Instantaneously Punctuated Picture-Music: Pilgrim in the Microworld and an Alternative Evaluation of Videogame Expression

This paper revisits David Sudnow's 1983 book Pilgrim in the Microworld, an account of his experience playing a simplified Atari 2600 port of the arcade game Missile Command, to argue that Sudnow's descriptive observations offer a more productive framework for evaluating videogame expression than the dominant theoretical models that emerged in game studies roughly fifteen years later. The author contends that Sudnow located the core pleasure of videogames not in winning, narrative immersion, or sophisticated rules, but in the experience of becoming incorporated into an audiovisual spectacle, with the player's bodily movements reflected back through the screen as rhythmic lights and sounds.

The paper identifies a persistent tension in early game studies texts between mechanical, technical, and narrative essentialisms, and observes that videogames themselves have repeatedly resisted the predictive models scholars built around them. Features such as noninteractive cut-scenes, the modest uptake of virtual reality compared with televisions and smartphones, the prevalence of retro visual styles, and the awards given to experimental games without goals or challenges all suggest that meaningful play does not depend on complex systems, engaging narratives, or cutting-edge technology. On this reading, what can be said with confidence about videogame expression is Sudnow's claim that these forms let players play with sights and play with sounds.

The argument develops two interventions. The first reconsiders videogames primarily as a playable form of audiovisual media, a new way of engaging with televisual screens, rather than as a subset of the broader category of games. The second holds that the embodied experience of players incorporated with these lights and sounds is inherently meaningful, even in the simplest early videogames. The scope is historical and theoretical, drawing on a close reading of Sudnow's descriptive passages and situating them against foundational game studies texts such as Aarseth, Ryan, Juul, and Murray, rather than on empirical data or a sampled corpus of games.