I AM ERROR
by Nathan Altice
First posted July 2015
I loved this book. I wish I took better notes, because I have forgotten most of the technical bits that I found so fascinating.
Yes, I purposefully said “bits” there, you’re welcome.
I wrote a long preamble that covered much of my personal history with the NES before segueing into I AM ERROR’s laudable dearth of anecdote. I thought the juxtaposition clever, but while editing it seemed both trite and self-indulgent; satirizing tedium with tedium is still tedious to experience, no matter how amusing.
I AM ERROR elucidates the functional, physical aspects of the Famicom and applies that knowledge onto the end product; it is why Mario looks the way he looks, or moves the way he moves; why the bushes and clouds in Super Mario Bros. are made from the same tiles (did you recognize they were palette swaps of each other? I didn’t.)—form following function in a restrained medium of expression:
If the Famicom only had four colors total, the two stacked bits from the pattern table bitplanes would be sufficient to describe any tile. However, the Famicom allocates thirty-two bytes of VRAM to eight individual palettes—half devoted to sprites and the other half to background tiles—containing four colors each. Every sprite and background tile onscreen may select only one of its four allotted palettes at a time. However, the first color of each four-color block must be identical—shared across all palettes—limiting the PPU to rendering twenty-five individual colors onscreen simultaneously.
Though the shared color may seem like an arbitrary constraint, it is actually a clever means to “erase” portions of sprite tiles that are meant to be transparent. When a sprite is on top of a background tile, any color bit set to the shared color will permit the underlying background tile to show through. Mario’s constituent sprites in Super Mario Bros., for instance, use only three colors: red for his hat and overalls; a muted brown for his hair, eyes, sleeves, and boots; and olive for his skin and overall button. All other pixels in the Mario tiles are set to sky blue, but they render transparent, permitting the background to pass behind his body as he moves.
I AM ERROR handles the density of the material in an impressive way, slowly ramping up the technical details until you are comfortable distinguishing between OAM cycling and VRAM attribution. The Famicom is unique in having a split PPU architecture, but honestly, without the book sitting in front of me, I cannot recall a more detailed breakdown. I AM ERROR is, much like a videogame begets multiple playthroughs, a book that calls for repeated readings.
It never takes the shortcuts upon which the vast majority of books about videogames thrive—tales of the author’s personal experiences—the type of tales that I had to forcibly excise from this review. This is a scholarly work that has eschewed the profligate memoir genre and stripped away the cobwebs of sentimentality; it provides an actual look at what powered the movable images that pepper the collective childhood memories of my generation. Much of the target audiences for early videogames are now adults, but videogames remain a nascent form of entertainment. Under all of the nostalgia creeps a haunting truth; our generation takes the cultural ubiquity of gaming history for granted; fluency in videogames’ genesis tale is slowly ebbing away. It will dissipate back into the ether, and soon. Written records are required as the creator generation passes away; that point is eloquently made though easily missed in I AM ERROR as it is inexplicably buried in the second appendix:
One problem facing videogame bibliography is the medium’s relative youthfulness. Commercial videogames have only been with us since the 1970s. Generations of consoles and games still litter yard sales, attics, pawnshops, and thrift stores. Our familiarity with and access to videogames is taken for granted, since many of us are old enough to recall first-hand experience with the entire history of videogames--a claim that cannot be made by scholars of other media. There is an implicit assumption that we all know what a Super Mario Bros. cartridge looks like, so why bother with thorough descriptions?
The lack of directed personal narrative creates an uncluttered playground for the mind to explore, a landscape over which to drape one’s own videogaming history. By contrast with the modern style of non-fiction writing—letting the author tells stories to convey facts—the text here offers historicity and authority to a device representative of an industry often treated as frivolous. I AM ERROR is wonderful to read, a needed piece of academia that anyone with the memory of holding a controller can come away from richer. And it is likely that most readers will come equipped with their own personal stories of the NES, content to act as their own Virgil through the surfeit of technical details. Just don’t write another Nintendo memoir, okay?