Across & Beyond: A Transmediale Reader on Post-Digital Practices, Concepts, and Institutions ed. by Ryan Bishop, Kristoffer Gansing, Jussi Parikka and Elvia Wilk (original) (raw)
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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).
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.
Antiquarianism and Hardware Ideology and rhetoric of video game emulation. The case of MAME
In the last decade, debates over the cultural legitimacy of video games have been slowly waning, as a result of a series of initiatives aimed at establishing or reinforcing the presence of the medium within archives, museums, galleries and other cultural institutions. This surprisingly sudden process of musealization conjures issues of preservation, archival curation and cultural heritage in regards to artifacts that, in some cases, were produced over half a century ago. For this reason, a number of disjointed conservative practices devised by grassroots communities of developers, game historians and fans have come to the fore of scholarly interest. Among these vernacular archival methods, emulation has drawn the most attention due to its complex and ambiguous relation with issues such as nostalgia, video game historiography and game preservation. Both in magazines devoted to game culture (McDonald, 1999) and in scholarly publications (Conley et al., 2004), emulation is often discussed from a jurisprudential standpoint, where the pressure of video game industry towards copyright protection and trademark integrity is challenged by emergent practices of playing old or classic video games in their emulated versions. While issues of property and copyright are central to the current debate on video game preservation, I will confront the issue of emulation from the standpoint of its impact on the materiality of video game play, its relation with original hardware and its implicit and explicit rhetorical stances. In the first part of this paper, I will describe and analyze MAME, one of the most popular and widely used emulators for arcade and classic video games. In discussing MAME's rhetoric I will confront its peculiar approach to hardware preservation and its interaction with current theories in video game preservation and archiving. In the second part of the paper I will discuss what I will term transformative nostalgia, a series of experimental practices aimed at re-using and re-imagining pieces of gaming history – both material and immaterial – openly contrasting the rhetoric of disembodied, abstract preservation present within the discourse of emulation and in more 'traditional' forms of preservation.
Video Games at the Library: A Historical Perspective
2011
We present an overview or the video games available at the Film Library of Bologna. This institution, in collaboration with the University of Bologna, has a whole collateral branch dedicated to the video games, as they can be considered a recreational activity somehow related to movies. This collection of video games conceptually starts from the ones that are strictly connected to movies, and then expands to a wider class of video games. A video game could be related with a movie either as its direct inspiration, its prequel or collateral plot, or also be created as a direct consequence of that movie. The expansion of the collection available in the Library includes a historical set of video games. In this paper we discuss the historical perspective of the relationship between technology and video games, providing a complete historical view of the video games by means of the titles and the consoles available in the Library. Several dedicated consoles are still in working conditions and could be used by the visitors of the Library.