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Breakout: Pilgrim in the Microworld

(Boss Fight Books #22)

David Sudnow,

Gabe Durham (Goodreads Author) (Foreword)

3.83 · Rating details · 83 ratings · 17 reviews

Just as the video game console market was about to crash into the New Mexico desert in 1983, professor and sociologist David Sudnow was unearthing the secrets of “eye, mind, and the essence of video skill” through an exploration of Atari’s Breakout, one of the earliest hits of the arcade world.

Originally released under the title Pilgrim in the Microworld, Sudnow’s groundbr ...more

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Paperback, New Edition, 224 pages

Published by Boss Fight Books (first published March 1983)

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Start your review of Breakout: Pilgrim in the Microworld (Boss Fight Books, #22)

Mar 26, 2015 Chris Salzman rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

A deep analytic meditation on Sudnow's journey from never touching a videogame to mastering Breakout for the Atari. Every bit of the journey is told in excruciating detail as he takes time to reflect on everything (I mean everything) about the game. This might be the best writing on video games that's ever been produced.

There's so much I take for granted in games and getting a glimpse into it from the perspective of a pilgrim is fascinating.
...more

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Jan 16, 2020 Caleb Ross rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nonfiction, own, type-ebooks, type-paperback, video-games

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I just finished reading Breakout: Pilgrim in the Microworld by David Sudnow, which was originally released in 1983 and has been reprinted by Boss Fight Books as their 22nd book, and I’ve got some thoughts.

Breakout: Pilgrim in the Microworld is basically a memoir of one man’s discovery of, and obsession with, t ...more

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May 23, 2017 Max rated it it was ok · review of another edition

I'm glad to have read this seminal work. Mostly glad because it means I won't have to read it again. It was not a fun read, but somehow remains clout with me for its rave reviews and general renown for being the first book that looked at video games. In my personal opinion, this book is not worth reading at all. It is only my recognition of my own flaws that I consider myself unfit to judge it worthless, and so finished it anyway.

It is incredibly boring and hard to understand. Rereading a sectio I'm glad to have read this seminal work. Mostly glad because it means I won't have to read it again. It was not a fun read, but somehow remains clout with me for its rave reviews and general renown for being the first book that looked at video games. In my personal opinion, this book is not worth reading at all. It is only my recognition of my own flaws that I consider myself unfit to judge it worthless, and so finished it anyway.

It is incredibly boring and hard to understand. Rereading a section will not help you grasp it no matter how many times. This is caused both by the difficulty of describing events in an abstract game world, but also by the author's complete non concern with being comprehensible. Abounding with pseudo-philosophy, Sudnow begins every other sentence with "And the most vital aspect was . . ." or "The whole trouble arose out of . . ." These buzz words are irritating.

Yes, Sudnow did go to Atari headquarters and "interviewed" the engineers. Then throughout the rest of the book he complains of not having asked them anything of any value (e.g. history of atari, development of Breakout).

His lack of knowledge about these things becomes incredibly annoying, as he philosophizes about how Breakout was engineered to take money as efficiently as possible. Sudnow clearly has no idea how computers work. Nor is he an authority on anything else, except piano (which admittedly is possibly somewhat relevant).

Flipping to a random page and finding a typical example of "philosophy": "It's as if instead of truly incorporating the events on the screen within the framework of the body's natural way of moving and caring, the action on the screen must incorporate me, reducing me or elevating me to some ideal plane of synaptic being through which the programmed coincidences will take place." What is this garbage? It's like William Faulkner having a stroke.

Sudnow spends pages explaining how Breakout must have been engineered, and the thought-processes that must have been behind it. This is incredibly irritating because a) Sudnow is not a computer scientist and b) he did not take advantage of his trip to Atari to ask the actual engineers anything about it. Basically, he's plain wrong and doesn't know shit about the thoughts he's unintelligibly spilling.

The reflections on the impact of the new "microworld" is so quaint, and also so overblown. I would like to see what Sudnow would say about modern video games, with how far they've gone past Breakout. It would probably be too overwhelming for Sudnow, considering his reaction to ancient tech in this book. If Sudnow were to write a second book about modern gaming, it would probably span thousands of pages, and Sudnow would realize how inadequate his first book was.

Sudnow spends one of the longest chapters of the book "Practice" trying the same strategy over and over for months on end and not getting any better. It is actually painful to read about, but luckily he stops. He finally realizes that just playing the game more loosely is more fun and makes you a better player. To accept the challenge for what it is, he says. If there is one takeaway from this book, it is this: don't get stuck on one particular thing or you'll lose your mind and not go anywhere, and have absolutely nothing to show for it.

The intelligible bits were somewhat intriguing. They were a breath of air that made you realize you weren't stupid and could understand words when they were arranged properly. They add one star to make this book 2/5 stars. ...more

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Aug 21, 2020 Ryan Stanton rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: critical-writings, non-fiction

This book is a chore to read in many places... but when it clicks, it’s a fascinating read that makes the many plodding sections worth it.

A deep dive into one man’s first experience with digital games, and their slow descent into obsession, Sudnow’s tale is one of the best phenomenological accounts of what it feels like to learn a game for the first time. His descriptions of the slow but persistent progression of his obsession, the frustrations that come with attempting to nail a particular cha This book is a chore to read in many places... but when it clicks, it’s a fascinating read that makes the many plodding sections worth it.

A deep dive into one man’s first experience with digital games, and their slow descent into obsession, Sudnow’s tale is one of the best phenomenological accounts of what it feels like to learn a game for the first time. His descriptions of the slow but persistent progression of his obsession, the frustrations that come with attempting to nail a particular challenge, or the feeling of ‘flow’ that you may achieve are all remarkably relatable, despite being almost fourth years old. Perhaps this is complimented by the simplicity of his game of choice: focusing on Breakout leaves little in the way of necessary description of the games systems (though Sudnow manages to add plenty). It’s an easily relatable game, even for those with little experience.

It’s also great to hear his tales of meeting the developers. When he wants to be, Sudnow is a great writer, with a clever wit and some beautiful turns of phrase.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like he wants to a lot of the time, as this book is half fascinating discussion mentioned above, and half overwritten prosaic nonsense.

Beyond the aspects of the book which are of its time (outdated theory, casual sexism), much of Sudnow’s musings border on incomprehensible stream of consciousness ravings. For every instance that perfectly captures the feeling of a game (such as descriptions of the physicality adopted when playing seriously), there’s another where he spends a page writing one unbroken sentence dealing with his obsession over figuring out a specific pattern he has explained five pages before in more clear words. Aspects like this make it hard to recommend, even if I did like the book.

I think this is a great resource for anybody looking to write on the phenomenology of games, or needing a different perspective on how we interact with this medium. Apparently it’s been a bit ignored in scholarship, and while I hate to hear that, and think it deserves some recognition for the great aspects... I can kind of see why the other aspects may turn people off.

...more

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May 18, 2020 Mut rated it it was amazing

Videogames as modern visual music making devices

Not sure I ever read an in depth analysis of the experience of playing a game (or even the video game playing experience as a whole) that goes as deep in the players thoughts and feelings as this book does. I really wish there was more long form video game writing like this, as the closer I can think of is videogame blog. Please point me more in that direction if you read this comment and know of it. Video game writing is usually way more about the ...more

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Jul 02, 2019 Travis Timmons rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I'm a reader of phenomenology. It's the field in philosophy that I find most compelling -- human consciousness is bottomless stuff. This being said, _Pilgrim_ is phenomenology. A sort of living-breathing-moving version of the philosophy. And in some ways, far more insightful than the philosophical stuff written about phenomenology. This book does IT.

The writing is sometime clunky and counter-intuitive, but I find this normal deficiency to actually enhance the kind of work Sudnow is doing in the ...more

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Mar 26, 2020 Vsevolod Zubarev rated it liked it

It's incredible that this book was published so long ago, back in 1983. It is about the original Breakout (1976) for the Atari 2600. The author obsessively plays the game and describes his exact moves, tactics, kinesthetic feelings, etc., all the while pondering about game design and related topics that are intrinsic to video games and relevant today, maybe even more than ever. ...more

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Nov 13, 2020 Kevin rated it liked it · review of another edition

As far as I can tell, the correct publication date for this is 1983. Some online sources claim 1979, but that can't be as it mentions Missile Command for the Atari VCS which came out in 1981. ...more

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Sep 06, 2020 Michael Erwin rated it it was amazing

Shelves: my-library

What an excellent, weird, absolute time capsule of a book. Somehow so of its time and yet decades ahead. Still haven't read any kind of video game analysis quite like it. ...more

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Jan 25, 2015 Joe Henthorn rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

'Something vital was being dispensed.'

I remember reading about this getting a really glowing recommendation a couple of years ago on Anna Anthropy's blog and desperately wanting to read it - but I couldn't find a cheap copy (it's a long, long time out of print), and inevitably forgot about it. But when I saw it pop up again on Brendan Keogh's blog the other month and realised it was being sold for a penny plus £2.99 shipping by one of those weird Amazon marketplace sellers, I snapped it up immed 'Something vital was being dispensed.'

I remember reading about this getting a really glowing recommendation a couple of years ago on Anna Anthropy's blog and desperately wanting to read it - but I couldn't find a cheap copy (it's a long, long time out of print), and inevitably forgot about it. But when I saw it pop up again on Brendan Keogh's blog the other month and realised it was being sold for a penny plus £2.99 shipping by one of those weird Amazon marketplace sellers, I snapped it up immediately. I am very very glad I did because it is so so so good.

How the fuck do you describe a book like this?! The bulk of it is an incredibly obsessive study of the early Atari VCS game Breakout, but because Sudnow's mind works in powerful and mysterious ways it is so much more than this and it ends up touching on everything from the sociology of arcades, to the military-entertainment complex, to coin-op economics, to parent-child relationships, to the pleasures of the piano, to the benefits of the type-writer over the computer word processor... (you could go on, and on) ... Each question handled in the same manner as Sudnow's fave Missile Command move; with grace and style in a slick lateral panning shot - boom, boom, boom!

It pre-dates the current wave of academic game studies by a good twenty years, and to be honest I think it is just so superior to the majority of stuff that's been written since. The approach is wonderfully diverse, for starters. There's a lot of thick phenomenological description of the author's experience of learning to play the game - it's big on how it 'feels' to play a game, about the tactility of the controls, the blinking lights, the bleeps and bloops in 7.3/4 time. It also anticipates a lot of the post-humanist games writing (without resorting to overwrought hyper-academic prose or drowning you in a see of academics-you've-never-heard-of) in its description of human-computer hybrids, of the breakout twizzly-wheel-controller-thing becoming a part of his body. Towards the end, he writes of the displacement of the human as the central figure within this mad new electronic world - Sudnow sits in a dark room and tries playing the game with the sound off, only to find himself making the atonal bleeps and bloops himself, and wonders if he has not become 'a non-being the TV set uses to complete an electronic circuit so its programmed balls stay in motion'.

And it works so well because Sudnow is such a phenomenal writer, capable of spinning an hallucinatory chapter-length essay out of a couple of seconds of gameplay-time that has all the insights of the densest academic commentary with none of the distracting decorum. He's also really funny and completely aware of the obsessive lengths he's gone to to master this dumb bouncing ball game.

Would recommend to anyone really - people with any interest in games (academic or otherwise) will get a lot out of it, obviously - but there is a LOT here that will be of interest to absolutely anyone. Unique and fascinating! ...more

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Jan 25, 2013 Stacey Mason rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: game studies researchers, obsessive gamers, gamers who also happen to be musicians

Shelves: research

Jazz pianist David Sudnow didn't play video games until he went to retrieve his teenage son from an arcade in the early 80s, and he immediately dismissed them as a silly money-sink designed to keep teenagers occupied. When an Atari 2600 ruined a party of academics, however, he decided to give games another shot and try the Atari for himself. Thus began his decent into obsession.

Following in the style of Ways of the Hand, Sudnow's deeply detailed exploration of the phenomenology of playing jazz p Jazz pianist David Sudnow didn't play video games until he went to retrieve his teenage son from an arcade in the early 80s, and he immediately dismissed them as a silly money-sink designed to keep teenagers occupied. When an Atari 2600 ruined a party of academics, however, he decided to give games another shot and try the Atari for himself. Thus began his decent into obsession.

Following in the style of Ways of the Hand, Sudnow's deeply detailed exploration of the phenomenology of playing jazz piano, Pilgrim in the Microworld provides an equally detailed account of Sudnow's quest to master Breakout on the Atari--from the physical feeling of the controls to the subtle changes in his strategy of where to look on the screen. The book follows his transition from bemused to curious to obsessed and back, all the while revealing the most subtle changes in outlook and strategy, changes that most of the rest of us would never consciously stop to think about.

Sudnow is clearly catering to a high brow audience. His descriptions are peppered with references to classical music, and never misses an opportunity to name drop Debussy, Lenny Bruce, Nietzsche; but his tone only serves to legitimize the deep study of games at a time when they were regarded as low brow entertainment. As you might expect from the title, the writing recalls Thoreau or Dillard in its tone and approach--carefully balancing obsessive detail with a narrative arc whose drama you only appreciate when you've finished the book. At times the depth of his analyses of the most trivial functions of the hand or the eye can become exhausting, as--no doubt--his frustrating play sessions were, and these sections toward the middle are best handled by giving the book a rest. While others might complain about the pace of the middle chapters, to me, these sections only further highlighted the experience of Sudnow's frustration, and as a whole the book is engaging, thought-provoking, and masterfully written.

As a game studies text, this is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in phenomenology or player experience. No other personal account of playing games has come close to this level of thought and analysis. At times his descriptions teeter on the edge of what might be considered obsessive mental illness, but Sudnow's perspective is entirely unique among the field, and this level of detail will be incredibly hard for most researchers to duplicate.

A must-read for game studies researchers, obsessive gamers, and gamers who also happen to be musicians. ...more

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Dec 17, 2016 Jlawrence rated it liked it · review of another edition

Jazz pianist Sudnow's super-analytic, hyper-intellectualized account of his addiction to beating the Atari 2600 game Breakout when it first came out (he even travels to Atari Inc headquarters to grill the game's programmers on how to best play). As a nostalgic Atari 2600 fan and someone with interest in in-depth analytic digs into games of yore (The Digital Antiquarian is probably my favorite blog), this seemed like it'd be right up my alley.

But Sudnow's blow-by-blow detailing of his minute vari ...more

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Jul 29, 2012 Mjhancock rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: video-game, nonfiction

Neil David Sr. (or David Sudnow, as my copy stubbornly claims) describes in great, great detail his experience playing Breakout when it first came out on a home console. It's an extremely in-depth tale of his obsession with the game, from his trip to talk to Atari designers in person to his personal demand that he create the exact perfect playing sequence. It's of a reasonable amount of interest to those interested in game history, or game scholarship, as it's one of the earliest (and again, mos ...more

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Oct 03, 2007 Alex rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

fucking awesome

to qualify that:

it's amazingly OCD, it's a thinly veiled fictional account about a grown man getting addicted to 'missile command' and 'breakout' on atari 2600 in 1982.

he has screenshots of strategies, combined with social and cultural criticism; he says of his first sight of arcade:

"something vital is being dispensed."

not 'good' by any 'literary' account - but it's a must-read for any geek. ...more

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Oct 19, 2013 Erik van Mechelen rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Stumbling upon an interest, seeking mastery, and finding a world within worlds are Sudnow's high order bids in his epoch spent with Atari's "Breakout." Useful for philosophical introspection, applications to learning a craft, and reflections on the motivations of mankind and the behavior of individuals in a machine world. ...more

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Mar 29, 2011 Nate rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I love reading about other people's insanity. This guy became obsessed with Breakout for Atari, played it 8+ hours a day, took *meticulous* notes, and play by play accounts of individual games, then wrote a book about it. I mean, the amount of lunacy it built up in this man is staggering. ...more

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