongism. Japanese games are dominant. They do most of the pushing, with their strength of narrative. There’s more pong, and less ping. Western games, however, want you to give it to them as brutally as you can. They offer up no resistance. They are, therefore, loose and wide-open, probably because they’ve been raped so many times; that kind of fucks you up.
The videogame field has seen many technological advances, since Pong--even within the stagnant and ridiculous PC games market. There have been all manner of nifty new rules systems and storytelling devices. The back of the box for Star Ocean: The Second Story, which I personally believe is one of the five shittiest videogames ever created, for reasons I’ll not get into now, advertises that the game has, like, over eighty endings. Final Fantasy X has actual voice-acting. Like, whoa! Right?
No. That’s not right. We’ve made all of these superficial advances, but we’ve lost sight of what videogames truly are. We have ignored that they are, as an art, about cause-and-effect, just as films are about temporal juxtaposition, and sculpture is about naked women. The “stories” games tell and the “rules” that comprise them are a means to an end--and the end is interaction. Videogames have no meaning, without it.
A BIZARRE, YET CRUCIAL TANGENT BEGINS
Videogames are intimate relationships. They are communication.
Hey, back when I was in about the fourth grade, I was all about communication. (That was a pathetic transition, I know, but work with me here, okay?) And there was this one point, sometime in October or November, when our math class started getting into coordinate systems. We learned about the X and Y axes, about the origin, and about how to plot points. We learned that, when you do plot points, you move along the X axis first, then the Y axis. We learned all of this and then we moved on to long division and never used this information again until high school, where plotting points was totally crucial in Trig class.
Well, plotting points is also totally crucial in Pongism.
Behold:
That, there? It’s important. Get to know it. It’s a visual representation of the way videogames have slowly drifted away from Pong. You’ll notice the way the axes are defined--the X axis represents a videogame’s execution, and how abstract or literal it is. The Y axis represents the premise being executed. Pong is dead in the center--it is, in general, halfway between abstract and literal on both levels; the premise is that you’re half playing table tennis and half having gay sex. The execution, similarly, is somewhat abstract, in that you’re controlling digital representations of paddles and batting around a ball that really looks like more of a cube, but you can still recognize these things for the real-world objects that they are.
Tetris keeps the balance of execution--you push the game as hard as it pushes you--but in terms of premise it is skewed completely to the abstract. The bricks you’re dropping in Tetris don’t represent anything. They might be a metaphor, but if so, they stand for some vague and nebulous concept no one can figure out.
The further to the left something is on the X axis, the more you push, and the less the game resists. Thus, games out on the fringes of this side are entirely open in terms of what they allow the player to do; Tranquility lets you bounce around and do nothing; Black & White has you picking up trees and throwing them around; Sim City lets you do whatever the hell you want to the lives of two thousand virtual people.
On the other end, the game does all of the pushing. Rez sticks you on rails; you go where it takes you. Dance Dance Revolution makes you master very specific sequences of dance moves that never, ever change. In Gran Turismo, you drive around in circles.
And there are more differentiations, if you look hard enough. The graph has four quadrants, as all graphs do--as I learned way back in fourth grade.
The first quadrant, the one in the upper-right, contains things that are almost too literal to be considered true videogames. Gran Turismo, for example, is about cars and how to drive them. When you’re in the moment, on some road out in some back-country, in first place, you are racing. You can even use a steering-wheel controller, if you want, to put as few impediments between you and the driving experience as possible.
The second quadrant--those are your fucking stupid Western games. Civilization and shit. You know.
The third quadrant--those are your games that are too abstract to be considered true videogames. Stuff like Tranquility. No one plays Tranquility. I mean, honestly.
And the fourth quadrant--ah. That’s where our sake-drinking gods live. That’s where very Japanese games exist. They don’t give you much freedom, you know, but they’re abstract. Intellectual.
And that’s the rundown. You can figure the rest out. I have faith in you.
A BIZARRE, YET CRUCIAL TANGENT ENDS.
A guy I know saw 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time ever a few months ago.
“So,” I told him, “Saw 2001, eh?”
“Yeah,” he said. He was frowning slightly.
“What did you think?” I asked. “I mean, it was a pretty damn good film, I thought.”
He paused. “What did I think?”
“Yeah.”
“It was bullshit.”
I was slightly taken aback.
“Bullshit!” he repeated. “Nothing happened! Nothing! How the hell do you make a movie that boring?”
“I hate you,” I said, and it’s true--I did.
It’s fine not to like 2001. But to complain that nothing happens in it? That’s like saying Citizen Kane is shitty because it doesn’t contain any explosions. It’s dismissing the Venus de Milo because it isn’t a statue of a peacock..
It’s discussing a videogame in terms of its replay value. It’s breaking it into discrete components, analyzing its graphics, and its sound, and how they interplay, and slapping on a numerical score. That’s not the right view. It’s a misguided view. It’s also the ludological view. The ludological view is therefore fucking wrong.
The meaning of a game is more important than its anatomy. Quality is more important than form.
The Manifestation of Pong
“Pongism” embodies the viewpoint of which “the game is the pong” is the crux. It understands that a game is its narrative; that the poetic beauty of a Tetris or an Ikaruga comes from an understanding of communication. It knows that the objective, academic, cut-and-dried approach to videogames is garbage.
Ping-pong is the distilled essence of the videogame. Any layers on top of this idea are beside the point or stupid, or both. When you talk about a game, you don’t break out flowcharts and go on about how its different “parts” work “in concert” really “well,” “9.8.”
That creates a kind of design-by-numbers.
I’ll never forget the first time I played Warcraft III, and saw this. Everyone had raved about how perfect this game was, and I played it, and I thought, yeah, the developers sure got their shit together, and this game works really smoothly, but does it have a soul? Is there a point to what I’m doing? And the answer was: no.
I got the same feeling a couple of years ago, watching Finding Nemo in widescreen-stadium-seating-Dolby-Digital-surround-sound at my local multiplex, thinking, yeah, all the ingredients are here, and yet why do I hate this movie so much? Why have I not laughed once over the course of two hours?
I get the same feeling playing Donkey Kong 64. Or reading a John Grisham novel.. Or listening to U2’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.
Just because you know exactly how to write hip jokes that kids and adults both really love, and just because you know exactly where to put them in your film for maximum effect, that doesn’t mean you’re any good at making movies. Just because you can write a song that’s, like, catchy, and has this cool bit where you say “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!” doesn’t mean you’re a great artist.
Screw all of that. Screw getting all the parts down. Instead, you look at the basic things. You ask, where is the communication taking place?
Philosophy, by definition, is rational investigation, into the nature of The Arts. Pongism is the philosophy of the videogame--it looks into its nature. Fuck college kids and their lies. Fuck Blizzard. Fuck everything. You know Pongism is right.