“Don’t Watch TV Tonight. Play It!” Early Video Games and Television

A video game is something you look at on a screen (along with something you hear on synced audio), and also something you play using an electronic interface. In the early years of video games, the video component was most typically a cathode ray tube (CRT) display, more commonly known as a TV set, and video games were a new kind of media device that included TV in its technological ensemble. The display of an arcade cabinet TV game would be used for play only, but the home versions plugged into the same appliance that had been receiving broadcasts over the air. The histories of video games and television overlap, and the emergence of games as a new medium can hardly be understood without considering the televisions that were among their essential components.

Television was at the core of the new technology’s identity. Video games were marketed as “tele-games,” and coin-op video games were more commonly known as TV games in the 1970s. One early home game console was called “TV Fun.” While the meanings of video have shifted over the years, in the 1970s the word was still—as it had been for decades—a synonym for television. It was at the time also developing additional connotations in distinction to television particularly thanks to videotape, video art, and also video games, all of which were uses of television technology for purposes other than watching live network broadcasts.² Video games could have come to be known as electronic games, computer games, or something else, but their identity was established in terms of the familiar TV screen and its meanings.

Early games, particularly those available to play in the home, were a new use for a familiar technology, renewing the identity of television and drawing on its cultural status to develop meanings for the new medium. Television and video games became distinct media by the 1980s, but their histories also have something important in common. Video games were understood in the early and mid-1970s by reference to existing media—other electronics devices, other toys and games, and other uses of television sets. Before they were their own thing, video games had an ambiguous status. Video games drew on TV’s familiarity to appeal to consumers. But they were also distinguished from television and presented as an improvement on it. They were TV, but more than just TV.

As they are now, electronic games in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s were a heterogeneous assortment of artifacts and experiences. These included mainframe and minicomputer programs in universities; coin-operated amusements often placed alongside pinball machines in bars, bus stations, and shopping centers; handheld devices resembling calculators; and plastic boxes inputting to a television set. Even though they used LEDs (light-emitting diodes) rather than video displays, handheld games of the 1970s such as Mattel Electronic Football were precursors of Game Boys and mobile touchscreen devices. Even though they were used by a small number of hackers, early computer games like Spacewar! were precursors of PC games and multiplayer online play. Video games in the 1970s and early ’80s were also part of wider contexts of play that included Dungeons & Dragons and other nonelectronic games. Video games that plugged into a TV set like the Atari VCS were central to setting an identity for the new medium, but they also overlapped with all of these other phenomena in the emergence of electronic gaming. Arcade games built on the mainframe and minicomputer games. Home TV games adapted arcade games, and handhelds offered similar experiences as well, including driving, tank, pinball, and sports games, and later ports of popular titles such as Coleco’s Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and Frogger. TV games cannot be isolated from the rest, but television technology was essential for the development of these devices. The arcade version of Pong, for instance, was described in a magazine in 1974 as “a miniature computer attached to a television screen.”³ Television, not only as technology but as a cultural form of commercial broadcasting, was also essential for the establishment of the new medium’s public image.⁴ Both the familiarity of TV as an everyday object and its perceived failures as a mass medium were backgrounds against which video games were considered. The new meanings of video games were the product of a history of thinking about media and their social circulation and significance.

Video and the Mass Society

Video games were often imagined not merely as a new use for television but as an improvement on television, turning a disreputable, passive medium into one more active and purposive. This occurred in a wider context of change in electronic media. Television’s public image in the period of electronic games’ emergence was often one of a social problem in need of solving. Following the FCC Chairman Newton Minow’s “Vast Wasteland” speech to the National Association of Broadcasters in 1961, TV was widely considered not so much as a medium of cultural or personal expression as it was a threat to society. The institutional structure of commercial TV networks and stations was regarded as a failure for democracy. Television programs were generally considered to be ephemeral trash. As one famous quip of the period goes: “Television is a medium, so called because it is neither rare nor well done.” The experience of TV was characterized by passivity, and the association of TV with the mass audience of consumers whose attention would enrich networks and sponsors tinged this criticism with negative gender and class associations.

The public reception of video games in the 1970s was informed by decades of thought about media and their power to shape modern societies. By the time TV games came along, television was well established as an emblem of media exercising political power and social control. Conventional wisdom about TV at the height of the American three-network era was the product of alarmed midcentury thinking about a cluster of “mass” concepts: mass society, mass media, mass culture, and mass audience.⁵ These terms are inextricable from the broad themes of the twentieth century: totalitarianism threatening individuals’ liberty, a contest of ideologies (communist, fascist, and liberal democratic), and the Cold War politics of East versus West, which endured until the end of the 1980s. The rise of mass media early in the twentieth century had long been seen as enabling mass propaganda to serve the interests of those in power, influencing the opinions and beliefs of vast populations or even hypnotizing them into subservience to the dominant ideology. The development of broadcast media, first radio and then television, extended the speed, efficiency, reach, and concentration of media. To many detractors of modern media and many observers concerned about their social and political impact, this meant furthering corporate and state dominance over the spread of information and ideas, a means of controlling a mass public under a powerful centralized regime.⁶

In the eyes of many social critics, from Frankfurt School Marxists to American sociologists, from academicians to popular commentators in magazines, mass media had the power to shape a mass society.⁷ This could be as true in fascist societies under Mussolini or Hitler, or communist societies under Stalin and his successors, as in advanced capitalist, democratic societies of the West. The citizens in a mass society were not merely subject to the manipulations of official propaganda, but were also believed to have been atomized and estranged from one another, losing their sense of self and community, too eager to submit to bureaucratic, authoritarian leadership. The population was homogenized but also alienated, with traditional community and family ties weakened by urbanization and industrialization.⁸

Media replaced traditional community life for these modern citizens. In the more paranoid versions of this critique, media could be used in brainwashing the masses, compelling their subservience under a totalitarian system through techniques of thought control. A key example in such critiques was the 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network, which offered an instance in which mass behavior was supposedly engineered through the power of mass communication. Another hugely influential text dramatizing the power of mass communication was George Orwell’s dystopian 1948 novel 1984, a portrait of totalitarianism in which thought control is practiced through a mass media technology of both propaganda and surveillance, the telescreen.

C. Wright Mills, the maverick sociologist who was an inspiration to the 1960s student protest movement, was one source of mass society and mass media thought that informed the reception of video technology in the 1970s. In his 1956 book The Power Elite, Mills addressed mass media as a component of the mass society, which for him is in competition with an alternative social arrangement, a “community of publics.”⁹ Mills saw modern capitalist society like that of the United States to be governed by a small elite of powerful men who would not necessarily advance the interests of the people they ruled. Democratic societies are premised on the participation of publics in their communities, but a mass society replaces these small-scale conversations with mass media: one voice speaks “impersonally through a network of communication to millions of listeners and viewers.”¹⁰ In a public, individuals have the potential to answer back to communications they receive, and “as many people express opinions as receive them.”¹¹ But in a mass society, the flow of information is in one direction only, and most people have no opportunity to respond to mass media, which inhibits them from having thoughts of their own. In a mass society, Mills wrote, “the public is merely the collectivity of individuals each rather passively exposed to the mass media and rather helplessly opened up to the suggestions and manipulations that flow from these media.”¹² Mills did not see the move toward a society under the rule of the power elite as simply a product of new technologies of communication, but he credited the mass media for being “the most important of those increased means of power now at the disposal of elites of wealth and power.”¹³

By the 1960s, television had become the epitome of mass media: the most popular and profitable form of news and entertainment, dominated by only three national networks, all of them advertising supported. Ideas about mass media as propaganda had been formulated when newspapers and movies were the main forms of commercial media, but radio and television broadcasting were observed to be even more influential and powerful in engineering a mass society. The association between TV, as a domestic appliance, and the great audience of women, children, and people of lesser class status than the elite opinion leaders and corporate and state leaders, led to its identification as feminized and lower-class—mass culture. Mass culture meant a mass-produced and mass-distributed mass media, but also a culture for the mass audience of the mass society. Its reputation was low for multiple reasons: the idea of its audience wanting cultural status, but also its function being the manipulation of that audience, a form of social control. This notion of TV’s instrumental role within the mass society was not merely a matter of intellectual debate, but was disseminated in all kinds of popular culture such as Frank Zappa’s 1973 song “I’m the Slime” in which he speaks as television content to its audience: “You will obey me while I lead you,” he sings. “Your mind is totally controlled.” A vernacular critique of mass culture, mass media, and mass society during the 1960s and ’70s figured TV as its most perfect weapon, narcotizing and abusing the audience, trivializing politics, and forcing conformity and banality on the viewing public. This can be noted in the nicknames given to television: “the boob tube,” “the idiot box,” “the one-eyed babysitter,” “the glass teat,” “chewing gum for the eyes,” to name just a few.

One of the key formal dimensions of broadcast media that allowed for this kind of rhetoric was radio and television’s transmission from one to many. The audience can have its minds programmed by radio or TV only as long as the medium allows for no feedback from the viewer. Video games made it possible to see TV as a participatory rather than a one-way medium, and this contrast tapped into a line of thinking about mass society during the era of protest and counterculture of the 1960s. Inspired by C. Wright Mills, the student movement of the New Left coined the term “participatory democracy,” an alternative to representative democracy in which all members of a community discuss and deliberate about policy until achieving consensus.¹⁴ Mills’s populism decried the dominance of American society by a tyranny of elites, and the students protesting against corporate power, militarism, and civil rights violations saw society’s institutions as unprepared to undergo real change. The 1962 Port Huron Statement, a manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society, urged: “Let the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life.” Politics would bring the individual “out of isolation and into community.”¹⁵ Participatory democracy was a means to this end. In the historical account of Milton Viorst, “Participatory democracy would overcome a sense of powerlessness by having people partake directly in making the decisions that affected their destiny.”¹⁶ This was presented as a solution to the failings of mass society. If mass media imposed conformity of thought through its homogenizing message, participatory democracy would engage individuals on their own terms as political subjects.

In the 1960s and ’70s, many changes in TV were underway that were supposed to promise the redemption of television from its status as mass media within a mass society through improvement of its technology and forms. Videotape decks and cameras, cable and satellite television, video art, and possibilities for two-way television permitting audience feedback and participation were all topics of regular discussion in the popular and trade press. So was the futuristic possibility of computerizing television, turning the domestic set into a multimedia terminal networked to news, libraries, shops, offices, and other information sources, as well as other users.¹⁷ These technological developments were presented as revolutionary solutions to some of TV’s problems, and as possibilities for television’s democratization. Ideas of improvement and democratization of TV at this time were premised on the same shifts that we find in ideas about media convergence beginning in the 1990s: of media communication from one-way to interactive, and from audiences as passive consumers to active users. With cable TV, for instance, viewers would be free to choose programs that would really suit their interests rather than being subject to whatever the networks and their sponsors expected to be profitable. Some of these cable programs might not even be beholden to sponsors for their funding. With video technologies, people would be able to borrow or rent tapes of various kinds or record programs off the air to view at their convenience. The empowerment of audiences is figured in such scenarios as a contrast to network television viewers, who are regarded as victims of mass communication.

Video games allowing users to make the television set into an active, participatory medium taking input from the viewer/player were hardly a politically revolutionary intervention in popular culture. Surely they did little to diminish the power of mass media. But they did appear to many observers—and were presented by the marketing discourses of the games companies—as an improvement on the medium of television, which would solve some of the problems strongly associated with TV as perhaps the most important single instrument of the mass society. Video games were consistently described as a way to transform the TV set into a device that affords a more participatory experience, a contrast against the typical use of TV sets to watch commercially sponsored network broadcasts. As a form of television technology, video games were presented as a solution to existing media, allowing for the public to engage actively rather than be passive victims. In the Cold War context, this meant that games would suit the democratic personality of the autonomous individual rather than lead to Soviet-style totalitarian control over the populace. This contrast with the old idea of TV as passive advanced an identity for video games as a new kind of television, but also as an antidote to television.

Games as TV

As is generally true of new media, games were offered to the public both as a break from familiar experiences and as an improvement on what was already routine. The language used to describe new media often reveals its remediations of existing media technologies, forms, and practices.¹⁸ Radio was called wireless telegraphy; then television was described as radio with pictures. Email is electronic letters, while the “tube” in YouTube is an old TV set. In various ways, video games remediated pinball, board games, sports from ping pong to auto racing, science-fiction film and literature, and electro-mechanical arcade amusements. Perhaps more than anything else, video games remediated television. The iconography, language, and experience of television were presented as guides for consumers in understanding games and their functions and possibilities, just as the content of early games offered imagery that television audiences were used to seeing, like rocket ships and athletic competitions.

We think of video games as computer games, and often assume that they have always integrated video and computer components. While of course it is true that the mainframe and minicomputer games developed on university campuses in the 1960s were made using computer technologies, many of the earliest games released for public amusement such as Pong were made entirely using television engineering skill and materials. As Henry Lowood argues, “The reading of Pong as a product of the computer age sidesteps the emergence of the videogame out of TV engineering.”¹⁹ The history of both the Atari and Magnavox games is one of innovation in raster video rather than of work adapting computer science to entertainment media. Only later on did home and arcade games incorporate microprocessors and software code; initially the most familiar video games to be played by ordinary people were TV games through and through. This explains why video games were very infrequently called computer games or discussed in relation to computers in the early and mid-1970s. (This changed after a few years.)

They were, however, regarded very often as a form of television. When the brand new Magnavox Odyssey was the secret guest on What’s My Line? it was presented as a television set on which the guest was doing something the celebrity panel could not see. When the object was finally revealed to the panel, the host, after expressing his amazement at the new device, asked the Maganvox representative appearing on the show, “How do you tune it in?” After connecting the Odyssey to the antenna input and choosing channel 3 or 4, he explained, “You tune it in like any regular program.” The language of broadcasting (“tune in”) suggests that the game image on the screen is received over the air.

In addition to the term video game and its synonyms tele-game and TV game (as well sometimes as home TV game to distinguish against coin-operated games in public places), the language used to describe early games was frequently more elaborately televisual. A description of the first home game console in a 1972 New York Times article referred to a Magnavox Odyssey game as a “broadcast.”²⁰ A Popular Mechanics feature in 1976 described a sports game as follows: “The playing field is just another program you tune instead of comedies and commercials.”²¹ Radio-Electronics called TV games “a new kind of entertainment being offered on [the] home TV screen.”²² Consumer Reports explained, “Odyssey uses your TV set, including the picture tube, just as TV reception does.”²³ Business Week in 1975 called electronic games “TV’s Hot New Star.”²⁴ The packaging of Atari’s console version of Pong made prominent the phrase “for your home TV.” As Sheila Murphy argues, the small screen “served as a stable and familiar referent for consumers and users who were first learning to read the semiotics of … video game systems being connected to the more recognizable television set.”²⁵ The language used to describe the new games supports this notion.

Ralph Baer, who invented the Brown Box that was the model for the Odyssey as well as an inspiration for Pong, initially called his idea for this invention “Channel LP—let’s play!”²⁶ A video game console produced by Fairchild in 1976 was known as Channel F. A sales brochure for Channel F used phrases that link games with the TV set on which they would be played, such as “Now Playing” and “Stay Tuned.” Mattel’s Intellivision console, short for “intelligent television,” organized its games into thematic “networks” such as sports, action, strategy, arcade, and children’s learning. Above an Odyssey game pictured in a Sears catalog was the excited description: “All the action takes place on your TV!” This might have caused some confusion, however. Sears catalogs in the mid-1970s regularly cautioned prospective buyers of video game consoles: “TV not included.” One wonders what expectations consumers might have had if they needed to be told this. Perhaps some people might have thought the pictured product was a television set that plays games in addition to receiving broadcasts.

Figure 2.1 Fairchild Channel F brochure.

Imagery of television was central to the representation of games in visual media such as magazines and catalogs. The most typical image was of players, often opposite-sex couples or parent–child combinations, posed in front of a TV set in a comfortable living or family room decorated with wall-to-wall carpet, couches, and coffee tables. These images would echo the standard image of the family circle in advertisements for televisions and fit games into long-standing discourses of domestic media. The frequent presence of game imagery on higher-end console TVs—larger sets built into wooden cabinetry of traditional styles—establishes clear class connotations for the new technology. It inserts them into the ideal of suburban white American family life in much the same way as traditional representations of television since the late 1940s.²⁷

Graphic design representing TV games also borrowed familiar iconography, especially of the bulging rectangle shape of television. The “electronic tele-games” portion of a Sears catalog set the “tele” portion of the text against a bulging rectangle with rounded corners, emphasizing the hardware used to play the new device. Game catalogs for Atari, Intellivision, and other programmable consoles (i.e., consoles that would take cartridges to play different games) typically represented the screen image within the same shape to make clear how they would look on a TV set.

Figure 2.3 Catalog detail: “tele-games” from the Sears Wish Book for the 1979 Holiday Season.

The identity of video games with a TV set is especially clearly expressed by a toy produced by the Louis Marx & Co. for sale in 1974 called “T.V. Tennis.” Clearly inspired by Pong, Odyssey Tennis, and numerous similar games coming to market at the time, this electro-mechanical plastic toy with no video components takes the form of a green CRT set with control dials in the corners, mimicking the design and functionality of Pong without its electronic hardware. A video game sans video, T.V. Tennis reveals how the cachet of the image of television, and the novelty of interacting with imagery shown on a CRT display, helped establish an identity for the new technology of the video game in the early 1970s.

New Tricks Your TV Can Do

Early video games might have relied on TV to establish an identity, but TV’s identity was hardly stable at this time. At least as important as games’ dependence on a traditional conception of TV was their prospect for transforming TV, making television do new and different things. This occurred during a time of media change as television’s status was in flux. “The widespread public acceptance and use of home video game systems by a broader audience,” argues Murphy, “indicates that consumers were rethinking television’s role as a home technology in the mid-1970s.”²⁸ Video games were among a cluster of emerging video technologies that promised to renew television by opening it up to new forms of programming and new modes of engagement. In addition to games, the two most notable developments in television technology of this era were videotape becoming available outside of industry, and cable television subscription services launching as an alternative and supplement to broadcasting. Video games were understood as a new television technology, like video and cable, which would change the terms by which TV was experienced, and thereby also change TV’s social and cultural meanings.

In assessments of their impact on the television industry in the middle of the 1970s, video games were often discussed in tandem with consumer videotape recorder decks, which at the time were still called VTRs. These assessments might appear in industry trade papers such as Broadcasting, which in 1977 described video games and VTRs as “the two big TV toys,” but they were also circulating in publications aimed more at general readers.²⁹ Video games and VTRs had a number of things in common. They were both peripheral devices that would plug into the television’s antenna or CATV input and substitute new content for the broadcast or cable TV signal. They both represented competition for the attention of television audiences who might turn to them as an alternative to the offerings on their local stations or, in some cases, cable channels. And they both implied a new conception of the television user as a more active agent, choosing content at will and no longer beholden to network programmers and their schedule grid.

Millions more video games were sold in the mid-1970s than VTRs, though this was a matter more of supply and price than of consumer interest.³⁰ Of the two, tape had been seen as the more potentially revolutionizing force in television, promising to open up video content well beyond safe and formulaic network fare. “The Video Revolution,” a 1970 Saturday Review story looking forward to home video, promised that through the new technology, the TV viewer would be “rescued” and “liberated” after decades of “being held captive by network and sponsor.” Videotapes would offer “salvation” in the form of “a dramatically wider range of choice, and an adaptation of program to your convenience.”³¹ In the hopes of its champions, video would bring high culture, instructional or educational programs, Hollywood films, and children’s shows to audiences who were presumed fed up with the commercial TV status quo.³² In the 1960s and ’70s, American cultural critics often speculated on the promise of home video to be a form of cultural uplift, giving the mass audience better forms of programming in diverse forms and genres. They were eager to see the oligopoly of the broadcast networks blasted apart by new channels of distribution for video content. They presented this as a democratization of mass media, though elite taste would still govern the available choices.³³ Highbrow critics were skeptical that anyone would want to use home video recorders to save most television programs for later viewing, and saw the new technology offering a departure from the standard formats and experiences of television. But when Sony released its Betamax deck in 1975, its advertising pitch to consumers was “Watch Whatever Whenever,” giving the TV audience agency to program their own schedule. The visual rhetoric of the Sony campaign was similar to that of video game console advertising, with the device pictured before a TV set, linking them as components of a new technological ensemble, and suggesting a revised conception of television. Whether offering alternative fare or viewer agency, the VTR was perceived as a source of disruption to TV’s institutions and formats.

Figure 2.6 Sony Betamax advertisement: “Watch Whatever Whenever.”

From the TV industry’s perspective, video games and videotape were a pair of related threats to their business. An Advertising Age story on the two in 1977 makes this clear in its headline: “Innovations in Video—Nightmare for Networks?” It begins: “Videotape recorders and video games may be the two biggest monkey wrenches ever thrown at the television networks.”³⁴ Among other details, it notes that most video game play occurs during evening “prime time” (when TV networks charge their sponsors the most to air commercials) and that videotape usage shifts viewing away from evenings as well. Both of these new devices upset the TV networks’ expectations of patterns of use of the television set. VTRs would allow for skipping commercials, while video games are not an advertising-supported format, joining them together as an obstacle between the television networks and consumers whose attention they desired. In a 1972 story, Newsweek quoted Bobby Sherman, a writer, claiming he plays Odyssey games during commercial breaks while watching television, sometimes continuing through a few minutes of a show if “the game gets hot.”³⁵ The idea that television sets could be used for popular entertainment that does not include advertisements was a novelty, and the Advertising Age reader would naturally regard this with some apprehension.

Changing Times, a general interest magazine, put this same development in more positive terms in a 1976 article. While Madison Avenue and the TV networks construed new video technologies as a potential nightmare, ordinary consumers were invited to greet them as exciting, liberating developments. Explaining the headline “New Tricks Your TV Can Do,” the article lists electronic games and videotape, as well as projection television sets with their “theater big-screen effect.” The lead paragraphs portray a bold turning point in television history at that moment: “Your TV set has been fundamentally the same from the start—a box that allows you to see what someone else wants you to see whenever that someone decides to let you see it. Now television is up to new electronic tricks long dreamed of, long discussed and finally here.”³⁶ Watching on videotape is described as “doing your own TV programming,” and all of these new developments in TV technology promise to break viewers out of the broadcast mode of television set usage, whether by playing a game, watching on their own time, or making the home into a cinema-like space. By aligning video games with videotape and big-screen TV, Changing Times packaged them all together as new media upsetting the stability of television’s cultural status.

Cable television was less often linked with video games in the 1970s, though there were several plans to offer games through cable subscriptions.³⁷ Cable, however, was another key example of a new television technology promising to break the network oligopoly and open up TV to new, diverse, and worthwhile experiences. As with videotape, expressions of hope for cable TV in the 1960s tended toward bright optimism, regularly offering a utopian sense of revolution through technology. One commentator in 1972 proclaimed, “An almost religious faith in cable television has sprung up in the United States,” ascribing this to cable’s potential for offering “a way out of the vast wasteland of commercial network television.”³⁸ Like videotape, cable subscription would multiply the options available to viewers previously given the limited choice of three major networks and a handful of local stations. The scarcity of TV programs was viewed as an artificial condition in need of remedy by cable television’s multiplicity of options.³⁹ Cable also had the potential to break the “one-way” nature of broadcasting and offer new “two-way” communication that would empower audiences to speak back to the TV set. The discourse of cable television in the years before it was widely offered was one of transformation from passive mass communication to audience participation. TV itself was constructed as a problem in need of a solution, and cable subscriptions represented a solution from outside the TV industry and the system of commercial network broadcasting. Thomas Streeter writes that cable television was seen as a technology to “empower the … passive audience and eliminate the one-way quality of TV.”⁴⁰

Video games emerged against the background of these discourses, in which the trouble with television is always seen as being inherent in the one-way nature of commercial broadcasting as a form of mass communication, and in its limited range of options. The way forward to a better future has always been to open up TV to the participation of its previously passive viewer in diverse new experiences. This was the promise not only of cable TV and videotape, but also of electronic games like the Odyssey and Pong.

Video against Television

Video games, along with VTRs and cable TV, were part of a renewal of the status of television in the 1970s. But these new media technologies were also challenges to television, undermining its functioning industrially and culturally. As ways of using the TV set apart from the institutions of television broadcasting (e.g., networks and stations), the new video technologies of the 1970s were opposed to TV in its traditional conception. Video games were in one sense a “trick your TV can do”—a new way of using TV that would improve its value. In a more critical sense, however, video games were a trick at TV’s expense. At the same time that games were making TV better, they were also providing an alternative to television that would reveal TV’s flaws in clear focus.

One way to think of the changes television was going through in the 1970s is as a “makeover.”⁴¹ A makeover is premised on a “before” identity being unacceptable or even shameful. Television’s perceived failures have historically necessitated technological fixes offered by new audio-visual media. Sheila Murphy sees the emergence of video games in particular as an early instance of television’s encounter with digital media—what in the early 1980s was called the marriage of computers and television, and what later would more simply be described as convergence.⁴² TV in its old identity as a broadcast receiver has often been seen as the component of convergence in need of improvement or amelioration; by this logic, television is a problem that convergence solves.⁴³ We see this logic at play in discourses of the 1970s figuring television as a problem and the video game console as the solution.

Some of the most negative accounts of television in video game discourses were articulated by the “fathers” of the new medium, Ralph Baer and Nolan Bushnell, as explanations for their motivations as inventors of electronic game devices. Baer, an engineer, had been interested in devising a game to build into television sets in the early 1950s, but his employer was unwilling to pursue this research and development. When Baer conceived the plans that became the Odyssey in the mid-1960s, he has said, he was motivated by the desire to use television sets for a new purpose. Baer wanted to offer something to do with a TV “other than watch stupid network programs.”⁴⁴ He has said that the many millions of television sets in use in the 1960s were “practically begging to be used for something other than watching commercial television broadcasts!”⁴⁵ Bushnell, the Atari founder sometimes described in the 1970s as “King Pong” and frequently profiled in the press, told the New York Times in 1978 that video games represent “the first time people have been able to talk back to their television set, and make it do what they want it to do. It gives you a sense of control, whereas before all you could do was sit and switch channels.”⁴⁶ Bushnell told a magazine interviewer in 1974 that he wanted to make amusements be “not just spectator-oriented but participatory.”⁴⁷ Rather than expressions of their individual desires, we can see these utterances as social ideals of media and technology speaking through Baer and Bushnell. These men were merely expressing their culture’s commonplace ideas of television’s shortcomings, but, especially in Bushnell’s case as a more public persona, giving these notions the symbolic weight that comes with being a prominent innovator in both technology and culture.

The contrast of passivity and participation was standard rhetoric in the 1970s, frequently appearing in popular and trade press accounts of new media. An article in Sales & Marketing Management in 1976 promised, “With the video games, it’s strictly a participation sport.”⁴⁸ Video games were presented as a more active, engaging, and exciting use for the television set than merely watching it. But this idea is premised on the failure of TV in its usual conception to be anything more than a time-waster. The implicit indictment of television as a key component of the mass society, as a force promoting idiocy, conformity, and civic disengagement, is the background to any such appreciation of new media as a positive alternative to broadcasting.

Popular press stories introducing new technologies upon their public release, assuming a positive slant, are typically breathless and not infrequently techno-utopian. The stories hyping TV games in the 1970s fit this bill. Their optimistic descriptions of the new devices reveal as much about attitudes toward TV as about video games. In some instances, the games are presented as a revolutionary change for TV. In a New York Times story about the release of the Odyssey in May 1972, for example, the president of Magnavox (a long-time manufacturer of television sets) is quoted claiming his company’s product “is an educational and entertainment tool that transfers television from passive to an active medium.”⁴⁹ TV commercials seen at the time of the product’s release promised it would give “a new dimension for your television.” A New York Times Magazine feature two years later, under the headline “The Space-Age Pinball Machine,” included quite similar language:

Odyssey costs $99.95 and is simple enough for the average consumer to attach to the back of his TV set, transforming the otherwise passive box in his living room into a game screen with two “player” blips and a “ball” blip moving across it.⁵⁰

The language of passivity and activity is frequently matched in these descriptions with terms similarly describing agency, such as engage and control, as a means of distinction between games and ordinary TV. The article first describing TV games for readers of Time magazine in 1972 paints the following contrast:

The average American spends six hours a day gazing passively at television. Soon he will have an opportunity to play a more active role in what appears on the screen of his set. Last week the Magnavox Co. demonstrated a device that will give set owners a chance to engage in electronic table tennis, hockey, target shooting and other competitive games on their TV screens.⁵¹

The hobbyist-oriented magazine Radio-Electronics placed games into a similar before/after scenario, representing a transformation of television from meager entertainment to a more elaborate fantasy world of immersive sporting simulation:

For a considerable number of years, we sat in front of our TV sets and let them entertain us with moving pictures on that little screen. … Yet there is a new kind of entertainment on that home TV screen—it’s a Ping-Pong game, a soccer field, a shooting gallery and others and you, who until now have been a passive viewer get to control the action.⁵²

In all of these accounts of the new technology, we find that the television is not merely used in a new way, but the user’s experience is understood to have a value diametrically opposed to the typical television audience’s. Another hobbyist publication, Mechanix Illustrated, captures this totally different idea of the television audience, a fresh identity in contrast to the lazy spectator of the past:

TV screens used to be just for watching whatever the network or the local station felt like putting on the air. Now the home set has become the center of family sportsmanship. … It appears that the bouncing blip could change the habits of American TV gluttons. It will surely get them more involved.⁵³

The unconcealed disdain for television in this writing, and for the conditions of television viewing in the typical American family’s home environment, speaks particularly to the gender and class politics of new media discourses of passivity and activity. In the move from “just … watching whatever” as “TV gluttons” to being a “center of … sportsmanship” for those “more involved,” this writer taps into a long-standing characterization of TV as feminized mass culture, and of interactive new media as a more masculine and legitimate form of leisure-time recreation.

No concept expresses these ideas about old and new media in the 1970s as potently as participation, an unambiguous virtue in any writing of the period concerning media. Reporting on the popularity of electronic games on Christmas of 1975, The New York Times quoted a retail analyst asserting: “We may be leaving the spectator era for the participation era.”⁵⁴ This new era was signaled not only by the games played on a TV set, but also by the CB radio craze and the growing popularity of physical exercise such as jogging. The analyst quoted in the Times claimed that thanks to participation replacing spectatorship, that year he was even planning to skip watching the Super Bowl.

Video games would thus be part of a new turn toward more active and social leisure experience. A first-person account of an encounter with video games in the highbrow Saturday Review in 1977 by the magazine’s editor and publisher, Carll Tucker, lamented the effects of television on personal interaction, and the time wasted by the national habit of watching TV every evening. The author sounds a familiar theme, evoking notions of mass society and participatory democracy, in relating his first encounter with a video game:

Instead of merely talking at me, the television screen was challenging me, inviting me to participate. Moreover, the television was proving a social medium, a playground where two people could meet and relate to each other. For a change, it mattered whether or not I was paying attention to what was taking place on screen. …

Television isolated us from each other; it collected the world into a global village and locked each of the villagers in cells. Pong obviously is not the solution to this, but it is a hopeful sign. If, for a few hours, instead of the isolating TV fare, you have a playing field where live (as opposed to “live”) people deal with each other, communicate, the world is that much more intimate and real.⁵⁵

With participation comes a renewal of the television audience’s sociability and interpersonal communication in place of mass communication. Early video games like Pong and most Odyssey games were two-player affairs, like the racquet sports from which they were adapted. Whether one or two played, the game console was always pictured and described at this time as a group rather than a solitary activity. Representations in magazine items, advertising, and catalogs showed two or more players at the television set. This participation was thus not only between individuals and media, but also among players.

A similar point is made in Pilgrim in the Microworld, a 1983 volume published by Warner Books (owned by Atari’s parent company). The author, the sociologist and pianist David Sudnow, began to play the Atari game Breakout and became so fascinated by his experience that he wrote a study of games addressing the general reader. Sudnow’s earlier book had been a finely detailed analysis of the experience of playing piano, and his intricate descriptions of his Breakout sessions apply a similar expository style to electronic play. This legitimates video games by treating them as a cognitively engaging, even expressive medium in which the body and mind have to learn to work together. Sudnow is no television viewer; he sees Atari as a quite different type of technology from the broadcasting receiver into which the console is plugged. Sudnow has to buy a TV set to play Atari—he is intellectually above television—and his assessment of Atari’s value is in relation to television’s: “Bless you, Atari … you’ve resocialized us after thirty years of being vaguely with each other during prime time.”⁵⁶

This sense of new video technology being characterized, in distinction to broadcast television, by participation was not a new idea; its origins were in already existing discourses about television and new media of the 1960s and early ’70s. Jason Wilson draws connections between Baer’s and Bushnell’s ideas about video games as a more participatory form of media with the objectives of new media artists of the 1960s using television as a medium of experimental artwork. Video art of the 1960s by Nam June Paik in particular and video games of the 1970s were alike in their aspirations to transform television as it is experienced, making it more productive and changing the viewer’s role into one of engagement and purpose rather than mere spectatorship. Paik’s television work opposed the regime of network broadcasting as one-way mass communication, opening up the technology of video to manipulation as electronic signal and output, making the TV set into a plastic medium for the artist’s and audience’s creative manipulation. For instance, his 1963 work Participation TV invites the spectator to use a microphone and sound frequency amplifier as an input for the electronic signal producing abstract imagery on the CRT screen. Paik’s statements of intention from the 1960s are remarkably similar to popular press accounts of video games in the 1970s, contrasting passivity with activity and one-way communication of mass media with a more reciprocal relation between the audience and the medium.⁵⁷ Both video art and video games are thus premised on participation in distinction to broadcasting. Both invite “a new kind of productive spectatorship.”⁵⁸ The 1969 video art exhibition in New York City called “TV as a Creative Medium,” which attracted the notice of the popular and alternative press, collected a group of avant-garde artists who, Marita Sturkin explains, regarded video in distinction to commercial broadcasting, “as viewer participation, a spiritual and meditative experience, a mirror, an electronic palette, a kinetic sculpture, or a cultural machine to be deconstructed.”⁵⁹ According to Wilson, Pong was based on an idea similar to one energizing a contemporaneous new media avant-garde: making television “manipulable” by its users.⁶⁰

This idea of a manipulable television, of the audience as active agents making graphics move around the television set, implies a transformation not only in the address of media to audiences, but also in the orientation of audiences to media. The language of transformation suffuses discussions of early video games in the home. TV sets, according to some accounts, were being turned into “electronic game boards,” a nice image of remediation combining the interactive play of board games with the advanced technology of electronic media.⁶¹

The packaging, marketing, and advertising of video games consoles are perhaps the most powerful instances of this rhetoric of transformation. Intellivision was sold by unpacking its portmanteau name combining the words “intelligent” and “television.” These words were printed on the box in which the console was sold. In commercials starring the erudite George Plimpton, speaking in his classy mid-Atlantic accent, Intellivision presented itself as the sophisticated game system for discerning players, showing side-by-side comparisons with Atari to emphasize Intellivision’s graphical superiority. The tag line was “This is intelligent television!” While “intelligent television” might have been an oxymoron to cultural critics of the pre-video era hopefully anticipating the medium’s liberation by new technology, by the late 1970s and early ’80s the idea of television’s shift from stupid to smart through audience participation had become familiar.

Atari’s print and TV campaign in the later 1970s also sold video games as transformative, marking television’s passage from the passivity of mass communication to the participation of video. Video games would invite players to act out fantasies of masculine empowerment. TV commercials featured famous male athletes whose skills on the field would comically fail to translate into video games. A baseball hero stands with bat raised at the plate and looking in the camera’s direction says, “Okay Atari, let’s see your best pitch!” Cut to the umpire: “You’re out, Rose!” This humorous scenario reinforces the activity of video game play by association with athletics, and also empowers a perhaps youthful player to defeat the pros in video simulations of real-life contests. The Brazilian superstar of the New York Cosmos confesses, “I quit soccer to play Atari,” but in the next shot a little girl, perhaps his daughter, waves a finger at him delivering her line in a sing-song voice, “You need more practice, Pelé!” The consumer is invited to develop a skill by playing games, just as one would with a serious sport like soccer or baseball. At the end of the thirty-second spot, a voice-over reminds consumers that the action in Atari would be “on your own TV set.” Its tag line is “Don’t watch television tonight. Play it!” The same phrase appeared in Atari’s print ads, defining Atari’s identity in relation to TV and promising the transfer of television from a passive to an active medium. In messages like these, the public image of video games was of something you do on your own TV set, but also a means of making your TV set do new and exciting things. To “play TV” is to redress the failure of mass media and substitute a new sociality, with its promising dimensions of purposive engagement and user control, for the old experience of television as a feminized, mass-culture, broadcast medium.

Figure 2.7 Atari advertisement: “Don’t Watch TV Tonight. Play It!”

2 “Don’t Watch TV Tonight. Play It!” Early Video Games and Television