Video Games at the Library: A Historical Perspective (original) (raw)

It’s about Time: Film, Video Games, and the Advancement of an Artform

Philosophies

Jon Robson and Aaron Meskin have argued that the insights obtained through the philosophical analysis of video games is not specific to video games, but to a larger class of artistic creations they term Self-Involving Interactive Fictions, or SIIFs. But there is at least one aspect of SIIF video games that is philosophically interesting and does not apply to the class of SIIFs as a whole, the ability to represent non-classical time. If SIIF video games are considered to be an extension of the art form of graphic narrative story-telling, the art form dominated by film, then the ability to represent time in in this fashion represents a revolution akin to that of vanishing point perspective in painting. This makes SIIF video games philosophically interesting for both philosophers of film and philosophers of video games.

Video Games as Concepts and Experiences of the Past

Champion, E. 2021. Virtual Heritage: A Guide, 2021

More and more, people do not experience the past through books, museums, or even television, but through video games. This chapter discusses how these popular entertainment products provide playful and fun experiences of the past-something we refer to here as past-play for the sake of brevity. The video game industry has become a major, fast-moving player when it comes to creating, innovating, and distributing virtual representations of the past (Champion 2015). The study of such playful video game-based products as examples of virtual heritage is part of a growing field, called archaeogaming. Archaeogaming can be generally defined as 'the archaeology of digital games' , with roots in a diverse set of analogue and digital archaeological themes and tools (Reinhard 2018). It also draws in a variety of tools and thinking from game studies, game user research, and computer sciences. Archaeogaming is also a movement born in and out of playful, digital scholarship that studies popular, digital culture but itself also seeks to be part of popular, digital culture (Politopoulos et al. 2019a).

Gaming I, II, and III: Arcades, Video Game Systems, and Modern Game Streaming Services

Games and Culture, 2023

This paper aims to create a shorthand for video game historyfrom video games' infancy to the current subscription model that is dominating gaming. In this essay, I will apply the practices of historical media scholarship that have helped parse out television history (e.g., TV I, TV II, TV III, and TV IV) and film history (e.g., Cinema 1, 2, and 3.0) to define the various shifts in video game history. Gaming I represents the arcade and home system boom up until the 1983 video game Crash, Gaming II describes the post-Crash console period, and finally, Gaming III materializes due to the arrival of modern video game subscriptions. Rather than constructing an exhaustive account of video game history, this essay means to generate more studies on what video game history can mean in the context of the established academic studies on visual media.

De-framing video games from the light of cinema

G|A|M|E The Italian Journal of Game Studies, 2015

In this essay, we shall try to step back from a blinding cinema-centric approach in order to examine the impact such a framing has caused, to question its limitations, and to reflect on the interpretive communities that have relied on film (communities we are part of, due to our film studies background) to position video games as an important cultural phenomenon as well as an object worthy of scholarly attention. Using Gaudreault and Marion’s notion of cultural series and wishing to spread a French theoretical approach we find very relevant to the discussion, we will question the bases on which we frame video games as cinema. This inquiry will focus on the audiovisual nature of both media and highlight their differing technical and aesthetic aspects, which will lead us to consider video games as being closer to other forms of audiovisual media.

Re-framing video games in the light of cinema

2015

Video games theory has advanced far enough that we can use it to reevaluate film theory as a result, en route to broader, transmedial theorizing. This essay looks particularly at how video games can be seen as participating in and advancing Andre Bazin’s “Myth of Total Cinema”, and perhaps recontextualzing it as the Myth of Simulated Lived Experience.