I AM ERROR: The Nintendo Family Computer/ Entertainment System Platform

Abstract

I AM ERROR: The Nintendo Family Computer/ Entertainment System PlatformNathan Altice.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Series forward, appendix, notes, sources, index. 426 pp. S40.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780262028776The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and its Japanese predecessor, the Family Computer or Famicom, hold a unique place in video game history as the bridge between two eras. Before Nintendo's console, which was released in Japan in 1983 and in North America in 1985, the vanguard of electronic play was the arcade cabinet produced to play a single game. Nintendo's Donkey Kong (1981) was one such game, which was adapted for play in the home as a cartridge for a variety of consoles including the Famicom and NES. The Famicom/NES was the platform that established home console play as the vanguard. As processing power increased and PC gaming developed, the arcade faded as a key site of electronic leisure. In the later 1980s and 1990s, playing Nintendo was often synonymous with playing video games, and Nintendo has endured into the present by continually exploiting the intellectual property popularized by the Famicom-NES platform, particularly Mario of Super Mario Bros. (1985), whose origins are in Donkey Kong's Jumpman. Few video game producers or platforms are of greater historical significance than Nintendo and the NES. As an entry in the groundbreaking MIT Press series of Platform Studies, Nathan Altice's I AM ERROR gives Nintendo its due as an object of rigorous critical and historical study, while also providing a welcome intervention within the literature on platforms as cultural artifacts. Our knowledge of video game consoles and of this one in particular are substantially increased by Altice's exhaustive efforts to explore and explicate the Famicom-NES from the inside out, but so are our understandings of digital cultural expression and the poetics of computers as expressive media. This book serves as a case study and exemplar of the history of digital technology as an aesthetic terrain.As a platform study, Altice is engaged most deeply with the task of opening the black box of the Famicom/NES to show how its material form produces particular technological affordances. But he is equally interested in showing how cultural constraints external to the technology itself shaped the platform, and how the platform in turn shaped later instances of cultural expression such as PC game emulations and electronic music such as "chiptunes" composed specifically for the Famicom/NES processor.The most resonant themes of this study are easily applicable beyond the particular case of the Nintendo console. One is the way a platform functions as a point of always uneasy and often flawed translation between languages, cultures, technologies, and experiences. The other is the refrain of platform constraints (such as technological limitations) functioning as creative opportunities. Altice is most compelling when sounding these themes.Sometimes, Altice uses translation in its literal, linguistic sense. The books title is taken from an emblematic instance of a humorous Japanese-to-English translation fail within NES game text. But every chapter has its own version of this same dynamic of problematic translation, and the platform itself was in some ways the product of an effort to translate (in video game parlance, to port) Nintendo's biggest hit of the time, Donkey Kong, from one platform (arcade cabinet) to another (home console). …