Expedition 15
The Bathysphere
Take a seat for the 15th edition of Bathysphere! This week we have an essay from Florence on the history of the gaming chair from Ancient Egypt to 90’s “sensory gaming.” Both Chris and Keith give some great book recommendations, one a series of strange short stories, and the other the unexpected appearance of games in a novel about a family in a small Irish town. Stick to the end for a tennis themed piece in our Retrospective Adventures segment!
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The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart
Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com
Delightful games
Rooftops & Alleys is a game about parkour, which is a sport I am far, far too old and naff for. But that’s why there are games! I’ll keep this brief, but what I think is really special about this game is the control system, which is complex and slightly counter-intuitive at first. As an example, you need to do things with the triggers that feel very different to ways I’ve used the triggers before.
Anyway, I’m learning to swim at the moment, and so much of learning a physical process is about breaking it down into little pieces that are invisible unless you’re new at all this and are specifically looking for them. I imagine that’s what learning parkour is like - and it’s definitely what learning Rooftops & Alleys is like. CD
Interesting things
This week I read Valuable Humans in Transit, by QNTM. It’s a selection of short stories that skew weird and futuristic, and are happy to play around with styles and different ways of being. My favourite of the collection is probably Lena, a story about a digital snapshot of a human brain and all the quiet horrors it endures as an executable file. It’s told as a Wikipedia entry, which I feel shouldn’t work as well as it does.
As with any book of short stories - Ten Planets by Yuri Herrera is another great example - over time the pleasure comes less from individual stories but more from the fact that there are so many slotted in together. You go on little journeys whenever you turn the page for the next story - actually sometimes you go on pretty long journeys. But then there are threads that connect everything, either on surface terms or in an emerging sense of what the writer is preoccupied by. Reading short stories can often feel like you’re getting a privileged understanding of a writer’s brain much more clearly than when reading a novel? All said, reading books of short stories is pretty ace.
QNTM also made their own Tetris variant BTW. If you haven’t checked it out, it’s definitely worth tracking it down. CD
You know I love a theme, so this week, it’s all about chairs. I’m recommending an open access article by historian Laine Nooney, “A Pedestal, A Table, A Love Letter: Archaeologies of Gender in Videogame History.” This piece looks at how gender itself is an infrastructure that shapes possible game histories, as told through three vignettes about biographical objects from the life of Sierra On-Line co-founder and lead designer Roberta Williams. One of them is about the chair as pedestal in the visual language of games journalism! FSN
I can’t guarantee there will be chairs involved at the Car Boot Casino event happening during the Develop conference next week, but given it's a relaxed social event that involves playing homebrew bluffing games this seems pretty likely. It’s being run by curator Marie Foulston next Tuesday the 8th at the Old Ship Hotel in Brighton, and there is the potential for cursed prizes as well as sedentary fun. FSN
I always appreciate it when a novel that isn’t specifically about games nevertheless includes them in an interesting and authentic way. So I’m going to recommend (rather late) The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, a novel about a family falling apart in a small Irish town. The teenage son, PJ, is a video game player, and though it’s a very minor part of the narrative, his fandom plays a crucial role in the outcome of the story. It’s also a compulsive read, perfect for languid summer weekends. KS
Essay: Take A Seat - A History Of The Gaming Chair
“It is almost easier to build a skyscraper than a chair;” so said architect Ludvig Mies van der Rohe. I saw this quote on a wall at the Design Museum in Copenhagen. Their Danish Modern permanent collection includes the “chair tunnel,” a long room with 125 chairs displayed from floor to ceiling, demonstrating different typologies of 20th century design. Every type of chair you can imagine is represented, but there were some omissions. Why is our friend, the humble gaming chair, not present? Asking this question led me on a deep dive that touches on the Ancient Egyptian board game Senet, the automobile industry, and what “sensory gaming” looked like in the 1990s.
If you look up the “history of the gaming chair” on the internet, you’ll be told the same story again and again: the gamer’s throne as we know it was born from DXRacer converting their luxury sports car seats for a new market in 2006. If you’ve ever wondered why gaming chairs Look Like That then there’s your answer. The high backrest and aesthetic is inherited from another seated activity, albeit one that can involve travelling several hundred miles per hour.
But the story just isn’t as simple as DXRacer would want you to believe (they proudly proclaim themselves as “The Inventor of the Gaming Chair” on their website). There were chairs manufactured specifically for playing video games long before this, though their marketing was rather different. I went to the Video Game History Foundation’s Digital Archive and used a keyword search for “game chair.” and “gaming chair.” Sifting through some irrelevant mentions of bonking people with furniture in video games I came across various references to gaming chairs that apparently enhance the sensory experience of gaming.
In the 1991 directory of the International Summer Consumer Electronics Show, a company called Simulator Technology is listed as selling “Computer Game Chair That Gives Joy Stick Action With Body Movement of Chair.” Essentially what this means is that the chair itself became a joystick, allowing you to control movement in terms of how you shifted your weight. Another good example from the archive is an ad in the September 1998 issue of PC Gamer for the Intensor gaming chair, featuring an in-built audio system. I’ll let some excerpts from the ad speak for themselves:
“Like to begin with, you need to know what a Sensory Gaming Experience is. It’s complete immersion.”
“It's the gaming version of the thousand-yard stare. You'll recognize it in others who've "been there." Seek them out. Talk to them. This therapeutic approach can help preserve your sanity.”
“Remember, in this chair no one can hear you scream.”
Comparing the rather more zany gaming chairs of the 1990s with contemporary designs reveals different priorities. A DXRacer gaming chair is marketed as being stylish and ergonomic. The Intensor, on the other hand, threatens to destroy your hearing and potentially leave you with life-long trauma. It’s interesting to read a more measured review of the chair in the June 1998 issue of PlayStation Magazine that actually does describe it as an “ergonomic office chair with five speakers.” Still, these earlier chairs place more of an emphasis on extending the sensory, bodily experience of playing video games. It’s easy to get lost in the “thousand-yard stare” of the gamer’s gaze and remember that the history of gaming is also the history of the body gaming, not just what’s on screen.
Zooming out our perspective further still, there’s an argument to be made that any chair used while playing a game is a “gaming chair” of a sort, though not necessarily designed for that purpose. If we loosen our definition then the history of the gaming chair extends back at least thousands of years into the past. To give just one example, there was a painting of the Ancient Egyptian Queen Nefertiti playing the board game Senet in her tomb; we see her seated at a table. The chair is ornate with a high back- is this not a gaming chair?
Gaming chairs represent the trends, norms, and interior design conventions of their time. The rise of mobile gaming perhaps makes the traditional gamer chair less relevant, but if anything there is now more choice than ever. Once confined to the broody aesthetic of black and red, you can now get chairs in pastel colours with bunny ears. I wonder which would be scarier to the stereotypical gamer teenage boy in the 1990s - the Intensor sound system, or that. FSN
Retrospective adventures
As it’s Wimbledon fortnight I obviously had to serve you with a Tennis article. I wanted to find a review of the fabulous PC Engine sim Pro Tennis: World Court but haven’t found one yet, so I’ve gone for this enthusiastic piece on RealSports Tennis from Blip Magazine (is it legible? I hope it’s legible). Released in 1983 for the Atari 2600, it was one of the most graphically impressive games on the system and still plays pretty well today. The game was later converted to the Atari 5200 and 800 by coder W. Sean Hennessy who also worked on translations of Centipede and Pengu. If you’re interested in the working environment at Atari in the early 80’s there’s a lengthy interview with him here. KS