Materials:Modified Mac OSX computer-game software.

With this project I modified and hacked the code of a simple breakout game program so that the graphics for the gameplay are completely removed and replaced solely with rectangle frames, representing the areas of the "dirty rects" occurring during the gameplay. To do this I removed the graphics from the game's resources and then changed parts of the code in the main graphical routine, which calls all other drawing routines, I also checked which areas were 'dirty'. Instead of calling the 'sub-routines' I obtained the list of the dirty-rectangles and drew them.

This is a term that comes from a very common technique used to increase the efficiency of graphical updates on computer game software (and other software), and therefore to increase the frame rate of the game for an improved graphical experience. With this technique rather than redrawing the pixels of the entire screen, only the areas in which changes have occurred get redrawn. Many players of games are not aware of the technical trickery used to enhance gameplay. Complex technical devices, like computers, are typical trends of technology in that the processes at work are invisible to consumers, and most of them are happily unconcerned with what happens behind the scenes of the user interface.
With this modification, green rectangles are drawn for each area of the screen, which should receive a graphical update. In doing this, what is considered a technical solution for increasing performance, becomes an aesthetic, the generative system behind the visuals. The hidden code and algorithms are visually decoded, brought out of a computational black box and presented as a compelling, abstract foreground. The modified graphics also represent the history of the dynamics of movements (graphical changes) occurring during the user’s interaction with the game. Thus reworking the time based elements of the original graphics, from that discrete separated time elements, into one of a continuous compression and assemblage of time onto itself. During the gameplay if a life is lost the screen will reset itself and remove this history of graphical changes, but this because after a life is lost, the whole screen happens to get classified as a dirty rect. The rest of the gameplay is unchanged and works the same, only the graphical representation has been hacked. For example, they score board and high score tables remain. The wall can get demolished, things fall, the bat changes size, things speed up and the player can still progress through the levels. As for aspects that are changed, the bricks do not get shown, start game as a rectangle and remain invisible until hit by a ball, slowly the screen gets filled with the trace of these dynamically shifting rectangles, what increasingly makes difficult to perceive what is what, transforming a technique, meant to increase the game players pleasure from the game into one which frustrates, confuses and causes them to lose the game at an early stage. Dirty rectangles get drawn for the following game graphics: Background image, bricks, balls, bats, falling objects, explosions of bricks when hit, and magic stars which fly out when the bats collect a falling object.