Xbox One and the endless, hopeless dream of convergence

Ian Bogost is an author and game designer. His collection of ‘game poems’ A Slow Year is available here.

The history of videogames is also the history of televisions. Not the shows, the stars, or the ready meals, but the equipment – the box in your living room.  This connection is the most intimate yet unexamined one in our medium. The ‘video’ in ‘videogames’ isn’t just an affectation or a distinction: it refers to video technology, the recording and display system developed for cathode ray tube (CRT) televisions.

The earliest computer games didn’t use televisions, but they did use devices similar to televisions. Willy Higinbotham’s 1958 game Tennis For Two, often called the first videogame, was displayed on an oscilloscope connected to an analogue computer. Four years later, MIT engineers created Spacewar, a game that would inspire Asteroids and other space shooters. It ran on a refrigerator-sized PDP-1 minicomputer (‘mini’ relative to mainframes, that is) and rendered its ships and starfields on a display halfway between Higinbotham’s oscilloscope and a modern TV. Like Missile Command and other early coin-op games, Spacewar used a raster-scan CRT display, one that deploys its electron gun to etch vector shapes into the screen’s phosphor rather than to scan across the surface in rows as a raster-display CRT home television does.

By 1968, Ralph Baer had developed a working prototype of his Brown Box game system, which was specifically conceived to connect to an ordinary television. Its visual detail was rudimentary. In exchange for visual complexity, Baer brought videogames out of the research lab and into the home.

But there was a problem: nobody knew what to do with a contraption meant to be connected to a television. When Brown Box was commercialised in 1972 as the Magnavox Odyssey (the first home videogame console), the company had to explicitly inform consumers that the Odyssey would work on any brand of television, not just a Magnavox.

It’s easy to forget how acclimated we’ve become to seeing the TV as a consumer electronics device used alongside a wealth of other gizmos that require wiring and coupling to one another. Our home theatres demand a receiver, which then connect to five, six or even seven speakers. Our Blu-ray players and streaming media devices and game systems create labyrinths of video and audio in the bleak dark of our entertainment cabinets.

Microsoft’s ‘all-in-one entertainment device’ wants to be ‘input one’ on your TV – but will it succeed?

But in the early days of Odyssey, even the VCR hadn’t yet entered the picture. A television was either a big wooden box that sat stationary in a den or a small appliance set on a counter or a stand. Coupling a device like a video player or a game system to its display was awkward and unnatural. Early game systems connected to TVs as antennae, not as A/V equipment. To do so often required moving a large piece of furniture and risking an electric shock.

Those who remember having an Atari VCS or Intellivision may recall the RF switch boxes that facilitated switching between game and antenna or cable box. Playing a videogame involved communing with the television directly, reaching or scuttling behind it to gain leverage on the switch that transitioned the device from TV to GAME –and then repeating the process later when Dad yelled at you for forgetting to reset it.

We think we’ve moved beyond such inoperativeness today, but a spectre of incompatibility still hangs over consoles. Every new generation of hardware shows us how tenuously our TVs mate with our videogames as we haul out the old PS3 and replace it with a PS4, or realise that we want to keep both for a time but don’t have a free HDMI input. Hardware transitions force us to perform an archaeology of dust and cabling.

In the den, videogame systems continue to answer the same question they have for four decades: what is my place here? And stalwart as ever, the television resists the videogame system, pushing it to the sidelines, downplaying its role in home entertainment to the status of an accessory, an optional feature of a device meant for sitcoms and reality shows and live sports.

Today, one improbable loner stands against this dismissal. Xbox One wants you to run your cable box through it, so it can control your television with the commands of your voice, incorporating TV programming as just another ‘channel’, the latest in the endless, hopeless dream of convergence. Such a dream is a bold one, but one that works against history. To succeed, it will have to upend a dirty secret of videogaming: that it is an activity conducted in spite of the television, rather than along with it.

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