Expedition 6
The Bathysphere
Hello and welcome to the sixth expedition of the Bathysphere. Today, we’re introducing paid subscriptions, which will allow us to continue this endeavour. That’s if they work – we’re not quite sure we’ve mastered the system. We’re offering a monthly subscription for £3 or an annual sub for £25. A portion of each newsletter will always be free. Subscription details should be provided somewhere on this newsletter. Thank you for joining us.
The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart
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Delightful games
Flip7 is a card game created by Eric Olsen. It’s a push-your-luck game, and it’s incredibly simple to learn and teach and play. The cards have numbers from one to twelve on them, and players are dealt a single card at a time. Each turn they have to decide whether they want another card or whether they want to bank the numbers they have so far. If you manage to reach seven cards, the round’s over and you get a bonus. If you get a double of one of the cards you already have, you lose your cards and you’re out for this round. First player to 200 points wins, and the wrinkle is, the higher the number on the card, the more copies of that card there are in the deck. Magic. CD
I was a big fan of the experimental boom period of computer role-playing games – let’s call it the mid-80s to the late 1990s – when the form and function was still being decided. It’s lovely then to see a cult star of the era, Gates of Skeldal (aka Brány Skeldalu) getting a re-release on Steam. This 1998 gem from Czech developer Napoleon Games is filled with interesting ideas and puzzles, and it’s yours to discover for less than a fiver. KS
Oh, you should also check out Many Nights a Whisper, an experimental narrative archery game about carrying the weight of a society’s expectations on your shoulders while trying to hit a distant target. It’s the latest title from deconstructeam and you can but it for £2.50 on Steam. KS
The Internet Archive recently ran a game jam that required all entrants to make games that were at least 50% composed of assets from their “search engine for vintage data” DiscMaster. There’s a whole plethora of free games on the theme of media preservation. DiscMaster mostly contains pre-web or early web assets, and the interactive experiences inspired by that assemblage of oddities is something to behold. (Also, full disclosure, I have an entry in the jam). FSN
Interesting things
When I first left university I was a Kelly girl for a few years. I know the company had rebranded by that point, but we were still called Kelly girls - my mum, who had been a Kelly girl back in the day thought it was wonderful. I loved temping - getting to see inside all these weird buildings in Brighton, meeting people for a few days and hearing their stories and what they planned to do for lunch and then disappearing. Sometimes I see a face on the bus that I know but don’t know and I realise I met them when I was a Kelly girl.
Anyway, I’m reading Temporary by Hilary Leichter at the moment, and it’s a novel all about the temping life. It’s surreal and sometimes mundane and funny and surprisingly moving and I think it’s wonderful. It’s one of those magical books that feels both utterly coherent and as if it had been spun out of the air itself, as if Leichter sat down to write each morning with no idea where she’d be in the next half hour.
It’s a book that changes completely every thirty pages, which means it’s a pretty harmonious fit for temping. It’s magical realism, I guess? (I never quite know what’s magical realism and what isn’t.) But for all that, it feels very similar to my days as a Kelly girl, even if I never got a gig on a pirate ship.
(One last thing. One of the best things about being a Kelly girl was the lunches they provided every Friday in the office. You’d wander over with your new Kelly girl friends and for half an hour eat like a rich person. M&S curry and all that jazz. It was a good life.) CD
The annual Game Developers Conference has started adding talks from the 2025 event into its online GDC Vault and it’s really worth perusing the free section. My recommendation is Teabag in First: How 'Thank Goodness You're Here!' Does Comedy a hugely entertaining and suitably shambolic guide to last year’s fantastic comedy game. KS
On the topic of games academia, this week I’ve been at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Yokohama, Japan. Many of the papers from the conference are open access. Just one examples is “This Game SUX: Why & How to Design Sh@*!y User Experiences” by Michelle V Cormier et al. FSN
Essay: It took a while to sink in – thoughts on collecting games studies literature
If Philip Larkin can confidently declare that sexual intercourse began in 1963 (between the end of the "Chatterley" ban and the Beatles' first LP), then I can similarly claim that the academic study of video games began in 1998 (between Jack Thompson’s first lawsuit and Ape Escape). I’m drawing this conclusion from a highly subjective standpoint: during the Covid lockdown, I did what many people did and went slightly mad – only instead of baking banana loaves, I started to collect academic books on video games. The earliest I’ve been able to find is MIT’s excellent 1998 collection of essays on gender in video games, From Barbie To Mortal Kombat, which is now available for free on the university’s website. It has some seminal analysis on the segregated nature of early game design for boys and girls, as well as fascinating snippets about the internet culture of the time.
After this, things really kick off. 2001 saw the launch of Games Studies, the international journal of computer game research as well as the essay collection The Medium of Video Games edited by the prolific Mark J. P. Wolf, a professor in the Communication Department at Concordia University, Wisconsin. He was also responsible for The Video Game Reader (2003) which is arguably an indispensable text in the study of the medium. My copy of the book is a veritable rainbow of highlighted sections, and I especially love Mia Consalvo’s essay on sexuality in games and Bob Rehak’s piece on psychoanalysis and the avatar.
Did it really take the academic community more than two decades from the generally accepted birth of the games industry (1971: Computer Space, 1972: Magnavox Odyssey or 1973: Pong – take your pick) to start publishing video game analysis, or is my collection laughably incomplete? It’s tricky. There were certainly critical studies of games through the 1980s and ‘90s though they tended to be more focused on the history of the medium (say, 1983’s Screen Play: The Story of Video Games) or guides to the principles of game creation (Chris Crawford’s crucial 1984 book, The Art of Computer Game Design). There were also lots of books on the business of video games, which I think is culturally and sociopolitically telling: people were more interested in the money these things were making, rather than what they actually meant.
The earliest example of a relevant academic analysis I’ve been able to find is 1993’s Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles by Professor Marsha Kinder, an important figure in digital scholarship. I’ve yet sourced a copy yet though, so I don’t know how detailed the gaming content is. But I also own pre-1998 books that are thoughtful, intelligent studies of games and game culture, notably Invasion of the Space Invaders by Martin Amis, Stephen Levy’s 1984 book Hackers and J.C Herz’s hugely readable Joystick Nation. While these are fascinating, they are not academic works.
Perhaps it simply took time to establish a framework for thinking about and analysing games in an academic context. Throughout the 1990s there seems to have been a pitch battle between the ludologists who saw games as simulations defined by rulesets and the narratologists who saw games primarily as an interactive story-telling medium. I guess it took a while for them to sign a peace treaty? There’s also the socio-economic aspect: it wasn’t until the late 1990s that games had the mass cultural penetration to make academic study monetarily feasible.
Look, I’m in over my head here, I recognise that. I’m just an idiot with a book collection. So I emailed my friend Kat Brewster, a postdoctoral fellow and digital studies institute affiliate at the University of Michigan School of Information. Kat is researching how digital culture gets remembered, with a focus on LGBTQ+ networking history – she also knows a LOT about video games and academia, and even though she told me the period I’m asking about is slightly outside of her range of expertise, she gave me a brilliant response:
“Part of this question has to do with what we consider ‘academic writing’ and where ‘game studies’ as a ‘discipline’ kicks off. (Not to get all academic on you and question the very nature of your question lmao.) As I’ve often lamented (and defended) academic writing is a slow discipline. Lisa Nakamura’s Cybertypes, for instance, is writing about MUDs and MOOs from 1996 in 2002. Janet Murray’s pivotal Hamlet on the Holodeck is about games from the 80s, but was published in 1997.
“I think this delay is, in part, because before there can be an academic discipline on its own, there needs to be a sufficient body of relevant literature to ground it. That’s why a lot of game studies relies on the anthropological study of games and play (think ‘the Balinese cockfight’) and/or performance studies (Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life) and/or ‘movement image’ studies (e.g., film theory and Deleuze). It’s like, there wasn’t really a ‘media studies’ that was mature enough to spin off from and then cultivate into game studies in the 80s, and I’m not entirely sure that the games were mature enough for study then yet, either. Like, there couldn’t really be ‘video game studies’ as we might recognise it today until there was also the study of ‘interactive fiction’ or ‘digital media studies’ and they kind of needed the cultural study of computing, etc. from the 80s/90s, and they couldn’t really kick off until we got through the media theory boom in the 80s and then the cultural theory boom of the early 90s.”
Thank you, Kat <3
Essentially then, the architecture of game studies had to be built using various pre-existing critical and analytical frameworks, and like any major building project, that took time. So my 1998 estimate is possibly not completely stupid, but do email us if you have examples of games studies being carried out – and, crucially, publishing content – before that date.
Five years after lockdown, my collection is still growing and I still find a lot of pleasure in hiding away with a cup of tea and a dense essay about temporality, immersion or configuration. It is interesting to me to see games filtered through a whole different analytical lens, to venture beyond my comfortable arts-critical response into strange incomprehensible granularity – like Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, staring at Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte until it is nothing but muddily coloured dots. KS
Retrospective adventures
This week’s scan comes from a March 1983 issue of Popular Computing Weekly. The story concerns an exchange scheme launched by the Software Centre in London allowing customers to buy one program and then repeatedly swap it for new ones. Naturally, the games industry took umbrage and began legal action to shut it down. There has always been a tension in the games industry between the desire of consumers to play as many games as possible and the industry which wants to sell as many games as it can. Unofficial software swap clubs were rife in the early 1980s, as was home taping of cassette-based games. Very soon, a shadow industry of pirating devices such as Freeze Frame and Action Replay emerged, allowing users to copy even protected titles. Meanwhile, the video game rental sector was just opening up, inspired by the rise of the movie rental business. Right from its birth, the games industry was having to navigate the complex relationship between user and supplier.