{"id":910,"date":"2010-02-23T12:25:04","date_gmt":"2010-02-23T17:25:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/?p=910"},"modified":"2010-02-26T10:53:44","modified_gmt":"2010-02-26T15:53:44","slug":"variation-over-time-the-transformation-of-space-in-single-screen-action-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/2010\/02\/23\/variation-over-time-the-transformation-of-space-in-single-screen-action-games\/","title":{"rendered":"Variation over Time &#8211; The Transformation of Space in Single-Screen Action Games"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here is a paper I wrote a few years ago but never posted: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/text\/variationovertime\/\">Variation over Time &#8211; The Transformation of Space in Single-Screen Action Games<\/a> was published in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spacetimeplay.org\/\">Space Time Play<\/a> anthology in 2007.<\/p>\n<p>At that time, I was becoming interested in doing detailed analyses of  specific video game designs. (Also evident in my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/text\/swapadjacent\/\">Swap Adjacent<\/a> paper.) I think it is important to paint the big picture, but I find it interesting to supplement this with more specific examinations of very focused topics. The big and the small pictures are then meant to supplement each other.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/text\/variationovertime\/\">Variation over Time<\/a> concerns the kind of early video game design where variation was provided by opening the playing field during the course of a level. Examples include <em>Space Invaders<\/em>, (<em>Ms.) Pac-Man<\/em>, <em>Pengo<\/em>, and <em>Super Bomberman<\/em>. From the paper:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">My interest here is in a specific way of providing variation, the  qualitative change of difficulty that is created by opening the playing  field during a game level. This is a type of design where obstacles are  gradually removed and the playing field becomes more open as a result.  We can see this design in a number of board games (e.g. backgammon,  chess, checkers), and it was a popular design in the non-scrolling  action video game, most prominently in the 1980s. But for reasons I will  discuss later, this design has become unusual in contemporary video  games. Consider the early video game <em>Space <\/em><em>Invaders<\/em> (Taito 1977) as a first example. (Figure 1.)<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/text\/variationovertime\/index_image002.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"177\" height=\"189\" \/> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/text\/variationovertime\/index_image004.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"177\" height=\"189\" \/><br \/>\nFigure 1. <em>Space<\/em><em> Invaders<\/em> (Taito 1977)<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/text\/variationovertime\/\">More<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here is a paper I wrote a few years ago but never posted: Variation over Time &#8211; The Transformation of Space in Single-Screen Action Games was published in the Space Time Play anthology in 2007. At that time, I was becoming interested in doing detailed analyses of specific video game designs. (Also evident in my &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/2010\/02\/23\/variation-over-time-the-transformation-of-space-in-single-screen-action-games\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Variation over Time &#8211; The Transformation of Space in Single-Screen Action Games&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","category-my_publications"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=910"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}