Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 1
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After Life History: An Interview with Raiford Guins on his "Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife" / by Samuel Tobin
Raiford Guins is a professor of culture and technology in the Department of Cultural Analysis and Theory at Stony Brook University, he is also a curator of the William A. Higinbotham Game Studies Collection there. In his new book Game After, Guins draws on both of his professional roles, bringing a curator’s concerns to game and design history and a historian’s and critic’s attention to bear on game collections and collectors. Game After arrives at critical moment in the study of games, one in which the status of games themselves, as well as the means and methods best suited to addressing them is up for debate. In Game After, Guins shows us how we might begin to think not just historically but also critically about what games are and what their histories could be.
Recon: You (in Game After and elsewhere) make a strong argument for the importance of history to game studies, what about the reverse? What does game studies, as an object or subject area, its nascent methods, means or style offer history in general? What of histories of technology or science, cultural history or the like?
RG: I’m heavily invested in asking: “What are the modes and methods of historiography for the critical study of games?” It seems to me that while “histories of games” and “game history” are being written there is less evidence to suggest a willing engagement with the important question of “what is it to do historical research” within the scholarly study of games and its institutionalization. In Game After (GA) I rattle off a series of basic questions to ask what constitutes game history: Is it studies and stories of hardware and software? Developers and designers? Game play and gamers? Platforms? Companies? Etc. We can observe a number of instances where lines like “I aim to write a history of . . .” exist and, no doubt, will persist. But I’m much more interested in exploring the theoretical and methodological frameworks that occur prior to, while continuing to influence, such a line. That is to say, how a conceptual framework shapes the histories being constructed and the objects and events being pointed at as “historical.” To evaluate the current state of game history I would argue that we — those invested in the field) don’t need “more history” but would benefit greatly from better historiography.
“Better” is such a volatile, slippery, if not, entirely loaded term. I’ll run that risk to say that “better,” to me at least, consists of actions that seek to untangle, and to then re-entangle, historical narratives that have all-too-easily calcified into a narrow perspective — game-centric, design-centric, invention-centric, innovation-centric, user-centric — of the past that regards the task of the historian to be one of endless surveying to populate a pre-established record rather than the labor of careful research, contextualization, theorization, and argumentation. “Better” historiography seeks collisions not continuity, it aims to disrupt not perpetuate. Reflecting on questions of methodology is one means to make the doing of game history a more productive problematic for scholarly introspection. Game historians, like historians in other fields, must be aware of their methods in order to define and re-define their objects of study. To “What is Game History?” I would now add, “What is the task of the Game Historian”? Part of that task ought to be interventionist— an interposition into how game history is currently being practiced.
At the History of Games Conference in Montreal (History of Games International Conference, June 21 – 23, 2013) Melanie Swalwell gave an amazing keynote on the practice of writing game histories — as one of four organizers I now regret that we didn’t devote the entire conference to this practice. She is invested in asking what rhetorical styles and methods — her emphasis was on “non-traditional forms” — are being utilized and, most importantly, why. She draws heavily from Benjamin’s historical methods to posit that rhetorical style is a methodology for shaping the study of any historical object, and that writing ought to be an object of analysis for those of us interested in game historiography. Asking what “game history might look like” is a vital and reflective question that needs to occur before writing history commences. I don’t think that such questions have been asked enough when I read many works devoted to the subject of game history. The game historian has largely made the telling and re-telling of factual accounts their sole interruptive prerogative.
The “reverse”? As Game Studies continues to grow, especially with more archival materials becoming available to researchers, we are bound to see game history studied within and via the methodologies and theories found in History of Technology, Science and Technology Studies, Cultural History, Social History, as you mention — and let’s hope that such work will constitute the interdisciplinary conjuncture that your question seems to suggest. I have no idea what that will entail but I am excited to see the results.
I will say that I’ve been very pleased by the welcomed inclusion that my work on the history of Tennis For Two has received at the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). This will prove incredibly supportive given the subject of my next book— I plan to write a “pre-history” of Tennis For Two tentatively entitled, Tennis For Two, or the Love of Analog Technology. In addition, my graduate student Laine Nooney has presented her work on Roberta Williams and Sierra On-Line at SHOT two years running. She’s helped keep the history of women and computing, and now games, on the agenda at SHOT’s annual conference. The gaining of a footprint would be one response to your question — important within an organization like SHOT whose journal, Culture and Technology, has only paid scant attention to the history of games within its pages that date back to 1959.
In thinking through your question I should also mention that when I write an article-length piece on games my first instinct – given my research interests – is not a Game Studies or even New Media journal but one devoted to Design Studies. My work is more at home, more in-line with questions and debates, had in those pages than in Game Studies or Games and Culture. This is not criticism directed at either journal — in fact, I’ve just recently published a short piece in Game Studies — it’s based upon the audience that my work on material game history resonates with best and the types of questions that I am interested in pursuing.
In 2014 (schedule pending) I plan to write an article on game consoles, industrial design, and the socio-political context of the mid-1970s in the U.S. In the early stages of planning this work I immediately envisioned the Journal of Design History as a potential home. If Design Studies, or even Material Culture Studies, appear to be “margins” to Game Studies will work drawing from such fields find its way back to the “center”? What of the “reverse”? Will Game Studies, then, find its way onto the radar of Design Studies? I am surprised to see that Bloomsbury Press’s new Iconic Designs: 50 Stories about 50 Things does not include a single chapter on a game console, handheld, arcade cabinet, or even a game for that matter. Surely the joystick for the Atari VCS, or Nintendo Game Pad, has some iconic currency?
Recon: How do you see this book in terms of other scholarly work on museums? How do you see museum and collection studies today? How do you think of museums in general? Do you see museums as social, cultural or bureaucratic insertions? As sites of knowledge production or memory work?
Figure 1
RG: Museums are machinery to still life.
I am very curious to see how GA will be received within Museum Studies as well as Material Culture Studies, and Design Studies. I have a habit of writing books that defy categories for booksellers, which I credit to my graduate training at the University of Leeds in the 1990s when caught in the syzygy of Cultural Studies, Visual Culture Studies, and Critical Theory. This has certainly been the case for Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control and The Object Reader. GA only carries the designator, “Game Studies” when I rarely, if ever, discuss “a game” if we understand that to consist of an executable program, hardware, interface, and power source. Are “ex-games” an object for study in Game Studies? Are, for that matter, cardboard boxes? Is landfill trash? Are museum objects? Ruinous remains? Being practical, I could say they are now given the book’s dust cover and publisher. I would’ve loved to have “Material Culture” and “Museum Studies” accompany “Game Studies,” but a dust cover can only carry so much weight. I’ve come to realize that I’m much more comfortable regarding my research as cultural studies of technology. It just so happens that my interests in material culture takes the form of game artifacts, and my interest in Game Studies is on material history. But I should ask: would those fields welcome such a project? The danger of multi-disciplinary work is always “fitting in” be it within: a dissertation committee, academic department, tenure file, or publisher’s catalog. Having said that, I certainly hope that GA is read by people who work at and write about museums.
GA shares many interests with Museum Studies as I found myself immersed within the work of writers like Hilde S. Hein, Sandra H. Dudley, Ross Parry, Steven Conn, Philip Fisher, Peter Vergo, and, of course, Susan M. Peirce plus many more. The fieldwork basis of GA also put me in direct contact with curators involved with exhibition practice, game preservation, as well as working with the challenges of documenting a game type, moments in game history, or game design and designers. While emulation, recreation, and migration have caught the headlines when discussing the challenges of variable media within museums, I wanted to examine those objects that seemed to receive less attention: the inclusion of “physical objects” like storage media, game consoles, arcade cabinets, and packaging, within the exhibition spaces of museums to ask what role these objects play in documenting and evidencing game history.
Having spent a number of years visiting all types of museums to write GA, I would offer just a half sketched, off the cuff remark here on the question of “museums in general” only as they relate to collections of video games. I am less excited about the art museum collecting and displaying games, or games being placed within that context, than I am about other types of institutions managing game collections. Given the extraordinary curatorial practices I’ve witnessed at the Computer History Museum and Strong National Museum of Play, I think that the “art museum” is, well, a little late to the game.
The bigger problem is the conventional approach it takes to curating its games. Screenshots or playable installations to show “games as art” or “games as good design” leave a very bad taste in my mouth when the historical medium responsible for that screen is absent. Visit MOMA to experience Pac-Man stripped bare of everything except a controller and a plasma screen turned into a frameless picture affixed within a dark grey wall (Figure 1). The art museum sucks the life out of the game in my mind at least. Aren’t we over minimalism in museums? The Strong National Museum of Play is an entirely different story. It is invested heavily in artifacts and context not the work itself as a possessor of some type of inherent value.
Figure 2
At Strong you will see Pac-Man in its coin-op cabinet form, you will play it alongside other machines in a recreated arcade. You will also see the various versions that this game has taken— a cartridge for the Atari VCS and its original package, plus handheld versions of the game. These material forms matter, and I feel that one is only receiving a small part of the story of Pac-Man when playing “the game” reduced to a screen cut into a wall. In fact, I’m not entirely sure what one takes away when playing a game at MOMA. No one I’ve witnessed really plays the games. Controllers are quickly fiddled with and the screen is looked at as visitors then move on to look at other objects of design displayed on MOMA’s 3rd floor. A dynamic digital form has been curated into a painting (minus the gilded frame reserved for masterpieces). The old modernist belief in “attention” devours a lively artform; in the case of the coin-op version of Pac-Man displayed at MOMA that means transplanting the game from its cabinet to a wall. Is it that difficult to place a coin-op cabinet on the floor next to MOMA’s Pac-Man interactive installation? Is the cabinet or cartridge package dismissed as “decorative” or “commercial” art, hence an unwelcome sight at West 53rd? Or, is “game art,” or “games as art” only computer graphics within such institutions, not lines of code, cabinet artwork, or the industry design of consoles?
Recon: Is media afterlife always macabre? I'm thinking of the images you give us torn from pulps: Dexter Ward, undead, reanimated, Dr. Labyrinth's machine as failed/flawed transfiguration matrix. Is the arcade undead? What might this mean?
RG: I was first attracted to the notion of “undead media” when writing about the afterlife of Ms. Pac Man for Vectors Journal in an essay entitled “Ms. Pac Man: An Elegy for the Undead”[1).Then such a term was offered as a counterpoint to Bruce Sterling’s “dead media” project. While researching the various versions of Ms. Pac Man that the game has endured since its coin-op cabinet, I stumbled upon an online article devoted to the “last new Ms. Pac Man,” a warehouse find in Dallas, TX of a factory sealed machine. This really was the moment that forced me to begin thinking about the various situations that objects experience across their life cycle. That piece was written in 2005 and published in 2006. A few years later Elizabeth Guffey invited me to contribute to Design and Culture “In Memoriam” section. This is where I published: “Concrete and Clay: The Afterlife and Times of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari Video Computer System.”
I am briefly reflecting upon these two articles because each required a specific tone given their conceptualization and, in the case of Design and Culture, the section within the journal that the piece would appear. The first was an “elegy” which lamented that Ms. Pac Man was not bestowed the same Quadranscentennial celebrations received by “her” other half, Pac-Man in 2005. It felt fitting to adopt an elegy for this particular game, one that I still enjoy playing in its coin-op form. But also because the poetic tone common to an elegy seemed appropriate for remembrance. For Atari’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and in particular its landfill history an elegy didn’t really capture the sentiment that I was hoping to achieve! Design and Culture’s “In Memoriam” serves as a “design eulogy” for the journal and prior to my contribution Will Straw wrote on the CD—talk about a tough act to follow! A “eulogy” differs slightly from an “elegy” in that the previous offers public praise. This too may seem odd but I took the opportunity to “appraise” the life history of a flawed game—in terms of the economics of the games industry crash but also a cultural appraisal of the values of the dumping for game history (something discussed at length in GA). Crafting my objects via these particular writing styles provided me with access points to the material histories that interest me the most—the ways in which things remain.
Here’s where the macabre enters: I think that the macabre plays an important role for attempting to distinguish a particular material view of the afterlife. Many religious or spiritual systems of beliefs separate the material vessel i.e. the body from the soul; it’s the latter, the non-material form, that ascends, or enters into a myth of peaceful eternity—be it the Elysian Fields, Valhalla, Olam Haba, Heaven, or Sto-vo-kor for Klingons. Materiality is left behind, shed, often in a ritual of earthly return or disposal (for example) cremation, or acid in gangster movies. The macabre, however, doesn’t imagine a clear separation from materiality and some type of essential being released from physical imprisonment. The haunting or abject quality of a remaining thing is that its material confines aren’t shed but persist in the slow process of decay. And I think that we can see the attraction of a concept like “zombie media” in this instance—the reanimated material form caught in a loop of perpetual withering not death. While it’s not the case that the afterlife has to be framed in such horrific guises, or let’s just say, material remains, I do feel more comfortable working with and through materiality rather than soul-catching a game’s essence. I should add one additional point that I find necessary: I was attracted to Dick’s “The Preserving Machine” not on account of its rather monstrous and violent entities but because the short story demonstrates that enduring material life cycles do not conform to our desire and memory. I read Dick’s short story as anti-nostalgia (or a comment on nostalgia’s danger) in that our memory of a particular thing is but one moment in a broader semiotic, taxonomic, material life cycle. Objects acquire history and find themselves in and out of situations that precede and exceed us. We perform a disservice to contemporary and future history if we force “the past” into a hope chest while ignoring all of “the stuff” that doesn’t conform to our happy memories. Dick’s story shows us that the preservation of culture may not necessarily take the forms that we remember, or desire in the present, but that we have to attend to them regardless.
Is the “arcade undead”? The experience of “playing coin-op games from the 70s, 80s, and 90s at an arcade” is increasingly, for the most part, becoming a journey to a cultural institution, or annual event rather than to a local arcade. Today, and tomorrow, these are the places one will have to traipse to in order to work on coin-op arcade video games. I do think that it’s fair to say that a specific cultural and historical form has seen its better days and is, at best, barely limping by but that’s not to say that other forms — i.e. versions, iterations, recreations, revisions, migrations — aren’t coming online. It is also the case that those remaining arcades — I’m thinking of the Redondo Pier in particular – today display diverse socio-ethnic groups in ways that nostalgia for the 1980s rarely does.
To say that one “works on video game arcades” is not to close oneself off to how that institution persists at present as well as how it has been transformed. Sam, I think that your study of the “arcade mode” in contemporary game play is one exciting direction to address the question of transformation, or, better yet, remediation. In regards to that vanishing form that continues to capture the imagination of many, the social institution that pushed pinball to the periphery to make room for interactive CRT cabinets beginning in the 1970s, I’d like to also see research that explores the arcade as a social place like other shrinking institutions such as record stores, video-stores, drive-ins, and porn theatres and shops. I think that these transitory places for experiencing media — (for example) the porn video booth — are begging to be reexamined today in the moment of media archaeology exuberance. So Game Studies will have its hands full with the arcade if we commit to researching its past iterations while not ignoring those remaining, restored, and re-imagined machines and the multifarious experiences they co-shape at present.
Recon: Don Ihde's concept of multistability is clearly important to you and to Game After, but I wonder if ideas like the ex-handaxe or ex-space invader doesn’t close down the very phase you want to open up (Ihde, 72). Or is that phrase also always already en route to one in which it could become an axe or a game? Or space invaders again by being rebuilt, fixed-up, parted out, replayed? If so then aren't you really changing our understanding of the play phase of the life of video games as much (or more than) the after-lives?
RG: I turned to Ihde’s concept of multistability to learn how to address the daunting question of the “singular” v. “serial,” a way to think about the differences between the “same”— how the “same” game can find itself within different often contradictory hermeneutic systems. I’ll clarify: What is the difference between “my” Sony PlayStation 3 resting in my Eames repro case-study media cabinet and the one I look at in the Computer Games Gallery at the Computer History Museum? Specimens in a natural history museum don’t really demand such a question. I doubt that anyone reading this owns a sperm whale bone similar to one found in the skeleton of a 58-feet sperm whale at the Natural History Museum of New York’s Whales: Giants of the Deep exhibition. Games are newcomers to the status of “museum object” — something that has only occurred in the last 20 years but has recently gained momentum and public notoriety — and, for now, we are looking at and possibly even playing “game artifacts” at a museum that we already own at home or have owned recently.
This is indeed an intriguing moment that we currently occupy when our “new media” are placed in the institutional spaces often reserved for the ancient, that which has passed, and, is now considered old (when our games shift from consumer objects to museum objects). Games occupy diverse and multiple taxonomic situations. Multistability allows me to examine the “use context” of my PS3 while it functions as a “game system” — an object in a stable array as ANT would say — and, simultaneously as it happens, as a “museum object” out of reach behind glass, displayed as an interactive installation, and now part of an entirely different network of meanings (Law, 93). In ANT an object is dependent on a stable network to remain as that object. John Law’s work on Portuguese naval vessels, as one example among many, illustrates this well: “The vessel is an effect of its relations with other entities, and the job of ANT is to explore the strategies which generate – and are in turn generated by – its object-ness, the syntaxes or the discourses which hold it in place” (Law 93). But what of the object should a network change? Then the object too is changed. But what about “the same” object caught in two radically different networks? Is this simply a matter of variations of the same? Or, do competing systems/structures/situations/contexts yield a different object? To claim multistabilities of a PS3 allows one to address the diverse contexts/situations formative of the thing identified as a PS3. This is necessary in order to value differences so that the common question “What is a game” is always hinged to “When is a game” across specific situations that impact upon how we can know a game. I mimic Ihde’s “ex-handaxe” with “ex-game” to draw out a distinction between, in the case of my example here, a PS3 in the “use-context” of its product life designed for playing games and the “museum context” where it now functions within a specific curatorial script where play may not be possible. Turning to multistability isn’t solely to increase the litany of intellectual tools available by which to redescribe games and game history, it is necessary, as one means of course, due to obsolescence and the enormous challenges to preservation that the digital medium poses. We will increasingly need alternative vocabularies when games cease to resemble their former selves, otherwise we won’t have much to say.
This is precisely why I also draw heavily from Philip Fisher’s concept of the “resocialization of an object” when examining the problematic of “video games in museums” (Fisher 10). Fisher’s emphasis that the prior socializations of an object — his leading example is an ancient sword — are silenced or impossible to script in a museum demonstrates that different values, features, meanings, and characteristics of an object may be revealed when resocialized within that space and system. While we cannot, Fisher argues, know whether or not a sword was a “good sword” in battle we can access the object as a “museum specimen” where and when “latent characteristics” become visible. Ihde’s concept of multistability benefits greatly when addressed via historical analysis — see his chapter on the bow-under-tension in Experimental Phenomenology 2nd Edition, 2012. And my goal was to try and create an opening to further examine video games when we’ve dedicated a great deal of attention to only two specific situations in their overall and general life cycle: development and play. A broader vocabulary for the historian as well as the curator is crucial so that an RCA Studio II isn’t just cream-colored plastic failure compared to the Atari VCS but a technological artifact representative of industrial design, a then new medium with specific design affordances, as well as specimen of early home console gaming. Tracking life cycles to address specific situations is a means to enable more histories to be written that intentionally break the constraints of existing game history. Multistability is a means to “open up” conversations, to investigate past and present trajectories.
I should also add, and this speaks directly to your interests in the “play phase” of a game’s life cycle, that situations are not by any means stable or infinite. An object may “slip” or “spring” in and out of specific situations across its life cycle. The shifts between and across specific situations are really fascinating. For example, and to speculate, what about those coin-ops locked away in storage all year long until unveiled for a weekend at California Extreme? They are only, if this were the case, played for, let’s just say, 3 days out of the year. However if we are to hold to a definition of a video game as a machine that comes into being when “powered up and software is executed” then what do we have on our hands here? The other 360 plus days they are unplugged and crammed into a warehouse— where does play factor in this situation? Of course, over that weekend in July they are resocialized into a play space and as play-things. Then, as closing time draws near on Sunday, they are, we may say, “desocialized” into the stasis of storage until next year. I think that play, no doubt crucial in Game Studies, I won’t dispute that whatsoever, is but one formative agent and condition tied to specific moments across a life cycle. Should we regard this situation and practice as conclusive, we then lose ways of examining games when they can no longer conform to or be enacted within these conditions. Multistability – particularly when called upon to assist with life history – reminds us that games are technologies, interactive, playable media, designed things, but also, and at the same time, objects that wear and may no longer be able to perform as hardware and software. What then? Do we say the “game is over”? Or, do we work to understand a new and different situation? I prefer the latter.
Recon: The research and I presume concurrent writing of this book was pretty long, six years. What changed beneath your feet in terms of the phases, “afters” and practices of collection, preservation, memorialization and preservation during that time?
RG: In GA I discuss the importance of finding the drawer of red buttons for historical research so I won’t replay that tune here. I will, however, touch upon a different change that derailed my earliest conceptualization of what became GA. I originally set out to tackle the question of sentimentality and aging games in a book-length project. I wanted to directly examine the emotional attachment players have to so-called “classic” games, the motivations behind collecting, organizing events to have hands-on access to games, and the care found in collector’s conservation practices. The topic of conservation stuck with me but not as originally intended. As it happens, my discovery of the Preserving Virtual Worlds project in 2009 immediately compelled me to radically overhaul (i.e. toss out) my original interests. Learning about game preservation — especially inhabiting worlds, debates, questions, and vocabularies often reserved for library and information science, archivists, and curators — exploded my world greatly as I quickly saw their practices as ones wrestling with the ontology, epistemology, and phenomenology of games, and, equally important, that one’s personal experience, attachment, and memories of play mean little to posterity unless recorded. If GA achieves anything I hope that its readers will forge deeper links between historians, curators, archivists, preservationists, and conservators. That’s the Game Studies that I want to inhabit.
Recon: What do you make of the new crop of arcades like Barcade, Dave and Busters, Galloping Ghost or Mission Control? Do you, along with California Extreme, see Dave and Busters as being focused on redemption games and cheap toys or are they arcades to you? What do you think of Family Entertainment Centers, of their histories and their relation (now) to game history and historians? What of their cooler cousins, the hipster bar arcades?
RG: I’m not sure that I actually share the position of California Extreme. I was only attempting to establish the motivation for the organizer’s annual exhibition and why they distinguish their event from contemporary public gaming institutions (franchises like Dave & Busters for example). The question is, nonetheless, relevant to my project. One the one hand, I think we make a mistake when we privilege (maybe even fetishize) the “original arcade experience” compared to new (and different) manifestations today. I’m sure that pinball enthusiasts balk at coin-op arcade video game players boasting about “back in the day”. Perhaps strength-tester or love-tester electro-mechanical enthusiasts return a stern glance to those pinball wizards’ claims of “OG” (original-gamer). The point being: the social space of the arcade is not medium specific and its definitions shift over time via the new media, cultural practices, and social experiences (and let’s also add locations) that help define that heterogeneous space. One major difference that I should acknowledge – and one that does favor the California Extreme mission – resides in the games themselves. Today’s arcade games don’t appeal to me. I feel that they’ve become too formulaic, banal, reduced to monstrous driving and dancing simulators, shooters, mock-band, and hunting games. Not really my taste as a player. As a historian I do think that these spaces require attention. Now, on the other hand, I do value the coin-op video game arcade and feel that as an institution, industry, and social experience that it does require attention within the field of Game Studies. What I would very much like to see is less nostalgic undertakings and more historical documentation that accesses public records, manufacturing, distribution, operators and owners. This, to me at least, is crucial and will not be an easy task given the liquidation of the coin-op industry in North America. Hopefully game historians will begin to seek out former arcade owners to conduct oral histories as well as oral histories from those who gamed in arcades. This is something to which I’d like to contribute.
My thoughts on Barcade…never wise to place a drink holder next to a coin-op arcade videogame. Water damage can be severe to the long-term care of a wooden cabinet.
Recon: I know from working with you on The New Everyday that you have a personal interest in collecting, in that case records but I'm going to go out and limb and guess other media as well. How do you think and feel through the process of work and leisure. Is this research or shopping? How do you navigate this divide or gap personally? Professionally? Is this a source of pleasure, anxiety, inspiration?
RG: Right off the bat I’ll distinguish between managing a historical collection from personal collecting. The former is a professional service – requiring training – to assist research and provide access to materials within a collection while the latter is autodidactic, wrapped up in personal identity and experience, emotional relations to objects, and more often than not a private exercise without measures taken to ensure public accessibility.
I also wish to state that cultural institutions are not the only stakeholders in game history and preservation and that the private collectors that I interviewed for GA are very much experts and leaders in their areas of preservation, restoration, and conservation. Collaboration between these groups is necessary and something I very much support and wish to help facilitate in any way that I can. It was important in GA not to privilege cultural institutions at the expense of those long-standing efforts by individuals, groups, and organizations working outside of “official” institutions. I sincerely hope that GA can be looked upon as showcasing both groups within its overall project.
Ok…onto the other side of your question. I don’t personally collect video games. That’s more of, shall we say, a perk of the profession. I too will go out a limb here to say that a “collector mentality” does somewhat play into my research when fully immersed in a subject—no matter the cost, time, and labor involved. I guess you could say that collecting primes a disposition (and care of the object-self) to regard work as an act of labor/leisure. I thoroughly enjoyed researching and writing GA. I cannot say that about other works of mine. I suspect that this feeling stems from walking among such rich collections—it’s one thing to view game cartridge box scans at MobyGames and another thing to witness the physical objects wrap along the walls in one of the Strong Museum’s storage facilities.
I could also say that the WHGSC owes a lot to my time on eBay—in the beginning its collection of hardware and software was basically the stuff that I amassed for purposes of research and teaching. The print collection is a different story as we (Kristen Nyitray and I) felt that we could stabilize and support a collection of print materials much better than hardware and software given the infrastructure at Stony Brook University. Looking back, I think that I was buying at the right time—copies of Playmeter Magazine now sell for $70.00 an issue! I guess academics alongside private collectors and those at cultural institutions (perhaps the same entity) have driven up the market for sticky nicotine infused copies of old trade magazines.
I would describe my personal relation to collecting as much more of a source of anxiety than pleasure or inspiration when it comes to my professional status. Unlike U.S. Cultural Studies turn to popular culture and “pleasure” in the 1990s, I have always resisted this particular embrace. I’ve intentionally forced a barrier between my non-academic interests from what I regard as professional research. I neither feel that such interests must be treated with the same critical rigor one reserves for research, nor do I feel obliged to turn all of my “hobbies” into my professional work. So I think it’s fair to say that I “navigate” that divide by not being an AcaFan…or said in another way, I really don’t find my collecting all that interesting to share with others within a professional setting (the piece I did for The New Everyday is my one exception that I felt really fit the cluster).
An apprehension does exist for me between collecting (and I’ll include fandom here) and, at the risk of a second loaded term, “serious” scholarship. While collecting primes one (emotionally) for sustained commitment to an object of interest it’s not exactly what I would describe as a “critical engagement”. I am not saying that collecting cannot make such a leap into intellectual labor but that to do so, should one even wish to in the first place, requires that an imposition of scrutiny and self-reflexivity be placed on one’s own workaday practices so that they can become a means to an ends different from acquisition, care, ownership, and trophy mantels. Collectors and fans can speak copiously about their interests and the things that they own (or would like to own) but I do worry when devotion, enthusiasm, and the specific types of knowledge possessed by such groups become tightly braided with or given attention as scholarship. A statement like “as a fan of…” has become, it seems, an accepted position from which one is licensed to speak at a professional conference, or write from in a refereed journal. It’s one thing to state a preference and to show your personal enthusiasm – to stick with the theme of this special issue – for an arcade game, but another to address it in terms of scholarly research. Of equal importance, I’d like to think that our investment in scholarly research has a purpose greater than, to use a phrase germane to fandom, what we are “into”. I work on game history and have built a collection not as fan but to help ensure that others will have a means to understand games historically and so that they will have access to materials to work upon in the future.
Recon: Your injunction for those doing game history to “open the drawer of buttons,” to confront the collection and its collectors reminds me of the relation between other historians with a big "h" — and titles, and offices and money — and the historian without, of arrow head collectors, civil war re-enactors and all modes of history buffs and historians, historiographers and professionals. I see you as correcting Huhtamos' historiography and literature review here with an eye to protecting the status of people like Herman, the expert if not academic. Is this right? If so why is this important to you, to game history?
RG: Cultural institutions are not the sole stakeholders in the care, collection, preservation, and managed longevity of video game artifacts. Many different groups are invested in and committed to the preservation of video games and it behooves these groups to find ways to coordinate their efforts, especially since cultural institutions can safeguard a collection well after an individual passes. This is the entry point for me when engaging with Huhtamo’s criticism of “first generation game historians.” Having witnessed the gigantic collections at The Supercade Collection and those at the International Arcade Museum and having interviewed their owners I was astonished to observe such deep pockets of knowledge about coin-op arcade video games from super collectors who don’t just amass the games but actively repair, conserve, and restore the hardware and software. You could say that these collectors — and many more exist, I’m thinking of Gary Vincent and crew at the American Classic Arcade Museum — have been doing a conservator’s “platform study” well before the phrase was even coined. Rather than write they solder. They “know” the machine at the level of circuit boards but also power supply, control panel, coin box, and exterior decorative surfaces. Their knowledge is invaluable to a cultural institution looking to learn “how” to conserve and preserve its collection while equally invaluable to a historian when the current literature in the field is lacking such depth, know-how, and authority.
Game Studies can learn a great deal from those who “get their hands dirty” with musty old electronics, who “follow the circuit” to conduct repairs, and who are working to create standards for coin-op restoration. I see the “amateur historian” — for lack of a better term — in a similar light in that they too have a vested interest in game history even though it doesn’t meet with scholarly standards or isn’t even interested in asking the types of questions that scholars are prone to ask. Such knowledge production, nonetheless, still has a role to play in game histories.
At the end of the day even though I want to “turn up the heat” on academic game history I don’t want to foreclose on the multiple types of histories that can be constructed. It’s just that the critical studies I’m interested in reading have been slow to appear. I do side with Huhtamo in his appraisal of “the field” of game history at the point in time when he was writing as he was identifying a particular model for doing game history that boasted few, if any, alternatives. The case is different today in what I dub the “era of collection” when we are now starting to have the means to produce well-researched history—I write this at a moment in time when the Strong Museum of Play has just announced that it has added the “Gerald A. Jerry Lawson Collection” to its archive. Prior to this collection how would one construct a history on the Fairchild Channel F? They would be reliant upon those scattered paragraphs in generalist surveys, rare interviews like the one found in Vintage Computing and Gaming and, sadly, obituaries that may have returned Lawson’s contribution to game history to the radar of the present after his death on April 9, 2011 (Edwards 2009). We can no longer make excuses for a lack of reliable resources in the era of collection. The onus is on game historians to raise their game.
Recon: I see a celebration of the touch of historical material with a researcher’s own hand in the book and an invocation of the carnal or tactile. Perhaps this is a suggestion of a kind of bodily historicism? This may have a practical downside long term or at least a few methodical problems. What happens when/as these buttons and screens and cabinets really start to disappear? I don’t think you could write this book in 20 years, a different book, even a good book, sure but not this one. Is a tactile and bodily history of media one that needs to be written by the temporally proximate? Your interviewees have a sense of urgency, of time running out, do you as well?
RA: Yes, of course, GA is of a particular moment, a moment when I can travel to a shop like Vintage Arcade Superstore in Glendale, CA to rummage through a vast assortment of game parts as well as conduct an interview with the shop’s owner. It’s also a moment when Peter Takacs — during a Q&A at NYU-Game Center following a screening of our documentary, When Games Went Click: The Tennis For Two Story — can hold up a Philbrick germanium transistor used in the electronic switch for running the analog computer tennis simulation to ask, “How many of you have seen an actual transistor”? I joke in GA that Peter is akin to a “book person” from Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 who, rather than commit a book to memory, has internalized an analog circuit. The next step, as I’ve communicated to Peter, is to migrate his extensive knowledge from gray matter to digital document so that the WHGSC can host his notes on recreation.
I’ll have to get back to you in 20 years to see if I could still write GA. I surmise, and that’s all I really can do is that those artifacts that have made their way into a collection will be accessible and will still provide documentary evidence in their present. Will the private collector stockpiles be as high? Probably not. But a representative sample will (I hope) be available. I learned something that ran contrary to everything I was hearing and reading in my involvement with the Preserving Virtual Worlds project when I interviewed Van Burnham. Many at cultural institutions wrestling with the challenges of preserving digital artifacts have not been working with the assumption that original hardware will be part of preservationist strategies and tools in the future.
Burnham is doing the opposite. She and partner Seamus Blackley have an unflinching commitment to prove that position wrong when it comes to coin-op arcade machines. They are drafting — through their conservation and restoration efforts — best practice methods so that original hardware can be sustainable. In retrospect, this is precisely where the emphasis on tactile proximity began to factor into GA. Watching a conservator talk about a coin-op arcade machine differs from, say, a journalistic account of one reflecting fondly upon their youthful experience in an arcade (ex: Ernest Hilbert). Every nut and bolt is a component for defining “the game” in the hands of a conservator whose physical practices attempt to restore a previous state, or maintain a current one, in a game undergoing treatment. I learned from Van — and I think its fair to include Greg McLemore, Gary Vincent, and Gene Lewin here — that “the game” is much more than the program displayed on a screenic medium but is also the cabinet, a wooden frame for supporting electronics. My interest in tactility stemmed from learning about conservation methods and wanting to try and occupy that position/perspective when examining game history. This “positioning of myself in relation to my project” also applies to the ways that an archivist and curator manage the objects in their collection. Where Game Studies would, in the case of a Space Invaders coin-op, discuss the game’s formal qualities, type, genre, mode of play, rules, interface, platform, global success — including the much noted coin shortage in Japan — and cultural status as a phenomenon, a curator has to consider all of these plus how the physical object ought to be scripted into a narrative within a specific exhibition, how it ought to be displayed, what information can be relayed to an audience from the object itself, and, if possible, whether or not it ought to be placed on an exhibition floor as an interactive exhibit, if it is indeed working. A curator has to look upon an artifact’s past, present, and future. Such responsibility for the material artifact – a Space Invaders coin-op machine – raises questions beyond Game Studies’ immediate interests and I wanted to drink from that cup so that Game Studies could forge intellectual collaborations with curators as well as continue to push its ontological questions.
Recon: What is the nature of “the aversion to history in game studies” as you see it? Is it an aversion to “good” history? To historiography? To materialism? To empiricism? What is there in its place? What do you think people should stop doing? Writing? Researching? On a related note: is Game After history?
RG: Megan Winget provided an answer to the “aversion to history in game studies” in my interview with her for Chapter 2. She makes the important point that when a new field of study is launched that the object in question requires definition— that scholars will attempt to articulate the definitive characteristics of the object of their inquiry as well as introduce modes of critique and theories to help study and explain their objects. I know this only too well via my role as founding principaleditor of the Journal of Visual Culture). Those “ludology v. narratology” debates across the 2000s demonstrate her point. I think that it’s no accident that calls for a more rigorous game history, or critical historical studies of computer and video games, occur at a moment when Media Archaeology, Media History, Media and Materiality, and Platform Studies are attracting a lot of interest across the Humanities. Such fields, methods, or concentrations offer a number of models pertinent to advancing game history beyond the “from . . . to” approach that has really dogged its first decade.
In regards to the evaluative part of your question — “is it to ‘good’ history” — I’d say that I think that Game Studies scholars with professional investment in history are primed to produce better histories in the era of collection. However, access alone will not guarantee this as it simply grants more materials for “show and tell.” I was disappointed at the History of Games conference to hear a participant state, “Write about what has not been written about” when asked where’s a “good place” to start with the construction of game history. I sank deeper into my chair wondering when Game Studies — or at least those sharing this position on game history— will read Foucault’s “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”? Henry Lowood and I have organized a session at the 2014 SCMS in Seattle, WA entitled, “Forgotten Histories”. Our aim in organizing a panel with such a title is not, to intentionally cite Foucault, “go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things” (Foucault 81) but to pressure historical analyses for overlooking such histories, to understand the stakes and challenges of historical research within Game Studies, to address the question of what histories get written, why, and, most important to me, how. Our focus is not on forging reconnections between the past and present but trying to understand their disconnections.
“What should people stop doing?” Stop playing the security blanket game to “cover” over 50 years of time — when Spacewar! and later, the Magnavox Odyssey are hailed as the points of origin —in a single book, or, few pages in an introduction. Game history remains fascinated with plotting origins, drawing rays, and speaking in terms of “evolution” when conceptualizing and constructing its past and present. Game history needs a vitamin boost of critical historiography. Permit me to graph an example from the field of Film Studies onto game history. The “era of the chronicle” that Huhtamo has written about and that I discuss at length in GA’s introduction could be said to resemble film survey history books such as: Terry Ramsaye’s A Million and One Nights (1926), Lewis Jacobs’ The Rise of the American Film (1939), Arthur Knight’s The Liveliest Art (1957), Gerald Mast’s A Short History of the Movies (1971). By the latter part of the 20th century we then witness a significant shift away from historical survey to non-grand narrative forms of historiography investigating specific time periods, developments, as well as a shifted interest from film history premised exclusively on industry, technology, or evolutionary models of film style to social and cultural histories. Robert Sklar’s Movie-Made America (1975), Lary May’s Screening Out The Past (1980), Kathy Peiss’s Cheap Amusements (1986), Charles Musser’s Before the Nickelodeon (1991), and Douglas Gomery’s Shared Pleasures (1992) would be just a few titles that fit this bill. Within these influential books exhibition, audience, specific periods in time, mass culture, leisure, business, among other emphases, help to redefine film historiography well-beyond presiding generalist models.
Of course today film/cinema historiography, particularly those accounts invested in a mixed-disciplinary as well as transmedia approaches, would make the offering of a representative sample a challenge due to the sheer volume of publications. I think that game history is beginning to move past its survey, chronological history and we are fortunate that it hasn’t taken 70 years. Having said that though I’ve yet to see a book like Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery’s Film History: Theory and Practice (1985) for Game Studies. One of the book’s opening line needs to be made relevant to Game Studies: “One of the signs of maturity of any new discipline is a consciousness of its own methods and approaches, successes and shortcomings. We believe that film history has reached the point that it deserves an examination of the historical questions that have been asked about the cinema’s past and of the approaches that have been and might be taken in answering them.” (Allen and Gomery) Lets substitute “film” and “cinema” with “game”.
GA had a number of aims all speaking to the subject of game history and historiography. First and foremost it wanted to construct a cultural study of cultural institutions and those responsible for building collections devoted to the history, documentation, and preservation of game and game related artifacts. Early on I felt that enormous efforts in game history were not evident in Game Studies but were occurring at libraries, archives, and museums. I wanted to help make these efforts visible. Because those are the places to start in order to learn about the challenges facing game history from those most involved. In conjunction with the experience of talking to various people involved with game preservation, archives, and curatorial practices, I also began “wide readings” across different fields and disciplines — a necessary practice for compiling The Object Reader years prior — that I felt could offer Game Studies and game history invaluable vantages. Learning about industrial archaeology, conservation practices, and garbology, just to name a few fields, helped expand the questions and problems that I found pertinent to studying material histories of video games.
Building upon this, and to address GA’s second aim, I turned to life history models of objects as a resourceful means to study “the stuff” that is being collected to evidence and document game history in the present. Social life history of material objects has a foothold in Anthropology, Archaeology, and increasingly in Design Studies. I’m interested in helping expand that method/approach to the field of Game Studies as it supports an emphasis on specificity while also allowing one to understand that a specific situation upon which, or within which one works, does not exhaust their object but is part of a larger temporal and spatial cycle. In fact, I would also state here, but further elaboration will have to occur elsewhere, that GA is, as it happens and many may have forgotten, partially aligned with the Cultural Studies of Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman by Paul du Gay et al. For me, life history is a methodological means to demonstrate that Game Studies has had a rather limited purview in its first decade by, for the most part, concentrating only on certain moments in a game’s life history. I hope that we start to regard other phases, moments, and situations as equally valuable to our continued study of games. This is something that I have tried to demonstrate by writing about Atari’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial , minus the joking, condemnation, and myth-busting. One can position the game into a platform study analysis to demonstrate the constraints — technological, corporate, temporal, translational — of the game’s design, and like Montfort and Bogost’s invaluable examination of Atari’s Pac-Man we would gain a different understanding, perhaps even an appreciation, of how those constraints led to the final product — a playable game with design flaws that nearly sold 2 million copies. But, E.T.’s history isn’t only the story of its constraints. Its disposal has captured more attention. How can one conduct a platform study on waste in a landfill? Yes, we can describe the circumstances that lead to the burial but to examine E.T. “beyond the grave” requires other mixed and multiple methods as well as an awareness of this situation as also formative of the game’s epistemology and life history. I took this as an opportunity to run a life history analysis so that we could map the transformative situations of the game to understand how each situation constructs different values and how these challenge or shift our taxonomic understanding of the game.
In regards to the coin-op arcade video game, I neither wanted to write a “history of the arcade” nor did I set out to conduct any ethnographic research on a specific arcade. Instead, I wanted to examine the medium’s continued and multistable circulation at annual events, at museums, the restoration methods that may return a cabinet to a product life and use-context of consumption and conservation treatment, as well as those battle worn survivors still functioning at remaining arcades. I wanted to help make sense of the historical medium via its contemporary appearances and related experiences. To do so meant bringing an inspective lens to these different situations to understand the different meanings and values ascribed in the contemporary history of these machines beyond their profitable heyday.
To return to social life history, and I would include “cultural life” given my interests, such an emphasis forces us to invest in specific material things in order to gauge their life histories. While I think that digital materiality and digital objects must also be worked with in this way, a subject and problematic long discussed within Library and Information Studies as well as archival theory and practice, I had to limit my attention to specific physical artifacts assigned evidential and documentary prestige within museums or archives. This moves into my third aim in GA: to evaluate the role that game artifacts are being tasked with as historical documents and to address the histories of these specific artifacts within their previous and present life history — the Pong prototype, Brown Box, Tennis For Two. Of equal importance, I urge readers not to regard certain materials as only “contextual” but to realize that documents also require documentation. This is the case with my work on Cliff Spohn’s cover art for Atari’s game cartridges. These boxes help contextualize an era, company, phenomenon, and game console at a number museums, however I believe that we are asking a lot of those boxes. Yes, it’s the case that the object itself can provide information to visitors. But being able to go “behind the image” in GA has really “opened up” those boxes to offer a greater insight into the era of late 1970s game and industry culture. Only when we access Spohn’s conceptualization process and design practice do we tease out the importance that illustration and graphic design has played in the history of games and we also learn about “why” those images looked the way that they do when Spohn was asked to illustrate a single image for the new media of an interchangeable ROM cartridge and Atari VCS. Spohn’s artwork is the perfect opportunity for collaboration between historians and curators. So those are a few large aims of GA.
I’ll close by saying in response to the final part of your question that GA isn’t a history of games. It examines materials from the contemporary past that function as historical documentation to better understand how to practice game history.
Postscript
Recon: We asked Raiford Guins to give us a list some of his favorite arcade games. His answers illustrate the rich possibilities for analysis these games offer.
RG:
Satan’s Hollow : Christian parents forbade their kids to play it.
Robotron 2084 : the fate of humanity resides in my hands.
Phoenix : it’s my memory machine back to the bowling alley of my youth where I first heard Gary Numan’s “Cars”.
Wacko : always reminded me of the villain’s hideout from the original Batman TV-series.
Missile Command : as the horrifying British film Threads told us, “you cannot win a nuclear war”.
Berzerk : the machine insults you.
Bubbles : you are a bubble in a sink.
Burgertime : your weapon is pepper.
Scramble : love the juicy marquee.
Chiller : most sadistic coin-op ever produced?
Golden Axe : a friend striped off a cabinet’s side-art and reattached to the front of his shitty Toyota Celica.
Starcade : I stole nearly $10 worth of quarters from a machine in 1984.
Swimmer : winner of gaudiest cabinet art award (if such a thing actually existed).
Tempest : spinning all the way to the “bowling alley” screen when inserting a quarter.
Ms. Pac Man : beautiful cabinet art.
Star Castles : skipped school lunch for a week to play it.
Crazy Climber : a bird shits on your head.
Sea Wolf : mimetic periscope interface.
Boot Hill : backlight backdrop…trippy!
Work Cited
Allen, Robert C and Douglas Gomery. Film History: Theory and Practice. Boston: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1985.
Candlin, Fiona and Raiford Guins, eds. The Object Reader. New York: Routledge 2008.
Dick, Philip K. The Preserving Machine. New York: Ace Books. 1969.
Edwards, Benji. “Jerry Lawson, Black Video Game Pioneer.” Vintage Computers and Gaming. 2009. <http://www.vintagecomputing.com/>
Foucault, Michele. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, p. 81.
Fisher, Philip. Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums. New York: Oxford University press, 1991.
Guins, Raiford. Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2008.
Guins, Raiford. “Concrete and Clay: The Afterlife and Times of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari Video Computer System.” Design and Culture. Vol. 1. No. 3. 2009, pp. 345 – 364.
Guins, Raiford. “Ms. Pac Man: An Elegy for the Undead.” Vectors Journal Vol 2. No. 1. Fall 2006. <http://vectors.usc.edu/>
Guins, Raiford and Laine Nooney. When Games Went Click: The Tennis for Two Story. 2013. <http://www.youtube.com/>
Hilbert, Ernest. “Flying off the Screen: Observations from the Golden Age of the American Video Game Arcade,” Gamers: Writers, Artists and Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels. Shana Compton (Ed.) Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2004, pp. 57 – 69.
Idhe, Don. Postphenomenology and Technoscience: The Peking University Lectures. New York, Suny Press 2009.
Idhe, Don. Experimental Phenomenology 2nd Edition, Multistabilities. New York: SUNY Press, 2012.
Law, John. “Objects and Spaces.” Theory, Culture & Society 19.5/6 (2002): 91-105
Lees- Maffei. Iconic Designs: 50 Stories About 50 Things. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts 2014.
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