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Loading... The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association
Close Reading a Close Reading: Revisiting Mystery House in Mechanisms
Key insights
7 takeaways- 01Matthew Kirschenbaum’s 2008 book Mechanisms, a foundational text in game studies with over 1,300 citations, contains significant technical inaccuracies in its close reading of the 1980 Apple II game Mystery House.See it on page 2
- 02The analysis incorrectly identifies BASIC program files like HELLO and MYSTERY.HELLO as simple text files, failing to account for their tokenized structure which was essential to the Apple II boot process.See it on page 7
- 03The report misinterprets the game's 'BLOCK' filenames as binary data blocks of two sectors each, a claim contradicted by the actual file sizes visible in the disk's CATALOG output.See it on page 10
- 04The author argues that game studies scholarship suffers from a technical gap, where researchers often lack the computer science proficiency required to accurately interpret low-level disk data and source code.See it on page 13
- 05Kirschenbaum’s reliance on the FishWings software for his analysis was flawed, as he misidentified the tool as a hex editor when it is strictly a display-only utility.See it on page 3
- 06The study demonstrates that the Volume Table of Contents (VTOC) anomalies discussed in Mechanisms could have been explained using standard Apple DOS commands rather than speculative theories about phantom software.See it on page 11
- 07Future game studies research requires a more inclusive and rigorous approach to technical analysis, moving beyond surface-level observations to properly examine machine language and assembly code as meaningful texts.See it on page 12
Summary
Close Reading a Close Reading: Revisiting Mystery Mystery House is a game that was released in 1980 for the Apple II computer. It was the first text adventure game known to be illustrated and was the game design debut of celebrated game designer Roberta Williams. The landmark 2008 book Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination performed a close reading of a Mystery House floppy disk, and in this paper I turn a critical eye to this previous work.
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