David Crane’s Pitfall & Colonial Imagery - A critical analysis

[Absurdity]

Wait... you're an adult? Tell me you are college educated!

 

[Punished “Venom” pH]

Wait... you're an adult? Tell me you are college educated!

Bachelor’s in Fine Arts for Media Production and Journalism bay-bee

and an Associate’s Degree, as a treat

 

[Absurdity]

 

[Punished “Venom” pH]

So are we cool yet?

 

[The best and greatest]

Bachelor’s in Fine Arts for Media Production and Journalism bay-bee

and an Associate’s Degree, as a treat

Sounds like the type of expertise that could only exist in a world where other people produce everything important.

 

[Furret]

Bachelor’s in Fine Arts for Media Production and Journalism bay-bee

and an Associate’s Degree, as a treat

If your goal is to be made fun of, this is a great start.

 

[Punished “Venom” pH]

If your goal is to be made fun of, this is a great start.

Have my actions not made my goals crystal clear by now? I’m here to tell the truth and make friends.

 

[Furret]

Have I not made my goals crystal clear by now?

Not really. I'm still not sure if your presence on this website is a trolling attempt, a way to stick it to the SCP Admins, or both.

 

[Punished “Venom” pH]

Not really. I'm still not sure if your presence on this website is a trolling attempt, a way to stick it to the SCP Admins, or both.

Why is anyone still talking about SCP? They’ve boldly leapt with both feet into the dustbin of history, what’s left for us to say about them?

 

[Absurdity]

There are two options:

A. You've been educated beyond your intelligence.
B. Your worthless liberal education has drastically lowered your IQ.

Fueled by delusions of competence and or some strange sadomasochistic fantasy, you decided to publish your work on a brutal doxing site where material like this is rightly derided and ridiculed on a regular basis. If you are option A, please stop before you get yourself hurt. If you're option B, you have to start questioning the Marxist model of interpreting all of the world's issues in terms of identified oppressed class versus identified oppressor class, which usually reduces into rejecting established western culture in order to allow all new tyrants to rule with a fool's golden carrot on the end of a selfie stick.

Let me break this down again for you, Ms. B.S. B.A. It's not the first time and it definitely won't be the last time, so I hope you are able to field criticism without invoking the gods of Reeee.

The limits of early videogames cancels out most of what you were trying to tie back to the game's programmers. The rest of it can be easily dismissed because you never cited the most important source: the creators themselves. There is nothing to restrain the wildest strains of apophenia when you don't have a firm grip on the actual motivations of the people you are actually trying to criticize. By failing to prove your points on an individual basis, you fail twice over in trying to apply it to any culture they came from. That this is coming from a journalism graduate makes it even worse. You only stand to further the highly damaging process of demoralization in this country.

By creating a fictional jungle setting to explore and adventure in, the burden is on you to prove there was any intent to "colonize" or as you frame it: to destroy, steal from, or to mock a native culture. It could be easily argued that such games are paying tribute to unlocking the mystery of remote, lost, or abandoned cultures when they incorporate archeological features to the narrative. The main motivation here would be learning about other cultures not merely destroying them for the sake of destroying them.

How you were shielded from true critical thought this badly through your entire adult life is another mystery. But an accomplishment is an accomplishment so, a tip of the fedora in the direction of your rabid pavlovian response to harmless entertainment media from the 1980s.

 

[Punished “Venom” pH]

There are two options:

A. You've been educated beyond your intelligence.
B. Your worthless liberal education has drastically lowered your IQ.

Fueled by delusions of competence and or some strange sadomasochistic fantasy, you decided to publish your work on a brutal doxing site where material like this is rightly derided and ridiculed on a regular basis. If you are option A, please stop before you get yourself hurt. If you're option B, you have to start questioning the Marxist model of interpreting all of the world's issues in terms of identified oppressed class versus identified oppressor class, which usually reduces into rejecting established western culture in order to allow all new tyrants to rule with a fool's golden carrot on the end of a selfie stick.

Let me break this down again for you, Ms. B.S. B.A. It's not the first time and it definitely won't be the last time, so I hope you are able to field criticism without invoking the gods of Reeee.

The limits of early videogames cancels out most of what you were trying to tie back to the game's programmers. The rest of it can be easily dismissed because you never cited the most important source: the creators themselves. There is nothing to restrain the wildest strains of apophenia when you don't have a firm grip on the actual motivations of the people you are actually trying to criticize. By failing to prove your points on an individual basis, you fail twice over in trying to apply it to any culture they came from. That this is coming from a journalism graduate makes it even worse. You only stand to further the highly damaging process of demoralization in this country.

By creating a fictional jungle setting to explore and adventure in, the burden is on you to prove there was any intent to "colonize" or as you frame it: to destroy, steal from, or to mock a native culture. It could be easily argued that such games are paying tribute to unlocking the mystery of remote, lost, or abandoned cultures when they incorporate archeological features to the narrative. The main motivation here would be learning about other cultures not merely destroying them for the sake of destroying them.

How you were shielded from true critical thought this badly through your entire adult life is another mystery. But an accomplishment is an accomplishment so, a tip of the fedora in the direction of your rabid pavlovian response to harmless entertainment media from the 1980s.

tl;dr, beyond the first line where you boldly assume that I’m a liberal, which did give me a hearty chuckle.

 

[Furret]

tl;dr, beyond the first line where you boldly assume that I’m a liberal, which did give me a hearty chuckle.

He's saying that your argument fails to account for the limits of the technology the creators were working with and the intentions of said creators, and is therefore invalid.

 

[Punished “Venom” pH]

He's saying that your argument fails to account for the limits of the technology the creators were working with and the intentions of said creators, and is therefore invalid.

Thanks for the summary! I do want to know everyone’s thoughts but good grief

 

[Absurdity]

tl;dr, beyond the first line where you boldly assume that I’m a liberal, which did give me a hearty chuckle.

I didn't say you were a liberal (that's a little too obvious), but since your liberal education has lobotomized you, you could claim you were King Tut reincarnated and it would still be more believable than saying your were anything but a lib. Simply by breathing in the phony political dialectic in this country, you wouldn't necessarily be a conservative even if you voted for Trump or a Jorgensen or a Paul. In your case it's not if you're liberal, it's whether or not you can still tie your shoes without thinking of the white man's burden.

Thanks for the summary! I do want to know everyone’s thoughts but good grief

That's only the beginning. You really have no idea what you're doing here!

 

[Jonah Hill poster]

Bachelor’s in Fine Arts for Media Production and Journalism bay-bee

and an Associate’s Degree, as a treat

If your goal is to be made fun of, this is a great start.

Second this. I received a degree in that same subject, but replace Journalism with Communication, and I now find out that they’re discontinuing the program.

+1 for useless degree.

Spoiler: Oh and to OP:

The fact that you made me had to get this from KnowYourMeme automatically gives you a dislike

 

[Punished “Venom” pH]

Second this. I received a degree in that same subject, but replace Journalism with Communication, and I now find out that they’re discontinuing the program.

+1 for useless degree.

Spoiler: Oh and to OP:

View attachment 1933613

The fact that you made me had to get this from KnowYourMeme automatically gives you a dislike

It’s top grade, special nutritious diet smell-good one pinch shit I promise you that much

 

[Secret Asshole]

What is the point of going over Pitfall? Which was just designed to be you swinging over pits and being difficult. God, they feel the need to do this to fucking everything.

 

[Punished “Venom” pH]

What is the point of going over Pitfall? Which was just designed to be you swinging over pits and being difficult. God, they feel the need to do this to fucking everything.

“They”? I’m just me, bud XD

 

[Secret Asshole]

“They”? I’m just me, bud XD

I've reviewed academic papers before and graded them. So let me do that with yours. Sad I don't have ExamSoft, Word Comments or QuickGrader, but I'll do my best with text color. This is like undergrad work so I've got plenty of experience.

My comments will naturally be in red and highlights will be in yellow-gold

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First problem before we even begin, there are no in text citations. This means I cannot look up what you quote. Also, without in text citations it is considered plagiarism. If you want this to be treated like a paper, you have to write it by one.

Pitfall! by David Crane was released in 1982. In a direct sense, it had been a project of Crane’s since 1979. Crane famously described the design process as “I sat down with a blank sheet of paper and drew a stick figure in the center. I said, "Okay, I have a little running man and let's put him on a path. Where is the path? Let's put it in a jungle. Why is he running?" And Pitfall! was born. This entire process took about ten minutes. About 1,000 hours of programming later, the game was complete.”

The thematic overtones of the game seemed to have come to Crane almost automatically, by his own admission, and the way that the game came together without any serious forethought being put into that creation process it shows how thoroughly these neo-colonial ideas of the mighty explorer, bravely exploring an unseen jungle are embedded into our culture.

You are making quite the assumption, by Crane's own admission he just put him in the jungle. In 1981, one year before release, Indiana Jones was incredibly popular, a blockbuster. You make a leap that it was not to make his game close to Indiana Jones to increase sales. You do not consider the context of the era it was made and the pop culture that was around at the time.

Not only that, you are not taking into account the vast limitations of technology at the time. Exploration of complex themes in games in 1982 was only possible through interactive fiction, which was an extremely niche genre even then. If you wanted anything graphically, there were severe limitations on what you could do.

Assuming that he could, how would he have made the game he wanted to make by not exploring these so-called themes? If he used a native instead of an Indiana Jones replica, you could easily make the same argument that he was exploiting stereotypes. Hence, there is no way this game could have been made without some sort of theme of 'exploitation'.

This is the major flaw in critical theory: Interpretation does not rely on evidence presented, but by false logic that can be twisted in any direction, rendering the narrative functionally worthless. I can just as well make the argument that by using an Indiana Jones analog, Crane was exploiting the capatalist structure by using a popular icon to increase his profits and visibility, hence drowning out smaller, more independent programmers.

Never the less, you don't offer a way he could properly express these themes. A paper should always offer possible solutions to a problem. You do not do that in the discussion, either.

Not only is Pitfall! itself an uncritical celebration of the Western world’s colonial legacy,

Many other cultures other than Western culture participated in colonialism. You have to differentiate how those were different from Western colonialism.

but the game itself has left the platforming genre and gaming as a whole in the habit of empowering the colonizer and demonizing the colonized. Sometimes metaphorically, and oftentimes literally. The Pitfall games on the Atari 2600 are not the only games to utilize this colonial legacy, but they are among the first and the most influential in perpetuating that legacy in many games which came after.

There has always been a propensity in societies for more aggressive cultures to seize the territory and resources of people groups who are not able to resist them. Empires, then sovereigns, and our modern nation-states have all engaged in colonial exploitation at one point or another.

China expanded and solidified its hegemony over enormous swathes of land and peoples for over 2,000 years. The Roman Empire expanded and conquered and then managed to hold onto most of Europe for thousands of years. But these were regional, hegemonic powers, the types which are easily to simulate in games like Civilization or Total War because they’re one geographically homogenous piece of arbitrary territory which one group is able to dictate political control.

You cannot take modern games and compare them to something that was not made in 1982. The comparison fails because the technology was not the same. Not only that, the genres are different.

This is not the type of colonialism in which the events of Pitfall! are taking place. After the Industrial Revolution, the bourgeois capitalist class of the industrialized nation-states required more raw materials than were available within their borders in order to power the new industrial engines of their economies. They now had the technology to bring supplies against the course of rivers and the medicine to keep their soldiers and administrators alive to seize territory and resources from other continents.

This is simply untrue. You mention the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire conquered parts of Africa and exported slaves, animals and raw materials to Rome itself. It exploited natives and founded colonies. In fact, travel for resources from far away places had been available since ancient times. There is evidence that the Vikings actually had trade routes from Newfoundland to what is now Norway. What you describe is not a new phenomenon.

This is also not the reason why African colonization happened. Mass Colonization of Africa in the 1870s was much more than a simple rush for resources. Which I will describe below.

Belgium was the first of these nations to industrialize, and they along with the other Great Powers of Europe met in Berlin to carve up the African continent between them. While Belgium is seen as a mild state on the same spectrum as Canada today, they were brutal colonizers. In the Congo, the regime of Belgian monarch King Leopold II’s Congo Free State is estimated to have caused half of the Congo basin’s population to die. Many more were mutilated by having their hands and feet chopped off if they failed to bring the colonizers the resources they required.

The most important event to mention is the 'Scramble for Africa', in which colonialism in Africa increased from 10% to 90% in the span of a few years. It did not occur because simply because of resources or technology. 10% of Africa was already colonized by the time the Scramble happened. What occurred was a result of international rivalries, Internal African Politics, Religious Expansion and prestige. It was a far more complex process.

While the historical anecdote provides color, it is ultimately irrelevant. Especially since you are only describing one nation in the morass of many. This is a problem, as the Scramble for Africa is the defining event of African colonialism. Without understanding its reasons, motivation and lasting impact, you cannot properly establish a thesis.

You brush over the reasons for colonialism of Africa with two paragraphs, one that is largely incorrect and another a horrific, but ultimately pointless story that deviates from your overall thesis.

This was a major international scandal at the time, but media sources then and now were less likely to publicize stories about the horrors of colonialism, such

You need to back up this statement with proper references. You cannot simply state it.

such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as they were to create endless stories and later films about properties such as Tarzan, showing a white man becoming one with the wild and unexplored jungle.

Heart of Darkness is an incredible indictment of colonialism written in the middle of the Scramble for Africa. You mention Tarzan but you absolutely miss one of the most important statements of colonialism in the West: Rudyard Kipling's "White Man's Burden". This was written in the Philippines, but it presents an important point about the mentality and justification of colonialism as the West's moral duty.

Not accurately portraying the proper motivations for colonialism and boiling it down to a resource rush is simply wrong. Colonialism was not only the extraction of resources, its motivations were exceedingly complex and lead by incorrect science and assumptions at the time.

If the average person were to know anything about famed explorer Henry Morton Stanley, it is far more likely to be the story of Dr. Livingston with the endlessly quoted line “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” than anything about his service to Leopold in mapping out the boundaries for the exploitative Congo Free State.

So it was this cultural miasma, filtered through generations of motion pictures glorifying the pith-helmet clad explorers slashing their way through unexplored jungle with their machetes in hand, acquiring amazing treasure and maybe saving a damsel in distress on the way out too.

You need to cite some of these films and overall public perception. One would be enough.

Even so, the films you are talking about resemble the films about the 1920s, when there was really no way of traveling to distant lands, so people had to simplify them and rely on unreliable tales. You're looking through the lens of a people who did not possess all the information. Regardless, David Crane was born in 1953, long after the era of these movies had passed.

If you want to make this assumption, you need to reference media he would have seen at the time. No one is going to take a movie from the silent or early film era seriously in 1953, especially seen as David was growing up in the golden age of Hollywood.

David Crane did not even need to think about the implications of what he was imagining, there was enough colonial imagery from media

he’d probably been absorbing for his entire life to fill in the blanks automatically.

Assumption without fact.

The protagonist of Crane’s Pitfall! is a little pixel man named Pitfall Harry. The instruction manual describes the setting as such: “Picture This! You are deep in the recesses of a forbidden jungle -- an unforgiving place which few explorers ever survive.” The treasures you can take her aren’t natural resources, but gold and jewels. Not just any wealth, but processed wealth. Diamond rings, Gold and Silver bars, and literal bags of cash money are available for Harry to collect and gain between 2000 and 5000 points per looting.

Throughout the game, most of the obstacles you face are the hostile wildlife in the jungle. Crocodiles, scorpions, poisonous Cobras, and other creatures block Harry’s progress at every turn. Pitfall Harry is the only living human you see directly at any point in the game, or in the instruction manual. However, there are clear signs that you are not the first person to be in this region. In terms of obstacles, there are plenty of barrels which are rolling in from just off-screen which must have been pushed by somebody.

Every screen in the game has some sort of underground passage, which would have taken extensive human labor and architectural knowledge to accomplish. Not to mention the ladders and brick walls which adorn these underground pathways. Whatever culture constructed the infrastructure Pitfall Harry is spelunking through, they were certainly a developed and intelligent culture in terms of their engineering prowess. That’s not to mention the fact that the wealth you find suggests that whoever owned it originally was fully capable of smelting and shaping ingots of precious metal.

Again, these are all assumptions. Not to mention, you say Harry is the only living human you see. This DIRECTLY CONTRADICTS your thesis on neo-colonialism, as the MOST IMPORTANT fact of colonialism was the devastation it wrought on its people.

Harry is just an explorer. He is not identified by any government. Therefore, he cannot claim any land. And since it directly references him as an explorer, he is not interested in claiming land.

Your colonialist argument was extremely tenuous before, but now it is broken. Because without people, there is no native harm to inflict. Without a government or private expedition, there can be no colonization.

Gold and Silver bars, as mentioned before, are some of the most common treasures the player can guide Pitfall Harry to loot. The diamond rings could have come straight out of a De Beers family diamond catalog. Not to mention the literal bags of cash, which suggests that in terms of its overall development the peoples who formerly inhabited this area were not only developed enough as a culture to have advanced engineering and smelting, but economic theory which had progressed to the point where paper currency was used alongside precious specie.

Once more, these are all assumptions. Never mind the fact that ancient civilizations have been plundered by all civilizations across the globe. This is not unique to the West. In Egypt, the tombs of the Pharaohs were rigged with traps so future grave robbers couldn't get to them. You posit this as somehow unique to the west but it isn't.

The implication here is clear: Pitfall Harry, whether he is being sponsored by a government or corporation back in his homeland, is a colonizer coming to a land which has been devastated by the usual tools of the colonizer - superior forces of arms, deadly disease, and enough crocodile-hide whips to make sure the entire population is so terrified that they will work themselves to death before they rise up and challenge their oppressors.

There are a few explanations for why there would be no human characters other than Harry. It would be implausible to state that this area is uninhabited, given that nearly every screen in the game has some evidence showing that Harry’s not the first one to come around these parts. Perhaps the people had advanced knowledge of his coming, and had hidden themselves to avoid being enslaved or killed. It is equally possible that they have already been wiped out by a deadly pandemic which devastated their population before the colonizers could even reach them. It could even be that the native inhabitants have been massacred already, and Harry is now being sent in to loot every piece of wealth which was missed by the first wave of death and desecration.

All assumptions without evidence. You cannot make up your own fiction and impose it on what is not there. That does not give it validity. There are no human enemies or other humans in the game, hence I could easily say the ancient civilization died out 1,000 years ago. And this was an island just found by Harry himself which is uninhabited. Or Harry was exploring and crashed on the island.

These explanations are just as valid, because as are yours, they are unsupported. The foundation of your argument rests on assumption and your own fiction not presented anywhere in the work.

In any case, it is not possible for the player to know. Their only task is to collect the treasure so that they may acquire victory. Pitfall! is very different from the arcade-based experiences offered by contemporary games such as Pole Position II or Ms. Pac-Man where the only real objective was to complete a repetitive task for a high score. Pitfall! is widely credited as having invented the side-scrolling genre of games, along with being one of the first to use a “Jungle” environment. Both the gameplay and the imagery of Pitfall! are still influencing the games which have been built atop its legacy. It’s interesting to note the game space of Pitfall! is universally referred to as a jungle environment even though there are plenty of man-made structures, not to mention the man-made wealth which is being seized by Pitfall Harry. This is a perfect example of how the media trivializes colonial imagery and downplays its significance.

Again, with no people, no government and no settlers, something cannot be colonized. As I said before, ancient cultures have been exploited by current cultures by every civilization on the planet. That is not colonization, because there is nothing to colonize.

You are twisting the ideas of colonization and imposing your own fiction in order to justify your thesis.

The fact that we have established the grim crimes against humanity which exported these tropes into our cultural consciousness and yet it still seems silly to speak about the game where the pixel man jumps over the crocodiles shows the level of indoctrination present in our “baseline” culture.

These are assumptions. Even in the Scramble for Africa, there were people who opposed it. There were people who said its horrors, but were powerless because of the absolute control of governments at the time. You cannot posit indoctrination when even in the era it occurred people were already identifying its horrific elements.

You also need to provide evidence for indoctrination. Where do we teach colonialism was good or not violent? Or where it didn't cause massive amounts of conflict and death?

Colonization has never been painted in a good light. You also don't consider the alternate: What you see is what you get. A pixel man that jumps over crocodiles. Nothing more, nothing less.

Games which draw from this legacy don’t tend to examine themselves and their thematic schematics critically, especially given how the descendants of the colonizers are more often target audiences for these games than the colonized.

This is a tangent.

The actions the player is permitted to take can encourage a colonial mindset and make them engage in exploitative behavior without questioning what it is they’re actually doing. You can see this even in the games which could be considered the contemporaries of Pitfall! in terms of when they were released, or by using the conventions pioneered by Crane. Games which have themes of singular explorers from a more advanced society coming to explore, exploit, or explode foreign lands include: “Metroid”, “The Adventures of Bayou Billy”, “Congo Bongo”, “Fantasy World Dizzy” all of which share these elements to some degree.

The inspiration was not always subtle, as in the case of “Montezuma’s Revenge” starring “Panama Joe” which depicts a grave-robber trying to steal as many valuables as possible from the ancient tomb of an imperial monarch. Just like in Pitfall!, you only win once you’ve taken all of the treasure, you don’t even have to get to a goal, taking all of the treasure in of itself is the only objective which must be achieved. Adventure Island plays like the logical next step to Pitfall! by taking place in a similar jungle environment in which a loincloth-clad white man skateboards through Africa consuming all of the food and killing wildlife indiscriminately. Many of these titles are remembered fondly as all-time classics for their respective platforms, era, and genre.

There are many more contemporary games that continue to draw from the same pitfall-laden legacy of David Crane’s creation. Thousands of kids grew up playing Oregon Trail on their Apple IIe’s in school computer labs, which is an unquestioning and uncritical endorsement of all that the white man benefitted from via manifest destiny. The people who lived on that land died from a lot worse than dysentery. The Pikmin franchise revolves around an alien military figure who militarizes a group of the native population in order so that he may divide and conquer the rest of the population in order to extract resources for his exclusive benefit. Procedurally generated exploration games like No Man’s Sky have core gameplay loops which revolve around visiting an endless number of planetoids inhabited by creatures with their own unique feelings, characteristics and personalities, then take everything you can away from them up to and including their lives.

Your thesis is on David Crane's Pitfall and colonial imagery. All of these are irrelevant. They're different than the game you are talking about. This needs to be severely cut down and presented in the conclusion as Pitfall's legacy. You spend more time talking about things that are not relevant to your thesis. Each of these could be a thesis on their own.

You are off topic here. This can be boiled down to a single small paragraph at the end of your paper. Nothing in this paragraph adds to your thesis or supports it.

There are also arcade games like Donkey Kong which while they are less obviously about exploitation, put their characters into situations which could only have occured in a colonial society in which wealth and exotic life have been stolen from their homeland and brought back at prizes shown off in the modern-day equivalent of the Roman triumph.

The titular Donkey Kong is an animal brought back from a colonial holding to show off to the people, escaping and kidnapping a white woman who has to be rescued by one of the burly blue-collar colonizers. It is directly inspired by King Kong, so much so that Universal pictures decided to sue them but lost due to the fact that Universal had previously released the picture into the public domain.

There are many adventure pictures in the public domain, the aforementioned swashbuckling machete-wielding conquerors.
Not every game is a colonial experience that cannot be enjoyed without the controller leaving some blood on the player’s hands. Simulation games such as Theme Park, Theme Hospital, SimCity and Nintendogs take great logical leaps to classify as being directly inspired by colonial themes or having problematic aspects to their gameplay.

There are even some titles such as Victoria II in which you could argue that, because the game allows you the freedom to play as the colonized nations and turn the tables on the oppressors, the equality of perspectives provided is an acknowledgement of the plight of colonized people and at the very least, by allowing you to play as them it gives them a voice which has otherwise been snuffed out of many historical records and the media of contemporary culture.

More tangents and points unrelated to Pitfall. You need to stick to the game you are talking about. You are going all over the place. You don't even stick to the proper era.

But it is not just games which feed the unending hunger for colonial media in Western culture. A feature film inspired by these same cultural influences is Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. The film raised the profile of the lone adventurer going to exotic lands to the extent that it boosted Pitfall!’s popularity and the visibility of media like it within the wider mass cultural consciousness.

Finally, we're starting to get back to salient points. This should have been way, way up in the Introduction, not near the end of the paper.

Despite the game crash of 1983, Pitfall Harry was still well-known to the point where he was given a starring role in seven episodes of the animated Saturday Supercade children’s show. Pitfall Harry’s is depicted as running around with a whip like he’d just got back from King Leopold’s Congo.

Unjustified Assumption.

The whip has long been a symbol of colonial power, fictional heroes like Indiana Jones use it to swing across gaps and keep enemies at bay. But historically, those who wielded whips used them to demonstrate their power. The slave owning plantation-owner class of the American South were infamous for beating their slaves to death or leaving them carrying thick scars for the rest of their lives.

Again, these are points that could have supported your arguments. Why are they down at the end of the paper in the discussion?

Future Fûhrer of Germany Adolf Hitler had a habit of carrying a whip around in his younger years in order to beat up anybody weaker than he was to impress his strength upon girls.

You go from colonialism to talking about WWII. How Adolf Hitler uses a whip is irrelevant in terms of colonial power. He could have used the whip in a sadistic manner to derive sexual pleasure, not any manner to punish. This is irrelevant.

Media glorifying colonial imagery are some of the most consistently profitable pieces of popular art both in the time of Pitfall! to our present day.

These need sources.

The release of Pitfall! was one of the first big third-party hits for the Atari 2600. The television advertisements for Pitfall! feature a 13 year old Jack Black, making his acting debut on the silver screen.

This is information for the introduction, why is it by the conclusion?

In 2017, Jack Black starred in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle which was followed by Jumanji: The Next Level in 2019. Both titles mix the pith-helmet clad explorers of old with modern video game tropes we would have seen in titles like Pitfall!, Adventure Island, Jungle Hunt, and more modern titles like the latest Animal Crossing game. Another sequel is more likely than not coming soon, given that these pictures have made hundreds of millions of dollars.

Again, you need to stick to Pitfall.

Underneath all of the hype, pomp, and circumstance, at the core of each of these games is the same alienating, exploitative loop: Parallel experiences depicting the barren emptiness of dead societies where disease has wiped out aboriginal populations, leaving nothing but wreckage and ruin to explore and loot. Once the blood has dried, the treasure chests emptied and the resource tiles tapped out, all that is left is the hollowed-out void.

'Other games', again. Pitfall. Also, you're making assumptions. Perhaps why these games didn't include natives is that they didn't want to be offensive. They wanted to create a fun, entertaining experience sans the element of human suffering. That they were puzzles used with the theme of exploration. The bags of money and diamonds simply represented the paint used, and gave the player a graphical reward instead of just being a random shape. Every paper needs to provide an alternate hypothesis and possibly why that isn't the case.

You have not proven any of this. All these are are baseless assumptions from which you draw conclusions from without proper evidence.

-----

So all in all, I found this to be a very poor paper. The major problems are as follows: You go off on tangents on games that are far more complex and try to make points that could be papers in their own rights. You do not correctly identify the reasons for the colonialist expansion of the 1870s. You incorrectly assume that the West was only guilty of colonization and exploitation of resources when this was done earlier than the Roman Empire. You make wild assumptions that are not supported and could be easily as valid as anyone else's. Robbing ancient civilizations does not constitute colonization, as colonization is the taking and occupying of territory.

You need to stick to Pitfall. You need to source your examples properly. You have to stop making assumptions that are not supported by either primary sources or secondary sources. You have to properly place information in the paper in its proper order. You have points you could make, but you gloss over them.

The tangents on other games will lose the reader. My biggest question was, "Why am I reading about these other games?" and "Where are the sources?" You cannot make a statement without sourcing it. 'Pith Helmets and Machetes and rescuing the damsel in distress' needs a source, no matter how trivial you think it is.

This is the major problem with the humanities. Their sourcing is poor and they rely too much on assumptions that anyone can make. I didn't read anything here that couldn't be countered by a simple layman's explanation. Its a weak thesis with weak evidence.

 

[Punished “Venom” pH]

I've reviewed academic papers before and graded them. So let me do that with yours. Sad I don't have ExamSoft, Word Comments or QuickGrader, but I'll do my best with text color. This is like undergrad work so I've got plenty of experience.

My comments will naturally be in red and highlights will be in yellow-gold

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First problem before we even begin, there are no in text citations. This means I cannot look up what you quote. Also, without in text citations it is considered plagiarism. If you want this to be treated like a paper, you have to write it by one.

Pitfall! by David Crane was released in 1982. In a direct sense, it had been a project of Crane’s since 1979. Crane famously described the design process as “I sat down with a blank sheet of paper and drew a stick figure in the center. I said, "Okay, I have a little running man and let's put him on a path. Where is the path? Let's put it in a jungle. Why is he running?" And Pitfall! was born. This entire process took about ten minutes. About 1,000 hours of programming later, the game was complete.”

The thematic overtones of the game seemed to have come to Crane almost automatically, by his own admission, and the way that the game came together without any serious forethought being put into that creation process it shows how thoroughly these neo-colonial ideas of the mighty explorer, bravely exploring an unseen jungle are embedded into our culture. Not only is Pitfall! itself an uncritical celebration of the Western world’s colonial legacy,

You are making quite the assumption, by Crane's own admission he just put him in the jungle. In 1981, one year before release, Indiana Jones was incredibly popular, a blockbuster. You make a leap that it was not to make his game close to Indiana Jones to increase sales. You do not consider the context of the era it was made and the pop culture that was around at the time.

Not only that, you are not taking into account the vast limitations of technology at the time. Exploration of complex themes in games in 1982 was only possible through interactive fiction, which was an extremely niche genre even then. If you wanted anything graphically, there were severe limitations on what you could do.

Assuming that he could, how would he have made the game he wanted to make by not exploring these so-called themes? If he used a native instead of an Indiana Jones replica, you could easily make the same argument that he was exploiting stereotypes. Hence, there is no way this game could have been made without some sort of theme of 'exploitation'.

This is the major flaw in critical theory: Interpretation does not rely on evidence presented, but by false logic that can be twisted in any direction, rendering the narrative functionally worthless. I can just as well make the argument that by using an Indiana Jones analog, Crane was exploiting the capatalist structure by using a popular icon to increase his profits and visibility, hence drowning out smaller, more independent programmers.

Never the less, you don't offer a way he could properly express these themes. A paper should always offer possible solutions to a problem. You do not do that in the discussion, either.

but the game itself has left the platforming genre and gaming as a whole in the habit of empowering the colonizer and demonizing the colonized. Sometimes metaphorically, and oftentimes literally. The Pitfall games on the Atari 2600 are not the only games to utilize this colonial legacy, but they are among the first and the most influential in perpetuating that legacy in many games which came after.

There has always been a propensity in societies for more aggressive cultures to seize the territory and resources of people groups who are not able to resist them. Empires, then sovereigns, and our modern nation-states have all engaged in colonial exploitation at one point or another.

China expanded and solidified its hegemony over enormous swathes of land and peoples for over 2,000 years. The Roman Empire expanded and conquered and then managed to hold onto most of Europe for thousands of years. But these were regional, hegemonic powers, the types which are easily to simulate in games like Civilization or Total War because they’re one geographically homogenous piece of arbitrary territory which one group is able to dictate political control.

You cannot take modern games and compare them to something that was not made in 1982. The comparison fails because the technology was not the same.

This is not the type of colonialism in which the events of Pitfall! are taking place. After the Industrial Revolution, the bourgeois capitalist class of the industrialized nation-states required more raw materials than were available within their borders in order to power the new industrial engines of their economies. They now had the technology to bring supplies against the course of rivers and the medicine to keep their soldiers and administrators alive to seize territory and resources from other continents.

This is simply untrue. You mention the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire conquered parts of Africa and exported slaves, animals and raw materials to Rome itself. It exploited natives and founded colonies. In fact, travel for resources from far away places had been available since ancient times. There is evidence that the Vikings actually had trade routes from Newfoundland to what is now Norway. What you describe is not a new phenomenon.

This is also not the reason why African colonization happened. Mass Colonization of Africa in the 1870s was much more than a simple rush for resources. Which I will describe below.

Belgium was the first of these nations to industrialize, and they along with the other Great Powers of Europe met in Berlin to carve up the African continent between them. While Belgium is seen as a mild state on the same spectrum as Canada today, they were brutal colonizers. In the Congo, the regime of Belgian monarch King Leopold II’s Congo Free State is estimated to have caused half of the Congo basin’s population to die. Many more were mutilated by having their hands and feet chopped off if they failed to bring the colonizers the resources they required.

The most important event to mention is the 'Scramble for Africa', in which colonialism in Africa increased from 10% to 90% in the span of a few years. It did not occur because simply because of resources or technology. 10% of Africa was already colonized by the time the Scramble happened. What occurred was a result of international rivalries, Internal African Politics, Religious Expansion and prestige. It was a far more complex process.

While the historical anecdote provides color, it is ultimately irrelevant. Especially since you are only describing one nation in the morass of many. This is a problem, as the Scramble for Africa is the defining event of African colonialism. Without understanding its reasons, motivation and lasting impact, you cannot properly establish a thesis.

You brush over the reasons for colonialism of Africa with two paragraphs, one that is largely incorrect and another a horrific, but ultimately pointless story that deviates from your overall thesis.

This was a major international scandal at the time, but media sources then and now were less likely to publicize stories about the horrors of colonialism, such

You need to back up this statement with proper references. You cannot simply state it.

such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as they were to create endless stories and later films about properties such as Tarzan, showing a white man becoming one with the wild and unexplored jungle.

Heart of Darkness is an incredible indictment of colonialism written in the middle of the Scramble for Africa. You mention Tarzan but you absolutely miss one of the most important statements of colonialism in the West: Rudyard Kipling's "White Man's Burden". This was written in the Philippines, but it presents an important point about the mentality and justification of colonialism as the West's moral duty.

Not accurately portraying the proper motivations for colonialism and boiling it down to a resource rush is simply wrong. Colonialism was not only the extraction of resources, its motivations were exceedingly complex and lead by incorrect science and assumptions at the time.

If the average person were to know anything about famed explorer Henry Morton Stanley, it is far more likely to be the story of Dr. Livingston with the endlessly quoted line “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” than anything about his service to Leopold in mapping out the boundaries for the exploitative Congo Free State.

So it was this cultural miasma, filtered through generations of motion pictures glorifying the pith-helmet clad explorers slashing their way through unexplored jungle with their machetes in hand, acquiring amazing treasure and maybe saving a damsel in distress on the way out too.

You need to cite some of these films and overall public perception. One would be enough.

Even so, the films you are talking about resemble the films about the 1920s, when there was really no way of traveling to distant lands, so people had to simplify them and rely on unreliable tales. You're looking through the lens of a people who did not possess all the information. Regardless, David Crane was born in 1953, long after the era of these movies had passed.

If you want to make this assumption, you need to reference media he would have seen at the time. No one is going to take a movie from the silent or early film era seriously in 1953, especially seen as David was growing up in the golden age of Hollywood.

David Crane did not even need to think about the implications of what he was imagining, there was enough colonial imagery from media

he’d probably been absorbing for his entire life to fill in the blanks automatically.

Assumption without fact.

The protagonist of Crane’s Pitfall! is a little pixel man named Pitfall Harry. The instruction manual describes the setting as such: “Picture This! You are deep in the recesses of a forbidden jungle -- an unforgiving place which few explorers ever survive.” The treasures you can take her aren’t natural resources, but gold and jewels. Not just any wealth, but processed wealth. Diamond rings, Gold and Silver bars, and literal bags of cash money are available for Harry to collect and gain between 2000 and 5000 points per looting.

Throughout the game, most of the obstacles you face are the hostile wildlife in the jungle. Crocodiles, scorpions, poisonous Cobras, and other creatures block Harry’s progress at every turn. Pitfall Harry is the only living human you see directly at any point in the game, or in the instruction manual. However, there are clear signs that you are not the first person to be in this region. In terms of obstacles, there are plenty of barrels which are rolling in from just off-screen which must have been pushed by somebody.

Every screen in the game has some sort of underground passage, which would have taken extensive human labor and architectural knowledge to accomplish. Not to mention the ladders and brick walls which adorn these underground pathways. Whatever culture constructed the infrastructure Pitfall Harry is spelunking through, they were certainly a developed and intelligent culture in terms of their engineering prowess. That’s not to mention the fact that the wealth you find suggests that whoever owned it originally was fully capable of smelting and shaping ingots of precious metal.

Again, these are all assumptions. Not to mention, you say Harry is the only living human you see. This DIRECTLY CONTRADICTS your thesis on neo-colonialism, as the MOST IMPORTANT fact of colonialism was the devastation it wrought on its people.

Harry is just an explorer. He is not identified by any government. Therefore, he cannot claim any land. And since it directly references him as an explorer, he is not interested in claiming land.

Your colonialist argument was extremely tenuous before, but now it is broken. Because without people, there is no native harm to inflict. Without a government or private expedition, there can be no colonization.

Gold and Silver bars, as mentioned before, are some of the most common treasures the player can guide Pitfall Harry to loot. The diamond rings could have come straight out of a De Beers family diamond catalog. Not to mention the literal bags of cash, which suggests that in terms of its overall development the peoples who formerly inhabited this area were not only developed enough as a culture to have advanced engineering and smelting, but economic theory which had progressed to the point where paper currency was used alongside precious specie.

Once more, these are all assumptions. Never mind the fact that ancient civilizations have been plundered by all civilizations across the globe. This is not unique to the West. In Egypt, the tombs of the Pharaohs were rigged with traps so future grave robbers couldn't get to them. You posit this as somehow unique to the west but it isn't.

The implication here is clear: Pitfall Harry, whether he is being sponsored by a government or corporation back in his homeland, is a colonizer coming to a land which has been devastated by the usual tools of the colonizer - superior forces of arms, deadly disease, and enough crocodile-hide whips to make sure the entire population is so terrified that they will work themselves to death before they rise up and challenge their oppressors.

There are a few explanations for why there would be no human characters other than Harry. It would be implausible to state that this area is uninhabited, given that nearly every screen in the game has some evidence showing that Harry’s not the first one to come around these parts. Perhaps the people had advanced knowledge of his coming, and had hidden themselves to avoid being enslaved or killed. It is equally possible that they have already been wiped out by a deadly pandemic which devastated their population before the colonizers could even reach them. It could even be that the native inhabitants have been massacred already, and Harry is now being sent in to loot every piece of wealth which was missed by the first wave of death and desecration.

All assumptions without evidence. You cannot make up your own fiction and impose it on what is not there. That does not give it validity. There are no human enemies or other humans in the game, hence I could easily say the ancient civilization died out 1,000 years ago. And this was an island just found by Harry himself which is uninhabited. Or Harry was exploring and crashed on the island.

These explanations are just as valid, because as are yours, they are unsupported. The foundation of your argument rests on assumption and your own fiction not presented anywhere in the work.

In any case, it is not possible for the player to know. Their only task is to collect the treasure so that they may acquire victory. Pitfall! is very different from the arcade-based experiences offered by contemporary games such as Pole Position II or Ms. Pac-Man where the only real objective was to complete a repetitive task for a high score. Pitfall! is widely credited as having invented the side-scrolling genre of games, along with being one of the first to use a “Jungle” environment. Both the gameplay and the imagery of Pitfall! are still influencing the games which have been built atop its legacy. It’s interesting to note the game space of Pitfall! is universally referred to as a jungle environment even though there are plenty of man-made structures, not to mention the man-made wealth which is being seized by Pitfall Harry. This is a perfect example of how the media trivializes colonial imagery and downplays its significance.

Again, with no people, no government and no settlers, something cannot be colonized. As I said before, ancient cultures have been exploited by current cultures by every civilization on the planet. That is not colonization, because there is nothing to colonize.

You are twisting the ideas of colonization and imposing your own fiction in order to justify your thesis.

The fact that we have established the grim crimes against humanity which exported these tropes into our cultural consciousness and yet it still seems silly to speak about the game where the pixel man jumps over the crocodiles shows the level of indoctrination present in our “baseline” culture.

These are assumptions. Even in the Scramble for Africa, there were people who opposed it. There were people who said its horrors, but were powerless because of the absolute control of governments at the time. You cannot posit indoctrination when even in the era it occurred people were already identifying its horrific elements.

You also need to provide evidence for indoctrination. Where do we teach colonialism was good or not violent? Or where it didn't cause massive amounts of conflict and death?

Colonization has never been painted in a good light. You also don't consider the alternate: What you see is what you get. A pixel man that jumps over crocodiles. Nothing more, nothing less.

Games which draw from this legacy don’t tend to examine themselves and their thematic schematics critically, especially given how the descendants of the colonizers are more often target audiences for these games than the colonized.

This is a tangent.

The actions the player is permitted to take can encourage a colonial mindset and make them engage in exploitative behavior without questioning what it is they’re actually doing. You can see this even in the games which could be considered the contemporaries of Pitfall! in terms of when they were released, or by using the conventions pioneered by Crane. Games which have themes of singular explorers from a more advanced society coming to explore, exploit, or explode foreign lands include: “Metroid”, “The Adventures of Bayou Billy”, “Congo Bongo”, “Fantasy World Dizzy” all of which share these elements to some degree.

The inspiration was not always subtle, as in the case of “Montezuma’s Revenge” starring “Panama Joe” which depicts a grave-robber trying to steal as many valuables as possible from the ancient tomb of an imperial monarch. Just like in Pitfall!, you only win once you’ve taken all of the treasure, you don’t even have to get to a goal, taking all of the treasure in of itself is the only objective which must be achieved. Adventure Island plays like the logical next step to Pitfall! by taking place in a similar jungle environment in which a loincloth-clad white man skateboards through Africa consuming all of the food and killing wildlife indiscriminately. Many of these titles are remembered fondly as all-time classics for their respective platforms, era, and genre.

There are many more contemporary games that continue to draw from the same pitfall-laden legacy of David Crane’s creation. Thousands of kids grew up playing Oregon Trail on their Apple IIe’s in school computer labs, which is an unquestioning and uncritical endorsement of all that the white man benefitted from via manifest destiny. The people who lived on that land died from a lot worse than dysentery. The Pikmin franchise revolves around an alien military figure who militarizes a group of the native population in order so that he may divide and conquer the rest of the population in order to extract resources for his exclusive benefit. Procedurally generated exploration games like No Man’s Sky have core gameplay loops which revolve around visiting an endless number of planetoids inhabited by creatures with their own unique feelings, characteristics and personalities, then take everything you can away from them up to and including their lives.

Your thesis is on David Crane's Pitfall and colonial imagery. All of these are irrelevant. They're different than the game you are talking about. This needs to be severely cut down and presented in the conclusion as Pitfall's legacy. You spend more time talking about things that are not relevant to your thesis. Each of these could be a thesis on their own.

You are off topic here. This can be boiled down to a single small paragraph at the end of your paper. Nothing in this paragraph adds to your thesis or supports it.

There are also arcade games like Donkey Kong which while they are less obviously about exploitation, put their characters into situations which could only have occured in a colonial society in which wealth and exotic life have been stolen from their homeland and brought back at prizes shown off in the modern-day equivalent of the Roman triumph.

The titular Donkey Kong is an animal brought back from a colonial holding to show off to the people, escaping and kidnapping a white woman who has to be rescued by one of the burly blue-collar colonizers. It is directly inspired by King Kong, so much so that Universal pictures decided to sue them but lost due to the fact that Universal had previously released the picture into the public domain.

There are many adventure pictures in the public domain, the aforementioned swashbuckling machete-wielding conquerors.
Not every game is a colonial experience that cannot be enjoyed without the controller leaving some blood on the player’s hands. Simulation games such as Theme Park, Theme Hospital, SimCity and Nintendogs take great logical leaps to classify as being directly inspired by colonial themes or having problematic aspects to their gameplay.

There are even some titles such as Victoria II in which you could argue that, because the game allows you the freedom to play as the colonized nations and turn the tables on the oppressors, the equality of perspectives provided is an acknowledgement of the plight of colonized people and at the very least, by allowing you to play as them it gives them a voice which has otherwise been snuffed out of many historical records and the media of contemporary culture.

More tangents and points unrelated to Pitfall. You need to stick to the game you are talking about. You are going all over the place. You don't even stick to the proper era.

But it is not just games which feed the unending hunger for colonial media in Western culture. A feature film inspired by these same cultural influences is Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. The film raised the profile of the lone adventurer going to exotic lands to the extent that it boosted Pitfall!’s popularity and the visibility of media like it within the wider mass cultural consciousness.

Finally, we're starting to get back to salient points. This should have been way, way up in the Introduction, not near the end of the paper.

Despite the game crash of 1983, Pitfall Harry was still well-known to the point where he was given a starring role in seven episodes of the animated Saturday Supercade children’s show. Pitfall Harry’s is depicted as running around with a whip like he’d just got back from King Leopold’s Congo.

Unjustified Assumption.

The whip has long been a symbol of colonial power, fictional heroes like Indiana Jones use it to swing across gaps and keep enemies at bay. But historically, those who wielded whips used them to demonstrate their power. The slave owning plantation-owner class of the American South were infamous for beating their slaves to death or leaving them carrying thick scars for the rest of their lives.

Again, these are points that could have supported your arguments. Why are they down at the end of the paper in the discussion?

Future Fûhrer of Germany Adolf Hitler had a habit of carrying a whip around in his younger years in order to beat up anybody weaker than he was to impress his strength upon girls.

You go from colonialism to talking about WWII. How Adolf Hitler uses a whip is irrelevant in terms of colonial power. He could have used the whip in a sadistic manner to derive sexual pleasure, not any manner to punish. This is irrelevant.

Media glorifying colonial imagery are some of the most consistently profitable pieces of popular art both in the time of Pitfall! to our present day.

These need sources.

The release of Pitfall! was one of the first big third-party hits for the Atari 2600. The television advertisements for Pitfall! feature a 13 year old Jack Black, making his acting debut on the silver screen.

This is information for the introduction, why is it by the conclusion?

In 2017, Jack Black starred in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle which was followed by Jumanji: The Next Level in 2019. Both titles mix the pith-helmet clad explorers of old with modern video game tropes we would have seen in titles like Pitfall!, Adventure Island, Jungle Hunt, and more modern titles like the latest Animal Crossing game. Another sequel is more likely than not coming soon, given that these pictures have made hundreds of millions of dollars.

Again, you need to stick to Pitfall.

Underneath all of the hype, pomp, and circumstance, at the core of each of these games is the same alienating, exploitative loop: Parallel experiences depicting the barren emptiness of dead societies where disease has wiped out aboriginal populations, leaving nothing but wreckage and ruin to explore and loot. Once the blood has dried, the treasure chests emptied and the resource tiles tapped out, all that is left is the hollowed-out void.

'Other games', again. Pitfall. Also, you're making assumptions. Perhaps why these games didn't include natives is that they didn't want to be offensive. They wanted to create a fun, entertaining experience sans the element of human suffering. That they were puzzles used with the theme of exploration. The bags of money and diamonds simply represented the paint used, and gave the player a graphical reward instead of just being a random shape. Every paper needs to provide an alternate hypothesis and possibly why that isn't the case.

You have not proven any of this. All these are are baseless assumptions from which you draw conclusions from without proper evidence.

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So all in all, I found this to be a very poor paper. The major problems are as follows: You go off on tangents on games that are far more complex and try to make points that could be papers in their own rights. You do not correctly identify the reasons for the colonialist expansion of the 1870s. You incorrectly assume that the West was only guilty of colonization and exploitation of resources when this was done earlier than the Roman Empire. You make wild assumptions that are not supported and could be easily as valid as anyone else's. Robbing ancient civilizations does not constitute colonization, as colonization is the taking and occupying of territory.

You need to stick to Pitfall. You need to source your examples properly. You have to stop making assumptions that are not supported by either primary sources or secondary sources. You have to properly place information in the paper in its proper order. You have points you could make, but you gloss over them.

The tangents on other games will lose the reader. My biggest question was, "Why am I reading about these other games?" and "Where are the sources?" You cannot make a statement without sourcing it. 'Pith Helmets and Machetes and rescuing the damsel in distress' needs a source, no matter how trivial you think it is.

This is the major problem with the humanities. Their sourcing is poor and they rely too much on assumptions that anyone can make. I didn't read anything here that couldn't be countered by a simple layman explanation. Its a weak thesis with weak evidence.

There’s nothing I love more than being held accountable, I am stoked to read this when ha e time to really sit down and see what you have to say!!!! Thank you so so much for your time and expertise!!!!!!