Kenneth B. McAlpine

From Michael Moore to JFK Reloaded: Towards a working model of interactive documentary

Abstract Traditionally, documentary has been presented as an objective portrayal of fact: the actualité. Recently, a new breed of ‘dramatic’ documentary that uses coercion; persuasion, and emotional manipulation has emerged to critical and commercial success. Contemporaneously, interactive entertainment has evolved to the point at which near-realism can be portrayed in real time. This, taken alongside the immersive interaction in which the industry specialises, and the dramatic techniques of engagement employed by the latest documentary films suggests that we may be at the brink of a new cultural form: the interactive documentary. In this paper we discuss the form that interactive documentary might take, and the historical and cultural context into which it fits. We conclude by detailing the issues raised by the concept of the interactive documentary, and how the role of documentary maker as auteur is reconciled with the notion of a truly interactive pathway through such a production.

Shake and Create: Reappropriating Video Game Technologies for the Enactive Learning of Music

This chapter explores the culture of hacking and its role in supporting engaging and meaningful educational experiences for diverse groups of learners. The discussion focuses around two case study examples. The first, KIDI, is an interactive museum exhibit that is located at a Fenton House in London, a National Trust property, and which repurposes interactive audio routines and hacked force-feedback controllers to facilitate engagement with a collection of keyboard instruments, the Benton Fletcher Collection, thus enabling visitors to learn about their sound and playing characteristics through play. The second, BitBox!, is an interactive gestural digital musical interface, which is designed to deconstruct and explain the underlying technical frameworks that support adaptive video game soundtracks and which draws upon a vocabulary of spatial and gestural controls from both video gaming and music performance. Both case studies highlight the importance of play as a vehicle for learning, harnessing both the physical and conceptual aspects of play to test and explore the limits of our skills and understanding.

All aboard the impulse train: a retrospective analysis of the two-channel title music routine in Manic Miner

The launch of the ZX Spectrum in the UK in April 1982 almost single-handedly kick-started the British computer games industry. Launched to compete with technologically superior rivals from Acorn and Commodore, the Spectrum had price and popularity on its side, and became a runaway success. However, one feature of the Spectrum that was found lacking was its sound hardware—just a single channel of 1-bit sound playback. Few improvements to the machine’s hardware were made during the first generation of Spectrum titles. Programmers soon realised, however, that with clever machine coding, the Spectrum’s speaker could do more than that for which it was originally designed. This creativity, born from constraint, represents a very real example of technology (or rather, limited technology) as a driver for creativity. These solutions gave rise to a characteristic sound that in time defined the aesthetic of ZX Spectrum music. At the time, there was little interest in the formal study of either the technologies that support computer games, or of the social and cultural phenomena that surround them. This knowledge gap is redressed in this retrospective study through a deconstruction and analysis of a key turning point in the musical life of the ZX Spectrum. The title music for Manic Miner was the first attempt at a true two-channel sound routine on the platform, and so marked the point at which music moved from being largely functional and utilitarian, to becoming an important and expressive dimension of the Spectrum gaming experience. This paper begins with an overview of 1-bit sound and the range of tones that are natively supported by a 1-bit system, followed by a demonstration of how these can be extended using frequency dividers and counters to create time-varying tones and pseudo two-channel sound. The limitations of this technique are highlighted, and the key adaptations that would make it a viable approach for two-channel sound in later games are outlined.

Andrew Hewson: Hints & Tips for Videogame Pioneers: Hewson Consultants Ltd., Manchester, UK, 2016, ISBN: 978-1-84499-136-5

My dad never really understood my childhood obsession with video games. Every afternoon, after school, I’d hook up my Spectrum? to a portable black-and-white television set in the living room, and sit patiently as the pulse-width modulated tones describing the data blocks on tape crawled into memory. Every evening, I would drag out my screen time for as long as I possibly could, forever running the gauntlet of fortune, and hitting the power switch and dashing up the stairs only when my parents’ insistent demand that I get to bed reached that tell-tale critical point. It wasn’t that my dad didn’t understand or appreciate ‘geekery’ and the obsessive devotion that comes with it—he was, after all, a steam train buff, who could wax lyrical about the intricacies of expansion strokes until the King Arthur class locomotives came home—it was just that microcomputers had very little to offer him. Very little, that is, until Hewson Consultants, one of the most innovative of the early 8-bit publishers, released Southern Belle, the world’s first 3D steam-train simulator, in 1985. Thanks to Hewson’s innovative approach to gaming in what was a buccaneering era of technical innovation and design, my dad and I were able to forge a strong bond between the two things that we each loved most. And so it was with a sense of nostalgia coupled with a deep professional interest that I delved into Hints & Tips for Videogame Pioneers, Andrew Hewson’s new retrospective on a fascinating and, at times, fraught career in gaming. The book, whose title is a nod towards the ZX80 programming guide that launched his game publishing career in the early 1980s, is the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign masterminded by Hewson’s son Robert, who was born in 1981, just as the UK games industry exploded into existence, and who has followed in his father’s footsteps to become a successful game developer in his own right.

Andrew Hewson: Hints & Tips for Videogame Pioneers

My dad never really understood my childhood obsession with video games. Every afternoon, after school, I’d hook up my Spectrum? to a portable black-and-white television set in the living room, and sit patiently as the pulse-width modulated tones describing the data blocks on tape crawled into memory. Every evening, I would drag out my screen time for as long as I possibly could, forever running the gauntlet of fortune, and hitting the power switch and dashing up the stairs only when my parents’ insistent demand that I get to bed reached that tell-tale critical point. It wasn’t that my dad didn’t understand or appreciate ‘geekery’ and the obsessive devotion that comes with it—he was, after all, a steam train buff, who could wax lyrical about the intricacies of expansion strokes until the King Arthur class locomotives came home—it was just that microcomputers had very little to offer him. Very little, that is, until Hewson Consultants, one of the most innovative of the early 8-bit publishers, released Southern Belle, the world’s first 3D steam-train simulator, in 1985. Thanks to Hewson’s innovative approach to gaming in what was a buccaneering era of technical innovation and design, my dad and I were able to forge a strong bond between the two things that we each loved most. And so it was with a sense of nostalgia coupled with a deep professional interest that I delved into Hints & Tips for Videogame Pioneers, Andrew Hewson’s new retrospective on a fascinating and, at times, fraught career in gaming. The book, whose title is a nod towards the ZX80 programming guide that launched his game publishing career in the early 1980s, is the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign masterminded by Hewson’s son Robert, who was born in 1981, just as the UK games industry exploded into existence, and who has followed in his father’s footsteps to become a successful game developer in his own right.

BitBox!: A case study interface for teaching real-time adaptive music composition for video games

This article looks at BitBox!, an interactive gestural music system that is designed to deconstruct and demystify adaptive music systems.

Jazz and the Art of Anticipation

Music and the moving image have cohabited quite amicably almost since film was first committed to celluloid. The first recorded instance reportedly occurred on 28th December 1895, when a pianist provided accompaniment to a series of Lumiere Brothers’ shorts in the Grand Cafe, Paris. Since then, music has been a core element of the cinematic experience: sometimes driving the narrative; sometimes giving the audience privileged insight into characters’ motivations and behaviours, and often being the vehicle through which much of the film’s emotional impact is delivered. If composed and apportioned well, the soundtrack has the power to emote without the viewer consciously registering its effect. One reason that this marriage has been so successful is because both film and music are temporal media with fixed, fairly linear structures: once a film sequence has been cut, it provides a narrative framework around which the musical underscore can be constructed. The film sequence provides definite ‘hit points’ to which the composer can write, and it is suggestive of tempo and intensity, creative building blocks that translate well into the musical domain, and which can be built upon in the soundtrack. Although there are problems in translating notions from film theory and semiotics without adaptation, there exist many similarities in the function and affective purpose of soundtrack music between gaming and films.

Burnishing the lamp of memory: documentation and preservation in the digital age

Every human action gains in honour, in grace, in all true magnificence, by its regard to things that are to come.... when we build let us think that we build forever.... For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy... which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity. John Ruskin, The Lamp of Memory, from The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London, 1848).