Missile Command

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

The document, an extended abstract presented at DiGRA 2018, proposes an alternative framework for evaluating videogame expression, drawing primarily from David Sudnow's 1983 book, Pilgrim in the Microworld.

• The paper argues David Sudnow's 1983 book Pilgrim in the Microworld, about playing a simplified Atari 2600 port of Missile Command, offers a better framework for evaluating videogame expression than the dominant game studies models that emerged about fifteen years later.
• Sudnow located the core pleasure of videogames not in winning, narrative immersion, or sophisticated rules, but in becoming incorporated into an audiovisual spectacle where the player's bodily movements are reflected back as rhythmic lights and sounds.
• The author identifies a persistent tension in early game studies between mechanical, technical, and narrative essentialisms, and notes that videogames have repeatedly resisted the predictive models scholars built around them.