[SIGCIS-Members] Opinions on "Spacewar" vs. "Spacewar!"

[thomas.haigh at gmail.com]

Hello SIGCIS,

 

I'm canvassing opinion on a small topic, as I work with Paul Ceruzzi to
finalize revisions on the revised History of Modern Computing. 

 

There are a lot of style choices like FORTRAN vs Fortran, Internet vs
internet, etc. where dominant usage has evolved over the past twenty years,
generally in the clear direction of not capitalizing things that aren't
acronyms. We're planning to follow that, while still capitalizing Internet
and Web to respect the historical context.

 

On the other hand, since the first edition the pioneering PDP-1 video game
formerly known as Spacewar has grown an exclamation point to become
Spacewar!. This causes problems with punctuation, as in the previous
sentence. It did not have one in either of the accounts that made it famous,
Levy's Hackers (1984) and Brand's 1972 article "SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and
Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums." So one might assume that any
punctuation attached to it in its original MIT incarnation had fallen by the
wayside as it spread. The original Modern History followed this
then-standard usage.

 

Wikipedia now has the exclamation point, and so does the Computer History
Museum: https://www.computerhistory.org/pdp-1/spacewar/. The Smithsonian
appears to have endorsed it in its writeup of the NMAH anniversary event,
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-first-popular-vid
eo-game-kicked-off-generations-virtual-adventure-180971020/. 

 

So I assume that this general shift must reflect some kind of movement in
video game studies to reattach a lost piece of punctuation.

 

On the other hand, there's a precedent for not using an exclamation point in
books or articles even when it is part of a company self presentation:
Yahoo!! (The second exclamation point there is my own excitement). The
company used it consistently, but the AP Style Guide tells journalists to
drop it when writing about Yahoo. We're following that in the revised
history.

 

So I'm torn about whether to follow the trend and use "Spacewar!"
throughout, despite the punctuation problems it causes, or to apply the same
logic as Yahoo and use "Spacewar" with an initial parenthetical observation
that the official name is "Spacewar!".

 

Best wishes,


Tom

 

 

 

 

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