Word: games
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...powerful element of fantasy in Space Invaders is the focus at which the computer technicians, the toy manufacturers and the games theorists seem likeliest to meet. Computer boffins at Manhattan's Rockefeller University play a game called Hunt the Wumpus, in which the Ph.D. devouring Wumpus is hunted through the perils of a 20-room cave. Computer language is flat and unresonant, and Hunt the Wumpus lacks a certain dash. But a toymaker may say, "Give me a way to display a Wumpus! Make him buzz and light up!" and next Christmas everyone may be going into debt...
...Koven, who used to invent and teach "socially interactive" games to educators and underprivileged children, thinks that electronic games are having an enormous impact on the ways in which children perceive themselves and their social realities. "You might almost say that childhood is tending toward a kind of autism and that children are seeking a way to stimulate themselves. With electronic games, they have it. You can play by your self. It's real exciting. You can carry the games anywhere. They look neat. They cause envy. They're expensive possessions so consequently there's a whole...
...visual qualities of the games will improve quickly. Bambino has a two-color display system in the works that would allow one football team to wear blue uniforms and one to wear red, for instance. TV games, overshadowed this year, should attract more interest when Mattel Electronics introduces Intellivision, a game system with realistic, multicolored graphic displays. Learning capability can be built into small computers. The costs will be higher, but if customers will pay $40 this year, they may pay $75 next year...
What is not likely to change is that the games that succeed will work because they use their memory chips and lighted readouts to create melodrama. The best example now in production is a brilliant quarter-arcade game called Space Invaders. It is a reaction-time contest: shoot down the massed, marching aliens shown on the big TV screen before they shoot you. The refinements are satanic. The player has four blockhouses behind which to hide his man, but as the blockhouses catch fire under attack, they crumble. As the sound effects become more ominous, the aliens begin to shoot...
Whether it was developed from loneliness or as a rebellious game or was simply a neurological accident, the twins' private communication has turned out to be something less than a true invented language. Linguists Meier and Newport now call Gracie and Ginny's speech "deformed English." What had seemed to be a vocabulary of hundreds of new words, when slowed down and analyzed on tape recordings proved to be about 50 complex mispronounced words and phrases jammed together and said at high speed. There was also "substantial variation" every time the twins talked. Phonetic transcripts initially brought...