[Premise] Originally running in Paris from September 25th - October 6th 2002, Arcade transformed Tower T2 of the Bibliotheque nationale de France into what may have been the world’s largest computer screen. The original Blinkenlights installation was a gift given to the city of Berlin by the Chaos Computer Club in celebration of the club’s 20th anniversary. 144 lamps were installed behind windows on the upper eight floors of the Haus des Lehers. A central computer controlled each lamp independently effectively creating a monochrome video matrix of 18 times 8 pixels. This first installation included a playable Pong game, interactive love-grams, and a host of other simply animations.

For Arcade, the CCC team significantly expanded the Blinkenlights system. Tower T2 has large windows in a 2:1 ratio so two lamps were needed to evenly light each window and smoothly control luminosity. 20 floors, each with 26 windows, were were utilized with the installation. 1040 lamps were required to control the 520 accessible pixels in the “display.”

The installation featured versions of 4 8-bit all-stars; Tetris, Pong, Breakout, and Pac-Man. Via a customized ISDN control system, individuals could dial in to Arcade with their cellphones and play these modest games on a truly grand scale.

[Read] There are so many I still like about this project, I really don’t know where to start. Primarily I think the installation calls to attention issues of public performance and spectacle. However in order to make this claim and appease the skeptics, you really have to prove the point that this is much more than just an interactive billboard ala` Times Square2’s Dodge Rock’em Sock’em Robots display in NYC. First of all, Arcade took place in 2002 (with the first Blinkenlights taking place in 2001). Times Square2 didn’t begin advertising until 2004. Secondly while Times Square2 boasts of 19,200 square feet of display, Arcade put that to same. While I don’t want to turn this into a straight pro/con comparison of the two, I do want to make the point that Arcade is bigger and different. Marketeers would argue that Arcade, being a non-branded experience, is a waste of potential. I argue that without being indebted to a corporate ideology, Blinkenlights / Arcade was free to create within cultural bounds but with bounds or bias.

Tetris, Breakout, and Pac-Man are all single-player games. So the experience of both playing them and watching them is fairly homogeneous. True you either playing or you are watching, but there is little to no polarity in those modes. There really isn’t much potential for a Kasparov / Deep Blue type of moment. The types of gameplay offered by Arcade just aren’t designed to accommodate that manner of interaction.

Pong, however, is where things start to get interesting. One thing that Times Square2 was well-served by recognizing was that multi-player participatory experiences are the potentially the killer app within the public sphere. Without digressing into a Huizinga -esque critique of the magic circle, a group of strangers playing a game in public truly facilitates the feeling of being “alone together” that our Dutch friend was driving at.

Imagine standing in the presence of Tower T2 and watching an intense Pong game. For many it may be hard to envision an intense game of Pong but trust me, it happens. For some reason you develop an affinity for Player 1 while your friend next to you decides to root for Player 2. You nudge your friend when Player 1 does well and he pushes back when Player 2 has the advantage. You and your friend might be one unit in a greater system. You see a similar pair of individuals a few feet away from you equally enthralled with the game. A connection forms and you develop an ad-hoc bond with those cheering for Player 1 while your friend does the same along his party lines. Theoretically, this process could continue and an immense population of people within a limited geographic area are “alone-together” in experiencing that game of Pong. …and all of this started with the ambiguous concepts of Player 1 and Player 2. Who are these players anyway? Is Player 1 that guy over there with his cellphone out? Is Player 2 a women in an office across the way?

The potential of ad-hoc multi-player public gameplay is promising to say the least. Unfortunately, the future seems to belong to marketeers rather than to the Chaos Computer Club.