MAY THE LULZ BE WITH YOU

A long time ago in a laboratory far, far away ...

The primal scene of hacking, remembered and repeated with all the force of mythology, was the creation of a game — one of the first and most influential works in the history of video games: Spacewar! This legendary feat of coding came together at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1960s. The original hackers — that is to say, the MIT research scientists, students, and technology enthusiasts who called themselves hackers — were engaged at the time in experimenting with the university's new DEC PDP-1 mainframe computer and CRT display. The PDP-1, a machine the size of two large refrigerators, had been acquired in 1961 to supplement the more formidable TX-0 mainframe. During official work hours, the hackers would tackle computational analysis and statistical calculations for various research projects at MIT. During off-hours, they would develop new programs or "hacks" for the PDP-1, performing ingenious mathematical tricks and other displays of technical virtuosity.

The Spacewar! project was a glorious hack: a collaborative effort to make the computer do something other than orthodox science, to test its capacities and affordances, to innovate through fun and games. It was imagined, from the beginning, as an exercise in applied science fiction. According to Steve Russell, one of the key figures in the project, "I had just finished reading Doc Smith's Lensman series. He was some sort of scientist but he wrote this really dashing brand of science fiction. The details were very good and it had an excellent pace. His heroes had a strong tendency to get pursued by the villain across the galaxy and have to invent their way out of their problem while they were being pursued. That sort of action was the thing that suggested Spacewar." For Russell, the game was an expression of tactical affinity, an affirmation of heroes who "invent their way out of a problem while they are being pursued," tinkering their way out of a jam, in the middle of things ... from the inside.

Another key figure in the project, J. Martin Graetz, has also recalled that a steady diet of science fiction novels and films "established the mind-set that eventually led to Spacewar!":

At the time, we were crashing and banging our way through the Skylark and Lensman novels of Edward E. Smith, Ph.D., a cereal chemist who wrote with the grace and refinement of a pneumatic drill. These stories are pretty much all the same — after some preliminary foofaraw to get everyone's name right, a bunch of overdeveloped Hardy Boys go haring off through the universe to punch out the latest gang of galactic goons, blow up a few planets, kill all sorts of nasty life forms, and just have a heck of a good time.

In a pinch, which is where they usually were, our heroes could be counted on to come up with a complete scientific theory, invent the technology to implement it, build the tools to implement the technology, and produce the weapons to blow away the baddies, all while being chased in their spaceship hither and thither through the trackless wastes of the galaxy (he wrote like that).

As indicated by these recollections, the Spacewar! project was not merely about morphing the tropes and narrative conventions of space opera into playable format. A certain ethos was also extracted from Smith's fiction — a disposition toward the practice of science as much as everyday life: a reckless spirit of adventure, an eagerness to go beyond the limits of established knowledge, innovating on the fly. Certainly, those involved in the Spacewar! project were keen to represent scientific accuracy as much as technical prowess. For example, Dan Edwards added physical calculations to more realistically simulate the gravitational pull of the central star, and Peter Samson updated the cosmic background so that it mapped the real night sky as seen from Earth, even indicating the relative brightness of actual stars. But at the same time, some things had to be fudged:

The torpedoes were not quite consistent with the Spacewar! universe after the Heavy Star was in place. Gravity calculations for two ships were as much as the program could handle; there was no time to include gravity for half a dozen missiles as well. So the torpedoes were unaffected by the Star, with the odd result that you could shoot right through it and hit something on the other side — if you weren't careful getting round the Star, it could be you. We made up a typical excuse, "mumblemumble photon bombs mumblemumble," but no one really cared.

Leveraging fiction for the sake of technics and vice versa, making up stuff as needed to get the job done — ingenious hacks, in every sense — the Spacewar! project played out as applied science fiction in a manner only superficially indicated by the game's content (fig. 1.1). For it suggests the extent to which all video games inherently belong to science fiction, insofar as they present imaginary worlds whose existence is generated algorithmically, worlds whose operations depend on high-tech hardware, and whose representational conceits involve some admixture of technical realism and fictive irrealism, whether at the level of narrative or at the level of gameplay mechanics, physics simulation, and so forth. But more importantly, in attempting to reproduce the ethos of Smith's novels at the level of representation, the Spacewar! project also reproduced it at the level of technical practice: an experimental zeal to go where none have gone before, confirming the values of modern science while also taking an irreverent and cavalier attitude toward proper forms of method, reproducible results, and institutional norms. In this regard, the project established a relation to the scientific imagination that was both affirmative and subversive — in other words, equivalent to science fiction.

The hacker St. Jude (a.k.a. Jude Milhon) has offered the following summation: "Hacking is the clever circumvention of imposed limits, whether imposed by your government, your IP server, your own personality, or the laws of physics." Certainly, science fiction as an aesthetic form would represent a similar provocation, a similar circumvention of established limits — whether the laws of society or the laws of nature — through its characteristic performances of cognitive estrangement and speculative fabulation, to say nothing of technobabble, a favorite quick-and-dirty way to overcome black holes, plot holes, and other obstacles in the path to adventure ("mumblemumble photon bombs mumblemumble"). These qualities of science fiction have served as epistemic resources for hackers throughout the history of hacking. John Brunner's Shockwave Rider, Vernor Vinge's True Names, William Gibson's Neuromancer, and the ensuing discourse of cyberpunk shaped the consciousness of legions of young hackers in the 1980s and 1990s. For many in the hacker community — whether they...