The Interactive Pasts Conference 2: John Aycock and Hayden Kroepfl

Описание: Video presentation for the Interactive Pasts Conference 2, October 8-10 2018, Center for Sound and Vision.

John Aycock (University of Calgary)
Hayden Kroepfl (University of Calgary)

The Desolation of Vixens

Desolation was a 1984 text-based shooter game that shipped with the short-lived Osborne Vixen, a portable computer. Very limited information is available regarding either the game or the platform, leaving us with little more than the digital artifact; despite that, we were able to reverse engineer Desolation’s data formats and reconstruct everything from ships to level data. We discovered that the game has data laid out in multiple ways, that the level data is very custom-tailored to the format of the extant levels, and the curious but inconsistent use of what we will loosely call “obfuscation” of data. We talk about how we were able to reverse engineer all this and the tools we built to assist, some of which will be of use more generally in the analysis of other games.

Perhaps more interesting, however, is the evidence about the game’s development that we were able to learn from analyzing the code and data. The game data, for example, captures what appears to be evolutionary steps in Desolation’s design. Meanwhile, the code suggests that the game was not only possibly written on a different machine, but was written for a different CPU, and may even hint at the form of the game deliverables. Desolation provides a case study of what we might learn from digital artifacts about the human process of creating video games, even when the games were created 34 years ago – an eternity in computer time.