Playing in the Gap: Analog Programming and the First Video Game Console

In this essay we explore the relationship between code and the physical world through an in-depth analysis of the analog video game Volleyball, one of the first games for the first video game console ever produced, the Magnavox Odyssey, in 1972. We address the relative lack of critical humanities scholarship on analog programming by exploring the many ways that this code differs from digital program code, and the implications of the relations it establishes between user, digital logic, and the surrounding environment. We represent this program in four levels of abstraction: as hardware (circuitry), as mathematical models, as block program notation (historical analog programming notation) revealing the program’s logic flow, and as game, when combined with player input and human language instructions. We conclude that Volleyball is an example of code that enrolls its end users as fundamental constituents in its primary program loop, and thereby “plays in the gap” between the symbolic and the real, the analog and the digital, the inside and outside of code. We explore this model as multi-level code, arguing that it suggests new perspectives and modes of analysis for digital code as well.