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Hardware and Platform Constraints

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Physical and psychological properties that suggest and limit ... Finding McLuhan's shockwave 'Affordance Mining' Brian Schrank, Georgia Tech DM Ph.D. student ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Hardware and Platform Constraints


1
Hardware and Platform Constraints
  • LCC 2700 Intro to Computational Media

2
Affordances and Constraints
  • Don Norman
  • Doors and stovetops
  • Physical and psychological properties that
    suggest and limit interaction
  • But computers go beyond this

3
Standards
  • Rules of production that facilitate consistent
    production
  • Facilitate simplified modes of designing
    artifacts
  • Facilitate better use of artifacts
  • ISO guidelines, code standards, design best
    practices, standardized components, etc.

4
But
  • Standards are difficult to enforce
  • Standards may obscure their own problems and
    shortcomings
  • ISO certification
  • OSHA law
  • Code standards professional practice
  • Manufacturing interoperability (game theory)

5
Platforms vs. Standards
  • Standards use external means to enforce their
    rules and constrain the expression possible under
    their guidance
  • Platforms use material constraints to enforce
    their rules and constrain the expression possible
    under their imposition
  • Standards are top-down, enforcing systems
  • Platforms are sometimes top-down affairs, where
    the material enforcement is known to the platform
    designers
  • Platforms are more often bottom-up affairs, where
    the material enforcement comes from the
    unexpected arrangement of seemingly incidental
    features

6
Auto manufacturing
  • The Dodge Neon and the PT Cruiser
  • The Toyota Camry and the Lexus RX 330
  • The VW Touareg and the Porsche Cayenne
  • The Ford F-150 and the Ford Chassis Cab Towtruck

7
Coin-Op Arcade Machines
  • 2 - 3 minute play goals
  • Pick-up controls
  • Sinistar example

8
ENIAC , 1940s(Electrical Numerical Integrator
and Calcultaor)
  • 18,000 vacuum tubes and 2,000 square feet of
    footprint
  • Programmatic instructions in separate parts of
    the machine
  • Segments needed to be plugged together for any
    particular computational task
  • Programming required considerable physical
    effort
  • John von Neumann and others realized this
    limitation
  • The conditional control transfer or
    stored-program technique
  • Execution based on programmatic need rather than
    physical arrangement

9
Pong and Tank
  • Pong in 1972, a surprise arcade hit
  • Distribution practices and Kee Games (Al Alcorn)
  • Pong vs. Tank (1974)
  • Steve Bristow
  • The predecessor of Atari Combat

10
MS-DOS memory structure
  • Conventional Memory
  • Contiguous memory directly used by the 8086 in
    real mode
  • 0 to 640kb
  • Even though the chip could address 1MB, IBM
    reserved the upper memory for ROM c.
  • Expanded Memory
  • Up to 32MB expansion on any machine
  • Apps must be written to use it
  • Extended Memory
  • Past the first 1MB of address space
  • 286 and up supports it
  • Addressable by applications in Real mode
  • DOS programs use this memory for storage and
    swapping to Conventional

11
MS-DOS memory structure
  • Issues
  • Loading the app into 640kb or less RAM, then
    using Extended and Expanded memory to swap
  • Lotus 1-2-3 could only store cell labels and not
    values in expanded memory
  • Large programs (esp games) required a great deal
    of conventional memory, which was often a
    configuration problem
  • Leading to
  • Memory managers (e.g. LOADHIGH), config.sys woes,
    etc.
  • In comparison, other OSs provide one contiguous
    physical space for memory, accessible to the
    programs at all times
  • Windows (later versions 3.x ran atop DOS!)
  • Unix
  • OS/2

12
Game Engines
  • The First Person Shooters affordances?
  • Abstracted and encapsulated into Engines Quake

  • Features
  • 3D rendering
  • Physics
  • Sound management
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Network Communication
  • Scripting
  • Tools

13
Ways to use Game Engines
  • Doom, Quake, HeXen, etc.
  • (Metal Gear), Deus Ex, Thief, Splinter Cell, etc.

  • Future?
  • Improved bump mapping, particle effects, fresnel
    effects, and volumetric effects (HL2)
  • synchronized behaviors, preconditions, success
    tests, priority, atomic behaviors, goals, and
    subgoals (ABL)

14
Videogame First Party Licensing
  • Nolan Bushnell sold Atari to Warner Communication
    in 1977
  • A glut of titles flooded the market in the early
    1980s.
  • Pac-Man (more carts than consoles)
  • E.T. ( in the NM desert)
  • I could put dogshit in a cartridge
  • The videogame crash of 1983
  • Nintendo renews the market in 1985 with the NES,
    sold as a toy (not a videogame system)
  • Tightly controlled first-party licensing is
    introduced

15
Next-Gen Videogame Consoles
  • (from Chris Heckers GDC 2005 rant)
  • Engine Code vs. Gameplay Code
  • Engine Code
  • Graphics, physics, etc.
  • Huge homogenous data structures
  • easy to write this code (even if it has a lot
    of math in it)
  • Does something very predictable
  • Gameplay (and AI) Code
  • Branching, parameterizing, etc. mostly
    exceptions
  • Does something unpredictable (this is what makes
    the game work, well.

16
Next-Gen Videogame Consoles
  • Modern CPUs (Pentium Pro and later) support OUT
    OF ORDER execution
  • Vs. IN ORDER OOO rearranges the code to best
    take advantage of the processor
  • But Xenon and Cell (Xbox 360 and PS3) are IN
    ORDER processors!
  • Makes gameplay code hard to write, and hard to
    run efficiently
  • Why? And why do we care?
  • Cheaper processors
  • Invest in the GPU
  • A whole processor for shaders!
  • Wheres the AI processor (EA anecdote)

17
The Atari VCS (2600)
  • Based on the success of Pong and the Pong home
    consoles
  • A console for Pong-like games
  • The board design and memory architecture is
    designed for Pong-like games
  • A playfield backdrop
  • Two player sprites
  • Two missiles
  • One ball
  • Modified 6502 (Apple II) core with 13 of 16 bits
    available, called 6507
  • The Television Interface Adapter (TIA) for
    graphics
  • 3 registers
  • 128 bytes RAM
  • 2 kilobytes on ROM (increased to 4k and higher
    over time with bankswitching)

18
The Atari VCS (2600)
  • Designed for games like Pong and Combat
  • Examples
  • 40 blocks of playfield, but 20 bits of playfield
    memory?
  • Hardware wraparound
  • Pitfall?
  • Grand Prix?

19
Platform Studies
  • A name for the practice of using, understanding,
    and critiquing digital artifacts from the
    perspective of their hardware and software
    constraints
  • How platforms establish, influence, or underlie
    computational expression
  • Constraints and affordances
  • Genre
  • Meaning
  • Etc.
  • A material perspective on computational
    expression
  • Compare to McLuhan the properties of the medium
  • Compare to the history of the book, photography,
    film

20
Design Strategies
  • Evaluating platforms for untapped potential
  • Especially promising for older platforms
  • Combatting nostalgia, cult relic status
  • Also useful for current platforms
  • Finding McLuhans shockwave
  • Affordance Mining
  • Brian Schrank, Georgia Tech DM Ph.D. student
  • Mashboard Games
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