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Arcade game console as an escape/emergency button
The Old New Media I wanted to pay tribute to is the old arcade games, the ones that work with coins. They had their prime time at mid-1980s but I would find them every summer at my village up until 2000ish. Looking back to those machines, what I find most interesting is the human behavior towards them and their graphics and that’s what the project is about.
The behavioral aspect I attend to is synopsized by the phrase: “What happens when things go wrong” and there is a lot of things that can go wrong when playing a game: frozen screen, blue screen and latency increase are just a few exam
ples. Of course the same stood for the arcade games era – it is probably safe to generalize that technology will always be problematic. However, despite the increase in complexity of modern game technology, the average user, at least from my experience, will find it less confusing to deal with the machine when something goes wrong. He will probably try a few keys like escape, Alt+F4, Ctrl+Alt+Del, or the small reset button, the one under the big button – or at least he can be trained to do so. In the case of arcade games, it is not that they were missing a button or anything; the whole concept was absent in many cases. That fact, resulted in odd (and somewhat amusing) behaviors, like people hitting the machines when they freeze, or staying silent hoping that things will turn back as they were after a break for stuttering.
In light of this, I made a platform out of wooden and clay elements, that will display a screen message as an answer to a punch. As you can see at the picture, I tried to mirror an old arcade platform. Also, since for the users, in these consoles, the escape button was always present (as the entire platform) I decorated the platform with an “Esc” message drawn with a common method for developers of the time.
NMNT tribute video from George Bouzias on Vimeo.
Technical side
Electronically there is not much to it since I just attached a piezo element and an Arduino board underneath to sense the changes in air pressure that the shaking of the platform will create (to enhance the shake I trimmed one leg of the platform). The Arduino code sends what it senses serially to the computer-display and the processing code according to the strength of the vibration will display the message.
Decoration – Graphics
Due to the fact that while searching for arcade games I bumped into a lot of content about their graphics, I decided to try to illustrate one of the methods they used for the “Esc” message on the board I mention above.For Color Cells method the engineers divided the screen into smaller sections that could only have 2 colorseach, hence the name of the method. In the print, I made an index of 64 boxes/pixels wide and 64 boxes/pixels height in Illustrator and afterwards I split that area into 64:8x8 cells. Afterwards I tried to draw the “Esc” by using a font as scores, to see which boxes should I draw (photo). Throughout the process, I applied the law of only 2 colors allowed in each cell.
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