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The Programmer as Player: Understanding Early Digital Game History Using

Structuration and Actor-Network Theory

In the consumer electronics market, digital gaming occupies an increasingly prominent
position within the larger category of "entertainment" products. Games and game consoles share
prime store space with computers, DVDs and Blu Rays, CDs, cell phones, and e-readers. Media
coverage of game-related events, including conferences and the release of highly-anticipated
titles, has grown more substantial in recent years. In academia and in the industry, fundamental
questions about games are being asked and analyzed, to various ends. All of this work plugs into
a larger discussion on gaming itself, and what criteria a specific set of practices must meet in
order to qualify as a game, or as play. Sale and Zimmerman's treatment of this issue incorporates
proposals made by no less than eight gaming scholars we have Huizinga's theory of play as an
immersive, separate (from "ordinary life"), yet still rule-based practice, Suits' notion that gaming
is goal-based activity rendered inefficient (purposefully) by rules, and Crawford's conception of
the game as a "closed formal system" that allows for player interactivity within an environment
intended to produce conflict (Sale and Zimmerman, 2004, 73-79; also Huizinga, 1995; Suits,
2005; and Crawford, 1984). These are foundational works that support a wide range of valuable
research into digital games, but a common thread among them is a focus on the experiences of
the game player/consumer. The gaming industry the big corporations, the independents, the
hardware engineers, the retail and online outlets, and so forth also receive attention, of course,
but nothing on the development side of the equation is ever truly a form of play. Why should it?
We prefer to put game development and play within different silos. This dichotomy, however, is
largely a conceptual invention: in the earliest years of gaming, and for many years thereafter, the
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vast majority of computer game players (as opposed to arcade or console gamers) also developed
games; more accurately, they tended to modify existing games, and would then go on to
distribute their new versions via various channels. This was not simply a matter of blending
together two disparate hobbies. To play was to program for all but the most casual of users.
This essay will make the argument that our modern notion of what constitutes digital play
should be expanded to include the practices of those who play via programming, as well as those
individuals and groups that engage in related practices, with "modders" being an important
contemporary example (Sotamaa, 2007; and Sotamaa, 2010). I will discuss how the first game-
like programs grew out of government and university-sponsored computer engineering projects,
and stood in contrast to discourses from the same era in which the computer was presented as a
practical problem solver (for example Licklider, 1960; and Engelbart, 1962). Funding from
government agencies in particular was contingent on developing machines that could solve the
complex problems inherent in prosecuting a Cold War waged on a global scale (Edwards, 1997;
and Leslie, 1993). Games were developed by programmers interested in experimenting with the
capabilities of the machines that they worked with and pushing them further than was generally
allowable when they performed more utilitarian tasks. Display "hacks", such as the "Bouncing
Ball" program for the Whirlwind computer, were popular in the earliest years of computing, and
these evolved gradually into more interactive projects such as TX-0's "Mouse in the Maze", until
finally there were programs such as Spacewar! that we would now recognize as games (Graetz,
1981; and Hurst et al., 1989). I will argue that these early games inherited the practices and
ethos of the display hack era, from coding to execution. Many years after the release of
Spacewar in 1962 the most well-known and influential of these programs computer gaming
was still conceived of as an activity in which programming and play were not dichotomized.
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The role of player/programmer preceded those of producer and consumer that we see in the
modern digital game economy, in which it is expected that audiences of users will play games
produced largely by for-profit firms. Even free and open-source games are typically attributed to
a specific developer or group of developers, programmers and players and conceived of as
separate categories, with little to no overlap. There are spaces, however, where the act of
programming as play is still active, and to better understand such practices I believe it is
necessary to look back on an era when the player/programmer was more clearly defined.
In order to accomplish my goals for this essay, I came to rely upon two similar, but
somewhat disconnected sociological models. The first of these is structuration theory, as
devised by Giddens and refined by later scholars such as Orlikowski (Giddens, 1984; and
Orlikowski, 2000). In structuration theory, society is understood as being organized along a
system of largely unspoken rules, which are continually reproduced and perpetuated as
individuals and institutions engage with one another. Orlikowski extends this model by
incorporating technologies as artefacts which assist in the building of structure, and focuses on
various categories of enactments that users perform as they leverage such artefacts. As user
engage with new technologies, according to Orlikowski, they tend to either use them to support
existing practices in which such technologies are implicated, or they choose to alter such
practices (Orlikowski, 2000). The second model is actor-network theory (ANT), which was
founded on the work of Latour, Callon, and Law, among others. ANT is a complex theoretical
and sociological paradigm in which individuals and entities (including, somewhat
controversially, objects) as viewed as actors linked in various configurations. As Law puts it,
ANT "is a way of suggesting that society, organizations, agents, and machines are all effects
generated in patterned networks of diverse (not simply human) materials" (Law, 1992). These
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networks, moreover, are "sites of struggle" in which configurations are never static, but rather are
always in flux as actors and agents compete for influence (Law, 1992). There are several
advantages to combining both of these models, the primary of which is the ability to understand
the actions performed by ANT actors as enactments that build structure and normalize specific
modes of behaviour. Such modes then go on to inform the growth and evolution of the networks
within which they are embedded. With respect to early digital game history, those who
programmed, played, and distributed games such as Spacewar were acting against the tendency
to consider the computer as simply a tool to be used to solve complex mathematical problems,
particularly those involving military concerns. At the same time, however, they assisted in the
building of structures that would come to classify games as entertainment media, severely
disconnected from wider programming practices. I will argue that digital games would not be
seen as games, and perhaps not even called "games", if these structures had not been built.

Structures, and Actor-Networks
Before getting into the subject matter at hand, it is necessary to make the case as to how
structuration theory and actor-network theory can be blended, and the benefits of such an
approach. For structuration theory I will first discuss Giddens, but then I will shift to
Orlikowski, as her technology-centric work better matches the approach I wish to take. For ANT
I will use works from Law, Latour, and Callon to provide the basic contours of the theory, before
discussing how I believe it can complement structuration.
Giddens, then, outlines structuration theory as a means by which to uncover the unspoken
rules that govern the behaviours of individuals and institutions within any given society. This is
not a deterministic model; Giddens stresses that he is not trying to suggest that "social life can be
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reduced to a set of mathematical principles" (Giddens, 1984, p. 20). Rather, rule and practice
exist in a symbiotic relationship, so that common practices within a society eventually become
behavioural norms. As he explains it:
Let us regard the rules of social lifeas techniques or generalizable procedures
applied in the enactment/reproduction of social practices. Formulated rules
those that are given verbal expression as canons of law, bureaucratic rules, rules
of games, and so on are thus codified interpretations of rules rather than rules as
such (p. 21).
The "social activities" of humans are therefore "recursive", to use Giddens' own phrasing: such
activities are governed by rules, but they also help to normalize and perpetuate rules. Not every
actor has the same capacity to reproduce and/or change rules, of course; Giddens stresses the
importance of "institutions" in building structure, as opposed to individuals. But rules are only
formed and reformed in practice. Giddens stresses that structure does not exist in any ethereal
sense outside of human activity.
Giddens does not stress the use of technology with respect to building and maintaining
structure, which is where Orliskowski comes in. Orlikowski employs structuration in order to
build an explanatory model with respect to how humans and technologies co-create one another,
bridging the gap between technological determinism and social theories of technology. As she
explains it, a finite set of uses are inherent in any technology, but humans acting as individuals
and institutions enable one or more specific uses to emerge based on their needs. This process
serves to influence the evolution of a given technology in order to better accommodate the
selected uses:
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When humans interact regularly with a technology, they engage with (some or all
of) the material and symbol properties of the technology. Through such repeated
interaction, certain of the technology's properties become implicated in an
ongoing process of structuration. The resulting recurrent social practice produces
and reproduces a particular structure of technology use (Orlikowski, 2000,
p. 407).
Such social practices, however, are not developed in a vacuum. Rather, discourse helps inform
potential practices:
Use of technology is strongly influenced by users' understandings of the
properties and functionality of a technology, and these are strongly influenced by
the images, descriptions, rhetorics, ideologies, and demonstrations presented by
intermediaries such as vendors, journalists, consultants, champions, trainers,
managers, and "power'" users (p. 409).
Within such a paradigm, applications of technologies emerge as a result of negotiations between
individuals, institutions, discourses, and objects. While neither Orlikowski nor Giddens get into
the issue of object agency, what does seem apparent is that objects express and build structure, at
least when humans engage with them. In this way, then, there is something of a dialogue
between both sides, with objects having the capacity to influence users towards certain ends.
This leads us to actor-network theory, which emerged out of concerns over the proper
application of social factors to the study of science and technology. Latour directs much of his
criticism, in particular, on the notion that the social is something of an ethereal element that is
disconnected, but still influential, from developments in technoscience (Latour, 2005). Callon
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indicates that the solution to this problem is to, when required, fully incorporate social elements
into networks of agents and practices:
If the hesitations, changes and evolutions that mark their [i.e. science and
technology] development are to be understood, then interests, strategies, and power
relationships which do not stop at the laboratory door must also be brought within
the scope of analysis. In sum, though science and technology develop in some
measure apart from the rest of the world, they are neither detached nor fundamentally
different in nature from other activities (Callon, 1986, p. 19-20).
Law refers to the ANT solution to this problem as "heterogeneous engineering," a process he
describes as follows: "[B]its and pieces from the social, the technical, the conceptual, and the
textual are fitted together, and so converted (or 'translated') into a set of equally heterogeneous
scientific practices" (Law, 1992, p. 381). This translation work described by Law involves
collecting these "bits of pieces" of practice and mapping them into networks of influence and
control. The set of "actors" that comprise a given network includes anything and everything that
possesses any degree of influence, including individuals, institutions, ideas, and objects.
The notion of object agency is one of the most contentious elements of ANT. Latour
defends it by noting that a given actor is never a source for action, but is rather a "moving target
of a vast array of entities swarming toward it" (Latour, 2005, p. 46). Objects are conduits of
agency, though they can also provoke actions that were not intended by their designers or
developers. What ANT scholars do, then, is study how these agencies affect the configurations
of networks. As Law puts it, the "core of the actor-network approach" is "a concern with how
actors and organizations mobilize, juxtapose, and hold together the bits and pieces out of which
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they are composed; how they are sometimes able to prevent those bits and pieces from following
their own inclinations and making off" (Law, 1992, p. 386).
It is interesting to note that both structuration and ANT frame their respective models
around metaphoric constructions linking individuals, institutions, and technologies. For Giddens
and Orlikowski, structures emerge and are perpetuated when specific beliefs and practices
become ingrained in a given society. Orlikowski expands on Giddens work by allowing for
technologies to influence, and be influenced by, these activities. For Latour and Law, networks
emerge as various actors strive to expand their own realities onto those external to it. These
theories are not, of course, identical ANT's claims to object agency have no true equivalent in
structuration. But both theories complement each other by providing tools that the other,
arguably, lacks. For structuration, ANT can provide more precise mechanisms by which to
analyze specific structures. If we treat all elements in a given structure as actors, and then
analyze how each actor attempts to expand its influence, we could potentially identify how the
emergent properties that come to define the structure grow and evolve.
Conversely, structuration theory could provide ANT with tools to help explain the
motivations of actors. One troubling aspect of ANT as explained by Latour and Law is that all
actors appear to be single-mindedly pursuing the goal of expanding their power and influence
within their networks. For an ambitious scientist like Pasteur a focus of Latour's in a seminal
ANT article this does not appear to be overly problematic: Pasteur was, according to Latour,
aggressively inscribing a new form of knowledge to address a specific problem (Latour, 1983).
But how is ANT to explain the actions of actors that, for example, seem to act against their own
self-interest, or that otherwise engage in activities that damage their influence over other actors?
How does one deal with seemingly purposeless inscriptions such as non-commercial digital
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games, which, as will be discussed below, spread rapidly through the earliest computer
networks? Structuration allows us to see the ways in which individuals situate their actions
within the larger scope of cultural and social practices in order to derive meaning from them.
People, institutions, and other entities draw on the cultural resources they have available to them,
limiting their agency only to those activities that engage and respond to wider cultural norms.
Actors, in other words, may simply not be able to obtain the cultural information necessary to
make decisions that would expand their reach. Or they may purposefully damage their influence
as a reaction against such information. As we will see, early game development and game play
became cherished forms of "time wasting" on expensive government and university-owned
computer equipment, a role that game playing essentially continues to play today, albeit in a
drastically different context.

Early Gaming
Digital gaming emerged in the 1950s and 1960s within the research institutions that
produced the earliest mainframe computers. This was back in an era when computers were only
taking their first steps outside of university campuses and into the private sector. The first home
video game consoles did not emerge until the early 1970s, with stand-up arcade games arriving
at roughly the same time. The title of "first" computer game is often given to Tennis for Two, a
Pong-like two-player ball bouncing game designed by nuclear physicist William Higinbotham in
1958 for the Donner Model 30 analog computer (Brookhaven National Laboratory, 1981/2011).
It seems likely, however, that A. S. Douglas' nought and crosses (tic-tac-toe), created in 1952 for
the EDSAC at the University of Cambridge, deserves the honour (Winter, n.d.). Regardless, the
history that concerns us here centres on the game Spacewar, which was the first game to be more
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than just an ephemeral, localized novelty, and incited what was to become the first wave of
widespread hobbyist game programming. The practices that emerged around various Spacewar
incarnations were to play a pivotal role in determining the future of gaming.
Spacewar was conceived of and designed by Steve Russell, J. Martin Graetz, and Wayne
Witanen, a group of computer "hackers" working as programmers for various researchers at MIT
and Harvard University. The term "hacker" has a long, contentious pedigree, and I only use it
here because the development of Spacewar was such an integral part of Steven Levy's 1984 work
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. According to Levy, the term emerged out of
MIT's student-run Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC), with certain practices being labelled as
"hacks":
[A] project undertaken or a product built not solely to fulfill some constructive
goal, but with some wild pleasure taken in mere involvement, was called a
"hack"The most productive people working on S&P called themselves
"hackers" with great pride (Levy, 1984/2010, p. 10).
The Spacewar developers were members of the TMRC, and helped steer the group towards the
pursuit of computer hacks. It is important to note, however, that what we would now consider to
be hacker "culture" did not exist at this time.
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Spacewar was programmed on a PDP-1, a transistor-based minicomputer donated to MIT
by Digital Electronics Corporation (DEC), a recently-created business enterprise started by two
former MIT computer scientists. The game itself involved two players that controlled

1
Levy's work is problematic, in that he strives to find evidence of the "Hacker Ethic" throughout the early
(and later) history of computing. As a consequence, then, every action and activity that he chronicles is evaluated
based on its ostensible contribution to the development and sustainment of this Ethic. While hackers did go on to
reflexively define their collective identity and the nature of their activities and then go on to debate at length
about these matters in these early years the situation was much more fluid. That is not to say that programmers
in the early Spacewar era did not engage in activities that would later be defined as hacking rather, their
activities took place within a nascent subculture that had not yet defined itself so definitively.
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"spaceships" displayed on a CRT screen, with the object being to shoot your opponent with
"torpedoes" while also negotiating a gravity well centred on a star in the middle of the playfield.
Its designers were inspired by the cheap science fiction novels and Japanese monster movies that
occupied their free time, at least according to Graetz, who wrote an account of Spacewar's
origins in Creative Computing magazine (1981).
It is difficult to underestimate Spacewar's impact on computer gaming, and on computer
history in general. Stewart Brand, the first editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, wrote a seminal
piece on the game for Rolling Stone magazine in 1972. A full decade after its creation, the game
had spread far beyond the MIT campus. Brand quotes renowned computer scientist Alan Kay as
stating "the game of Spacewar blossoms spontaneously wherever there is a graphics display
connected to a computer" (Brand, 1972). Spacewar began the trend of science fiction games,
which would later give rise to Asteroids, Missile Command, Star Raiders, and other arcade and
console classics. But it was on the computer that Spacewar was truly at home, serving as a focus
for both intense play and programming, as we will discuss later
In order to understand Spacewar's importance and influence, however, it is critical to
situate the game within the larger context of activities unfolding with respect to the technologies
upon which it was built. The PDP-1 was the product of knowledge and practices that dated back
to the earliest years of digital computing within institutional settings. It was built by individuals
who were plugged into the discourses surrounding computing in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
and helped to perpetuate such discourses in various ways. Spacewar, as a key element of this
assemblage, served as a challenge to the idea that computers had to be wholly instrumental
devices, though as it did so it helped to set itself up as a distinct "other", resulting in the
development of what we now call digital games.
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The PDP-1 was the third in a line of mainframe computers dating back to the final years
of the Second World War. The first in the line a machine that would come to be called the
Whirlwind computer was commissioned by the U. S. Office of Naval Research to MIT's
Servomechanics Laboratory, and was intended to be a general purpose flight simulator.
Eventually the simulator angle was dropped, and research and development focused solely on the
construction of a computer along the lines of the EDVAC machine that was being built at the
University of Pennsylvania for the Ballistics Research Laboratory (Redmond and Smith, 1990).
A team at the servomechanics laboratory, led by Jay Forrester, would go on to produce a
machine that introduced a number of important innovations. Their computer's memory, for
example, used specialized magnetic cores to store binary bits, as opposed to slower CRT storage.
More critically for our purposes, the Whirlwind was the first computer to employ a CRT unit
actually, several different units for display purposes (Redmond and Smith, 1990).
It needs to be stressed that it was not obvious that a CRT display could be used in
conjunction with a digital computer. Computers in this early era processed programs in "batch"
mode, meaning that they could only focus on one program at a time. The machine would be
wired in a specific way in order to perform a given function, and results would be sent to a
printer. The sort of immediate interactivity that a display enables showing information in real
time in response to user actions was not even conceived of.
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Note the language used in this
internal summary report from 1949 to describe the display:
The display equipment now in use with WWI is intended primarily for
demonstration purposes. It gives a qualitative picture of solutions to problems set
up in test storage, and it illustrates a type of output device that can be used when

2
Renowned computer scientist J. C. R. Licklider published a paper in 1960 entitled "Man-Computer
Symbiosis", which came to be seen as a foundational document in terms of what we now think of as human-
computer interaction.
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data are desired in graphical rather than numerical form (Servomechanisms
Laboratory, 1949, p. 29).
The display is clearly considered as a secondary device here. Yet there is a hint of what it could
be capable of by the use of the term "demonstration purposes". To bring in Orlikowski's
technological structuration in here, we can conceive of the display here as a nascent technology,
with a variety of applications that could emerge, or not, depending on which of its properties
were used. Norm Taylor, an engineer who worked on Whirlwind, presented a history of
Whirlwind's displays at the SIGGRAPH conference in 1989. At first, as he notes, the display
was initially a secondary, utilitarian tool:
Keep in mind we were not trying to build a display here; we were building a
computer. All we used the display for was testing the various parts of the system
so displays were ancillary completely to the main event (Hurst et al., 1989, p. 22).
Yet applications of the display grew quickly beyond testing. Taking advantage of Whirlwind's
capacity to quickly solve complex differential equations (essentially the primary problem that
computers were first designed to solve), its programmers developed a program they called
"Bouncing Ball". Initially it was simply a graphical representation of a series of inverted
parabolas traced by successively drawing points along a graph on the screen, thereby giving the
appearance of an animated object. As Taylor explains it, however, it was not long before an
interactive element was added:
A little later [Bouncing Ball developers] Adams and Gilmore decided to make the
first computer game, and this was also in '49You see that the bouncing ball
finds a hole in the floor and the trick was to set the frequency such that you hit the
hole in the floor. This kept a lot of people interested for quite a while and it was
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clear that man-machine interaction was here to stay. Anyone could turn the
frequency-knobs (Hurst et al., 1989, p. 21).
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Graetz, in his article on Spacewar, cites Bouncing Ball as an inspiration for their work, and
reiterated its utility as a demonstration program:
When computers were still marvels, people would flock to watch them still at
work whenever the opportunity arose. They were usually disappointedThe
mainframe, which did all the marvellous work, just sat there. There was nothing to
see. On the other hand, something is always happening on a TV screenOn
MIT's annual Open House day, for example, people came to stare for hours at
Whirlwind's CRT screen. What did they stare at? Bouncing Ball (Graetz, 1981).
Such demonstration programs continued to be produced on the TX-0, the transistorized successor
to Whirlwind. The TX-0 was a product of MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, a facility that solidified the
relationships between MIT's engineering units and the U.S. military that had been established in
the Second World War and gained new strength at the outbreak of the Cold War. In particular,
the Air Force, having been designated as an autonomous service in 1947, was looking to extend
its power and reach via projects such as a national early-warning air attack radar system. This
system, which would come to be known as the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE),
was built out of the Whirlwind computer when naval funding dried up (Redmond and Smith,
1990; and Redmond and Smith, 2000). Lincoln Laboratory, originally designated "Project
Lincoln", was the institutional foundation for SAGE and later Air Force-related projects, a
relationship that continues until today.

3
As Taylor indicates, Bouncing Ball might be yet another contender for the honour of being the first
computer game, though I have not seen his claim repeated or reaffirmed outside of this presentation.
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Despite all this weighty history, however, no discussion of the TX-0 seems to be
complete without mentioning the Mouse in the Maze program. Levy effectively summarizes
how it worked:
The user first constructed a maze with the light pen, and a blip on the screen
representing a mouse would tentatively poke its way through the maze in search
of another set of blips in the shape of cheese wedges. There was also a "VIP
version" of the game, in which the mouse would seek martini glasses. After it got
to the glass, it would seek another, until it ran out of energy, too drunk to continue
(Levy, p. 47).
There is clearly a bit more character to this game when compared to Bouncing Ball. It is playful,
and perhaps even whimsical, as well as being mischievous with the drunken "VIP" version. This
stands in contrast to the sober, serious uses for which the computer was intended. This is a point
worth emphasizing. The computers that were designed and built at Lincoln Laboratory were
essentially military equipment, just like tanks, bombs, and assault rifles. To turn around and use
this equipment for fun and games is rather remarkable, and does not appear to have been
anticipated in any way.
Despite Levy's framing of Spacewar as an embodiment of hacker values, then, we can see
that a tradition of CRT display-based animations and games was being developed almost
immediately after such displays were linked to computers. To bring in Orlikowski, we can see
Whirlwind and its successors as sites of contestation and negotiation, in which unintended
properties of relevant technologies were revealed through use. To bring in actor-network theory,
we can see the efforts of these early game programmers as an attempt to build a counter-reality
to that being developed by MIT and the Air Force. This counter-reality framed the computer as
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a platform for fun and experimentation, rather than being simply a device that solved problems.
There were however, other computer scientists who were pushing the problem-solving agenda,
allowing it to become dominant and thereby relegating the experimenters beyond the boundaries
of the mainstream.

Engelbart and the Augmentation of Human Intellect
Douglas Engelbart is best-known for his demonstration video that has since become
known as the "Mother of All Demos." Filmed in 1968 (with the help of Stewart Brand), the
machine Engelbart was demoing was known as the oN-Line System (NLS), and was the
culmination of many years of research conducted by Engelbart and his colleagues. The tech
demo introduced many of the elements of computing that have become mainstream, such as the
mouse, the windowed display, and hypertext (Bardini, 2000). Yet Engelbart was only indirectly
focused on introducing such innovations. His true aim was the "augmentation" of human
intellect, as he so often put it:
By "augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of man to
approach complex problem situation to gain comprehension to suit his particular
needs and to derive solutions to problems Man's population and gross product
are increasing at considerable rate, but the complexity of his problems grows
still faster, and the urgency with which solutions must be found becomes
steadily greaterAugmenting man's intellect in the sense defined above would
warrant full pursuit by an enlightened society if there could be shown reasonable
approach and some plausible benefits (Engelbart, 1962, p. 1).
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The computer came to serve as the platform by which one could potentially achieve such goals.
By promoting such ideas, Engelbart, working out of Stanford, had also attracted the attention of
the Air Force, who began funding his augmentation efforts in 1959. Engelbart would
subsequently become increasingly dependent on funding from the U.S. Department of Defence's
Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), created in the wake of Sputnik (Bardini, 2000).
Engelbart's commitment to his augmentation project is difficult to underestimate. As
Bidini explains it:
He [Engelbart] articulated a vision of the world in which these pervasive
innovations [i.e. NLS] are supposed to find their proper place. He and the other
innovators of this new technology defined its future on the basis of their own
aspirations and ideologies. Those aspirations included nothing less than the
development, via the interface between computers and their users, of a new kind
of person, one better equipped to deal with the increasing complexities of the
modern world. In pursuing this vision, they created the conditions that prescribe
the possibilities and limits of the technology for the users of personal computer
technology today (Bidini, 2000, p. 1-2).
The last sentence of the above passage is perhaps the most telling. By focusing so exclusively
on augmenting intelligence, Engelbart helped to impose a specific value system on computers
and related digital technologies. The innovations that he introduced are mapped to this value
system, and perpetuated it as they became more popular. The computer within this paradigm
plays the role of assistant to humans tackling complex problems. It serves a specific role in a
specific use case, and little else.
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Engelbart's value system was not the only one competing for prominence within
computer science research. A major complementary field emerging at the same time was
artificial intelligence (AI). Rather than using computers to augment human intelligence, AI was
more concerned with developing machine intelligence. John McCarthy, who is considered one
of the founders of AI, defined it as follows: "It is the science and engineering of making
intelligent machines, especially intelligence computer programs" (McCarthy, 2001, p. 2). He
then defines intelligence as follows: "Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to
achieve goals in the world" (p. 2). There are a variety of methods in AI by which to pursue the
goal of machine intelligence, such as artificial neural networks, and natural language processing
routines. Marvin Minsky, another pioneer in the field, envisions intellect as consisting of
countless disparate processes direct by a single conscious agent (Ford and Hayes, 1998). But, as
with Engelbart's work, the focus was on using computers to solve problems. AI has different
priorities as compared to Engelbart's work, but the ultimate goal is still to make computers and
computing "useful".
This representation of the computer as problem solver had profound implications for how
specific programs were judged and used. If a given program did not serve any tangible purpose,
it was labelled as a "hack", or simply a frivolous distraction. The Bouncing Ball program, for
example, used the same technique of solving differential equations used to plot artillery
trajectories, but because it was not mapped directly to that kind of work, it was considered a
shallow demonstration program, and nothing more. Spacewar, as described by Brand, attracted
the "computer bums", who only reluctantly engaged, if they did at all, with the more serious
research activities taking place in their academic institutions (Brand, 1972). This is a role that
the bums themselves seemed to embrace, however, and this reflects a critical point: the
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categorization of non-instrumental programming as frivolous was perpetuated in part by the
same people who engaged in such activities. From an actor-network perspective, they navigated
the same reality inscribed by Engelbart and McCarthy and other high-minded scholars. The role
they played was subversive, in that they were deliberately using computing resources for reasons
that had little to do with the academic and/or militaristic problems for which they were designed.
They did so, in part, by framing their activities as pure play, with in-jokes about drunken mice
and over-the-top science fiction fantasies. Their practices, then, served to polarize behaviours
and perspectives with respect to computers. On the one hand, computers were meant to solve the
sober, serious concerns of their designers (and financial backers). On the other hand, they could
be "hacked" to do the complete opposite of serious work. In such a situation, the potential for a
middle ground to form one that embraced elements of both sides was not necessarily strong.

A Different Path
Could such a middle ground exist? Could the practices involved in gaming, for example,
be used to ends that we would not associate with gaming? I believe that this is possible, and that
this in fact was actually happening until quite recently. As we look back at the history of
computer gaming, we find that, until around 15-20 years ago, coding and play were largely
linked together. It is easy to miss this because game programmers such as Graetz tended to
discuss their gaming practices as if they were purely frivolous play. Writers such as Brand also
make it sound as if play was the primary means by which programmers engaged with Spacewar.
In fact, however, as Brand himself describes it, many of Spacewar's players went on to
reprogram it, digging into the code to change the rules of the game:
20

Within weeks of its invention Spacewar was spreading across the country to other
computer research centers, who began adding their own wrinkles. There was a
variation called Minnesota Hyperspace in which you kept your position but
became invisible; however if you applied thrust, your rocket flame could be
seen.... Score-keeping. Space mines, Partial damage - if hit in a fin you could not
turn in that direction. Then "2-D" Spacewar, played on two consolesAdding
incentive, MIT introduced an electric shock to go with the explosion of your ship.
A promising future is seen for sound effects. And now a few commercial versions
of Spacewar - 25 cents a game - are appearing in university coffee shops (Brand,
1972).
With the advent of networks like ARPANET, such variants could easily be transmitted across
communications lines to whoever wanted to download the game, play it, and redesign it.
This kind of activity was not wholly a Spacewar phenomenon. Later games also tended
to get picked up, changed, and retransmitted quite easily. Will Crowther's text adventure game
Adventure was finished in its original form in 1975, but in the years that followed the game was
expanded upon, modified, and otherwise worked over by scores of eager programmers
(Montfort, 2005). Even more intriguing, however, are the collections of games amassed by DEC
employee David Ahl, who would go on to found Creative Computing magazine, one of the
primary hobbyist computing journals of the 1970s and 1980s (Anderson, 1984). Ahl was a big
proponent of hobbyist programming, encouraging schools that operated DEC computers to send
him programs and in particular, games written by their students. In 1975 he convinced DEC
to publish a book entitled 101 BASIC Computer Games which provided the source code for a
huge variety of simple games that could be keyed into most "standard" versions of the BASIC
21

programming environment (Ahl, 1975). Ahl's main motivation to do this work was to bring
computer programming into the classroom. In the Preface to the work, he makes the following
observation: "the educational value of games can be enormous not only in their playing but in
their creation" (Ahl, 1975, p. 7; emphasis added). Ahl has changed the rhetoric here; whereas
games like Spacewar were seen as having no intrinsic value, Ahl argues that game programming
is a form of education. By doing this, the emphasis is placed less on playing than it is on coding,
though Ahl does not consequently diminish the value of playing, noting the following:
Most educators agree that games generally foster learning by discovery
Newton's second law is probably the furthest thing from the mind of a person
sitting down to Play ROCKET. However, when the player finally lands his LEM
successfully on the moon, the chances are very good that he has discovered
something about gravity varying inversely with the mass of the LEM and the
distance from the moon (p. 7).
Whether or not games can become educational experiences is still matter for debate. What is
important here is that Ahl conflated play and programming in a format that was to become
extremely popular for more than a decade. Books and magazines full of type-in programs
became a staple of 1970s and 1980s hobbyist computing.
4
The player/programmer had become
legitimized via the discourse of education as expressed by hundreds of mainstream texts.
Moreover, new computers were being developed in response to the emergence of the
player/programmer. Commodore's machines, such as the VIC-20 and Commodore 64, would
boot up immediately into Commodore BASIC, allowing the user to build BASIC programs right
away (Commodore Business Machines, 1980). The BBC introduced a line of personal

4
To cite one example, a website devoted solely to the ZX Spectrum (released in 1982) lists dozens of
books that were available at the time: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/books.html. Interestingly, no formal,
academic study has been conducted on this issue.
22

computers as part of their "Computer Literacy Project," with a heavy emphasis on programming
("The BBC Microcomputer and me," 2011). These efforts were not all directed at game
programming, but these machines all boasted graphics and sound capabilities that were absent
from lines such as the IBM PC, which were not meant to be learning machines. In other words,
the capacity to program good games (for the time) was built in.
As computers have evolved and grown more complex, computer literacy efforts have
focused less on programming and more on learning specific software packages, such as Excel or
Photoshop. To create a game that leverages the graphics, sound, and processing capabilities of
modern machines requires much more than one or two pages of code. As game development has
moved to the private sector, where funds can be raised to acquire needed resources, the computer
user and game console user have been relegated largely to the role of player. While certain
tools such as level editors bridge the gap somewhat, they do not go nearly far enough to recreate
the player/programmer role. Games, then, turned into another consumer product, sold as-is on
store shelves, and eventually online. From our current vantage point, then, it is difficult to
discern the dual role that games played in the past. Yet by forgetting this, we make the mistake
of assuming that gaming is all about playing. As the earliest programmers of display hacks
demonstrated, playing with computers meant also to program them. If we accept that game
development is the preserve of a handful of powerful corporations, we throw away a significant
piece of gaming history. The independent games movement, of course, has alleviated the top-
heaviness of the industry somewhat, but even it dichotomizes the practices of programming and
play, with one side developing and the other consuming. The player/programmer role entails a
near-simultaneous engagement with both code and game playing. The coding becomes a
fundamental aspect of the experience, so much so that it becomes exceedingly difficult to draw
23

boundaries around what might constitute a "game" in the sense that we currently understand it.
This is not to say that these practices could or should be revised, at least not definitively; but, as
Orlikowski suggests, such potentialities are embedded within the technologies we use for
gaming, and perhaps we should at least acknowledge that fact.

Conclusions
While I have not reflexively noted every step in the process, my aim here was to combine
the insights gained from using both actor-network theory and structuration theory to tackle the
same problem. In terms of the subject matter at hand, the field of actors could have been
expanded on somewhat to include, for example, those involved in the creation of the video
arcade and home console consumer markets. I felt, however, that it was best to provide a
detailed analysis of the development of the first CRT display-based demonstration programs, for
it is from that foundation that all digital gaming truly began. It is also within that space that
competing interests emerged that came to define the categories of use for digital computers that
still remain with us today. As Orlikowski observes, such categories only emerge via engagement
with technology, and what is interesting about this period is that those with the most direct
access to the relevant technologies Whirlwind, the TX-0, the PDP-1 defined roles for those
machines that defied what institutional interests had in mind. Of course, as Giddens noted,
institutional power typically wins out, but the programmers at least were able to establish a
counter-position standing opposite to the purely instrumental, problem-solving dynamic of the
emerging field of computer science. The problem we now face is that this dichotomy between
work and play remains as rigidly defined as ever. Once we have a better understanding of
24

available alternatives to the developer and consumer roles we stick with so closely, we are likely
to find new ways to engage with familiar technologies.

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