Bill Turkel has been testing a really cool piece of equipment. The MDX-20 can turn 3D computer models into physical objects, and can automatically scan physical objects to make 3D computer models of them. And it doesn’t rely on magic, alchemy, or the Dark Side of the Force. There are so many interesting things that could be done with this (not all of them related to SL avs, Weird Science, and “In Every Dream Home A Heartache”…). As Bill says, “the possibilities seem nearly endless”. Strangely, the first thing that came into my mind when I read about it was palaeontology. Maybe if this technology gets good enough it might be possible to digitize collections of fossils, then researchers could easily run off life size replicas instead of flying to China to measure dinosaur bones (but there might be drawbacks that I haven’t thought of because I don’t know enough about dinosaur measuring). As the David Baird quotes in Bill’s post make clear, objects created by the MDX-20 are models, not recreations of the thing itself how it really is. Just like theroetical models and digital resources, what we get is some aspects of the thing (usually the ones we’re most interested in) but not all of them.

Nick at Mercurius Politicus points out that while digital collections like EEBO give us easier access to some aspects of early modern texts, there are other aspects that we don’t get to experience unless we go back to the originals. “Reading them on a screen today is inevitably a different experience to reading actual copies.” Like Nick, I’m not sure what impact this has or is going to have on how we read these texts. Even with the original physical books in our hands we’re still a very long way from being able to reconstruct the meanings that readers found in them in the 17th century. Holding a book, feeling the paper, seeing the colour of the ink, will necessarily suggest more or different meanings to me than when I see a PDF on screen, but those are still my perceived meanings, and not necessarily anyone else’s. On the other hand, being able to see a physical difference between two books which isn’t apparent on EEBO gives a new insight and has to affect the range of possible meanings, even if we’re not sure exactly how.

This isn’t something that only applies to early-modern print culture. Brett at Airminded mentioned in his excellent series of posts on the Sudeten crisis that British newspapers in the 1930s tended to have the most important stories in the middle, not on the front page. I had absolutely no idea that this was the case. It’s not something that’s obvious if you’re just dipping into the Times Digital Archive as you just get one page out of context.

And it doesn’t just apply to print. The same issues come up with old computer games. I can play my old favourite C64 games on my PC using an emulator, but the experience isn’t the same as playing them on a real C64 in the 80s. In many ways it’s better – you don’t have to wait for tapes to load, there aren’t as many crashes – but from a historian’s point of view it’s obviously not a perfect way of reconstructing the past.

Since posting about Esther MacCallum-Stewart’s article on gender bending in computer games, I’ve been thinking about early examples of female player-characters. Esther mentioned Gauntlet, a 1985 arcade machine (later converted to the C64 and other plartforms) where players could choose from 4 characters, one of whom was female (Thyra the Valkyrie). That was one of the earliest games where male players could choose to swap gender but not the only one. Below are some Commodore 64 games that I remember from the 80s in which boys could be (or in some cases would have to be) girls.

Cauldron (1985): No choice here – the PC was a witch on a mission to destroy an evil anthropomorphic giant pumpkin (no, really). Obviously an ugly, old witch with green skin and a broomstick is one of the most negative female stereotypes you can get (and let’s not forget that many women were killed because of it in the early-modern period) but that doesn’t seem to have put male gamers off from playing the game. More likely to put people off was the fact that it was so fucking hard. Did anyone ever finish it? In the sequel the witch became the enemy and the player took the role of a male pumpkin who was out to destroy her. If anything this was even harder…

Everyone’s A Wally (1985): An aadvark (that’s “arcade adventure” for anyone who’s too old. Or too young…) featuring 5 player characters: the eponymous Wally, his wife Wilma, and the imaginatively named Tom, Dick and Harry. 20% female and 80% male isn’t exactly gender balanced, and the roles of the characters are quite stereotypical (the men are builders, plumbers, electricians etc) but changing characters in the game was an interesting twist. This wasn’t just an option: if you wanted to finish the game you had to play every character, because they each had special abilities which were necessary to complete all the tasks.

Mama Llama (1985): Not a woman but a non-human female. The player controlled the eponymous llama who was accompanied by her offspring and a flying robot – anything can happen in the crazy world of Jeff Minter.

Leather Goddesses of Phobos (1986): A text adventure where the player chooses at the start whether to play as a man or a woman. Unlike Everyone’s A Wally, once the character is chosen you stay in it for the rest of the game, and the characters don’t have different abilities. As it’s a text adventure, you can’t see yourself, but you could get a description by typing “exam self”. The gender you choose doesn’t really affect the gameplay – it’s the same for both sexes, but that effectively means that it treats men and women as equal.

Barbarian II – The Dungeon of Drax (1988): In the original Barbarian, Princess Mariana was a stereotypical passive victim who had to be rescued from an evil wizard by the equally stereotypical barbarian warrior. By the time of the sequel she had turned into a proto-Lara Croft butt-kicking heroine in combat lingerie. Maybe not much of an advance, especially considering that in publicity material she was played by Page 3 girl Maria Whittaker, but not much is still some. Like Leather Goddesses, the player could choose at the start of the game whether to play Mariana or the male barbarian, and the gameplay wasn’t much different for either of them.

These are only what I can remember off the top of my head. There might be more among the 15,800 C64 games in the Gamebase64 database but probably nowhere near 50%. Even though there’s nothing like gender equality here, there are plenty of examples to support Esther’s point that gender swapping in computer games isn’t very new or strange. The fact that female players pretty much had to swap gender most of the time makes it even less unusual.