Minor Platforms in Videogame History (original) (raw)
Related papers
The immaterial aspects of video games: Platforms as preservation sites for traces and communities1
Hybrid
This article is a translation of: Les aspects immatériels du jeu vidéo : les plateformes comme lieux de préservation des traces et des communautés 1-URL : https://journals.openedition.org/hybrid/1755 [fr] Publisher Presses universitaires de Vincennes Electronic reference Benjamin Barbier, "The immaterial aspects of video games: Platforms as preservation sites for traces and communities",
ICAI, 2019
This paper presents a history of video games as innovation form beyond entertainment, offering reasons to establish why it is important to know and study their history with regards its social and cultural contexts: making emphasis in the importance that the users have when creating video games through experience. The social and cultural context in which those video games were born is fundamental to understand the diffusion and popularity that video games had throughout the ‘80s and especially in the ‘90s. The objective of this study is to identify the communication and information strategies of video games prior to the arrival of the Internet, especially the way in which this information was shared in the Spanish context. In the first part of the paper, we introduce the theoretical and methodological framework in which this research is based, through the concept of cultural archeology. In the second part, we present stories created by the users to analyze the gaming experience and how to share it, using the concepts of playformance and play-world, to finish questioning the gamer’s identity as a white, young, middle-class male subject. Finally, we want to point out the importance of sharing knowledge and strategies as a fundamental part of the social interaction of the gamer’s experience. We observed video games as a tool to identify something beyond: the society and the uses that move around a cultural product.
Playing the past: history and nostalgia in video games
Choice Reviews Online, 2009
The term "interactive digital media" contains an often-overlooked adjective, digital. Espen Aarseth has given us a detailed study of the aesthetics of cybertext; Nick Montfort, the textuality of interactive fiction; and Mark J. P. Wolf, a strict review of the hardware requirements for a work to be labeled a video game. These authors provide useful, high-level work that introduces a young field, but only begin to provide an in-depth look at the digital underpinnings of gaming software and digitalism's undeniable influence on the creation of virtual realities. The "digital" in digital media needs to be examined to gauge its characteristics' influence upon the creation of virtual spaces. Every web page lives on a digital host, forcing preschoolers to grandmothers to become familiar with the highly technical standards of Universal Resource Locators (URLs) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) that enable digital interpretation. Engines that drive video games are mediated by similar digital hosts. Games are limited in size by their ability to access their host's physical memory. They are limited in complexity by their authors' ability to construct decision-making algorithms that approximate the authors' visions of virtual realities. Theorists may be able to observe the results of these virtual realities, but in the absence of an interrogation of the fundamentals of computer science, they will not be able to effect a complete study of digital media and its creation. This chapter seeks to establish a rhetorical method-of terminology and taxonomy-by which to explore what is unique to software-based digital media, starting with a nostalgic application of the method to the Atari 2600 (the first truly modular home gaming console) and watching how its workings continue to reflect and inform studies of games written nearly two decades later. Such a methodology currently requires a
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).
Research Policy, 2003
This paper examines the role of creative resources in the emergence of the Japanese video game industry. We argue that creative resources nurtured by popular cartoons and animation sector, combined with technological knowledge accumulated in the consumer electronics industry, facilitated the emergence of successful video game industry in Japan. First we trace the development of the industry from its origin to the rise of platform developers and software publishers. Then, knowledge and creative foundations that influenced the developmental trajectory of this industry are analyzed, with links to consumer electronics and in regards to cartoons and animation industry.
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.
Dezaemon, RPG Maker, NScripter: Exploring and classifying game ‘produsage’ in 1990s Japan
Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 2019
The article examines three tools used for hobbyist game development in 1990s Japan: the Dezaemon series of user-customizable shoot 'em up games, the RPG Tsukūru (RPG Maker) series of tools for creating Japanese-style role-playing games and the NScripter scripting engine for visual novels. In doing so, it aims to highlight the diversity, but also to bring out the commonalities, of game 'produs-age': producing video games by using dedicated software. The focus on a non-western historical context is an attempt to challenge assumptions about the locales and platforms of game produsage prevalent in English-language scholarship. The article concludes with a two-axis typology of game produsage, based on the degree of expressive freedom their functionality enables and the limitations they impose on users' distributing their games.
Controversies: Historicising the Computer Game
ABSTRACT Games which involve historical topics have always been a staple of digital games, but at the same time they have often caused controversy and debate. This paper traces some of the pitfalls inherent to the creation of historical games, as well as trying to reach an understanding of how a history game can be defined. Throughout the paper, we investigate how some aspects of history can be problematic, and how others have been made more difficult by a lack of definition or an expectation that all historical games operate on the same intellectual level. We also examine how controversial games have coped with difficult subjects, and relate this to the development of complexity and scope within gaming. Author Keywords Gaming, History, Historical Gaming, Games Studies, Digital Games, DiGRA, War Games.
A Cultural History of the Greek Digital Games Origins: From Clones to Originality
Acta Ludologica, 2024
Literature on the digital games industry and gaming history has for the most part focused on the global production centres of North America, Western Europe, Japan, and, lately, China. However, in recent years, a call to research the diverse and less dominant national contexts within which digital games are produced has been addressed. In this article, we shed light on early digital game development in Greece, covering the years between 1982 and 2002. This particular region has been highly neglected by both domestic and international researchers. We approach Greek digital game development from both historical and cultural perspectives, through an investigation of how local game developers interact with a wide range of contextual facets in a complex interrelation between global and national conditions. This article argues that, in order to highlight the characteristics of early national game production cultures and digital games design, one must examine them as well under the broader cultural production ecosystem, along with the economic and institutional contexts and transformations within which digital game production takes shape.