Well, you didn't make me unhappy but if you read your last post closely you'll see that you don't really have arguments, except your allegation that Bill & Matt only copied what they found on "teh internets".

A good devil's advocate should at least deliver some arguments to make the audience at least consider his standpoint, though. A good DA is a person that offers another perspective.

Comparing Vintage Games to RTB and saying that the latter is deeper or more intelligent is neither valid (the books are clearly different in concept) nor particularly clever (did you see how many sources Montfort & Bogost cite in RTB's appendix?).

Conclusion: You clearly wanted to provoke and you failed.

take care,
Calibrator

He actually explains it in the book!

"Racing the Beam" stems from the video generation of the VCS as the CPU has to instruct the video chip what data to use *on the fly*. What is written into its registers (for example the background color) is more or less immediately used to generate the video data being sent to the TV set and displayed by the electron beam on its screen.
This is the most prominent feature of the VCS as it has no frame buffer or video memory like other systems with raster graphics. It's also the source for it's flexibility - even though it is so underpowered.

Montfort even says something like this: It would be more accurate to say "Pacing the Beam" as the CPU has to run synchronously and not outrun the beam but he hints that "Racing" sounds catchier...

take care,
Calibrator

Here are some quick & dirty ones:
"The Origins of Bestseller Games"
"The Most Influential Games and Their Heritage" (Gamasutra edition)
"The Most Important Games and Their Legacy" (Readers' Digest edition)

Some silly ones:
"Back to the Roots - and back again!"
"The Origin of Modern Classics - as told by Matt Darwin the Younger"
"In the Beginning There Was Light...On A TV Screen"

take care,
Calibrator

Well, the publisher pretty much insisted on Vintage Games, so that was that. However, we were having a very hard time finding any name we could all agree on. Some people prefer dry, technical and precise titles whereas others are willing to sacrifice some of that for something catchier or memorable. Nick Montfort is a genius at this--"Twisty Little Passages" works on so many levels. I'm not sure how RTB got its name, but I'm sure it ties in well to the book.

I'm a big fan of titles and am delighted by really clever ones. In my writing class I have a lecture where I spend a lot of time talking about good titles and how to come up with them, but it's all a moot point when you have no say in it. The problem is that anything clever you can come up with may not be inclusive enough to refer to your entire subject matter--i.e., "Joystick Nation" seems to imply only Atari-era games, "Insert Coin" seems limited to arcades, and so no.

To answer your question, though, we were calling it "Insert Game" for awhile, which I didn't particularly love, either. I seem to recall something like "Power Play," too. Anyway, I'm glad we have something a bit more fun with "Woot!" for the film, so I'm hoping they keep that and don't try to change it to something like "Old Shite."

Who would've thought that my mere mention of another book I ordered together with Vintage Games resulted in such a lively off-topic discussion?

You know, we could always get back to Asteroids! ;-)

take care,
Calibrator

PS: I don't feel somebody's fingers at my throat. Cold dead or otherwise.