The system, hosted at North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD), is dedicated to generating responses to nuclear war scenarios. “Is this a game?”ĭavid Lightman, high-schooler, hacker, and avid gamer, has found his way into a military computer system. Situating WarGames in the context of the progenitors of the computer game medium, I demonstrate that the film articulates a relationship to screen images that is not predicated on distinguishing between the game and the real world but, rather, on establishing a new relationship to screens and to the realities they obscure or convey. The question implies that the game world (the world on the screen) and the real world, where human actions have real consequences, can and should be distinguished. I take, as my starting point, “Is it a game, or is it real?”-a question associated with the film’s premise, marketing, and reception. But WarGames’ historical position, its cultural impact, and its formative role for the emerging tech culture of the 1980s and 1990s invites us to examine how the film directs its viewer to treat the screens that populate its diegesis. This evolution of the medium is generally treated as the effect of technological developments (more sophisticated computer graphics, the introduction of CD-ROM technology, and the more advanced consoles of Nintendo and Sega that replaced the Atari 2600) that encouraged the player to look both at and through the screen. When the industry resurged in the 1990s, the shooter game Doom and the adventure game Myst (both 1993), offered players enhanced realism and immersive worlds. The film’s viewers in 1983 would have been acquainted with computer games like Space Invaders (1978), a shooter game with a striking soundtrack and bit-mapped graphics, and Zork (1980), an adventure game in which the user navigates a maze via text-based interactions with the program. The Golden Age of Video Games is commonly defined as the period from the beginning of the medium to the industry crash of 1983. 2 “The years 19 marked the pinnacle of popularity for early arcade and home video games” (Newman, Atari Age, 8). WarGames, a film about computer games, programming, and hacking, was released in the summer of 1983, at the tail-end of the Golden Age of Video Games when early arcade and home video games were at the height of popularity.
On computer games and hacking, see Levy 39-61. Computerized game playing may be found to some degree at almost every computer installation” (qtd. Spenser notes that “most members of the computer programming community are also game players. 1 This linking was established early in the history of computing. Computer games, programming, and hacking have been linked since the nascent years of computing.
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