Game after : a cultural study of video game afterlife

486 Pages·2014·10.61 MB·English

by  Guins

A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife
Raiford Guins

Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Persistent Games
Ex-Game
Afterlife and the Culture of Materiality
Where Is History in Game Studies?
Now Boarding
1 Museified
Object Lessened?
Artifact-Activity
Slips
Iconic Object
2006.0102.04
2 Thinking Inside the (Archival) Box
Chronicled
Era of Collection
Collection of NoThings: Mr. Higinbotham's Oscilloscope of Wonder
3 After the Arcade
Unintentional Monuments
Curious Cabinets
Arcade Projects
"Behind the Screen," or the Totality of the Thing
"eGameRevolution," or Space Invaders behind Glass
"Videotopia: The Exhibit of the True History of Video Games," or Itinerant
Antiques
California Extreme, the Classic Arcade Game Show, or Another Spin around
the Present
American Classic Arcade Museum at Fun Spot, or Welcome to the
Musecade
The International Arcade Museum, or Online Census Project
Remains of the Game
4 Thinking Outside the (Game Cartridge) Box
NRFB
Container Becomes Content
Cliff Spohn's Evocative Surfaces
5 Landfill Legend
Classified
Trashing E.T.
E.T. as Trash
Memento Mori
Postscript: Remains to Be Seen
6 Game Saved
Restoration Hardware
Back to the Fire Buttons: Vintage Arcade Superstore
Supercade Unbound: The Supercade Collection
Serving History: The Recreation of Tennis For Two
Final Walkthrough
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index
America, the land of technology, has many traditions that nostalgically celebrate
past technologies. The biggest and loudest is probably NASCAR, which
celebrates stock cars outfitted with outdated technologies. For example,
overhead valve systems are forbidden, so when Toyota, an outlander, wanted to
race, it had to redesign its engines to fit the older technology. Less organized but
widespread is the love for Harley Davidson motorcycles' noisy, bulky
technologies probably better fitted to the often older and heavier riders who tout
them.
In Game After, Raiford Guins, who has founded a game studies collection at
Stony Brook University, takes a very up-to-date approach to the cultural afterlife
of games. Guins has learned lessons from the last two decades of new social
studies of science, technology, and culture. He has taken the "empirical turn," as
Hans Achterhuis has claimed for this genre of concrete case studies. In Guins's
case it is the material afterlives of video and computer games. He chases his
games from California to the Smithsonian.
In his pursuit, he also learns to appreciate what many call the new materialism,
and that I call a sensitivity to materiality, now prominent in the humanities and
social sciences. This too pervades empirical turn studies and arises out of a shift
from early modern distanced observation which spent much of its energy on
classifying objects. The new studies have turned to practices-what does one do
with (and experience) in an interrelational way with these material machines?
Yes, humans make them, but interrelationally, they also make us. Indeed, the
omnipresent screen today occupies an average of twelve hours per day for the
typical collegian. And the shift to smaller and more mobile screens has also been
heavily weighted towards entertainment and game activities. As with all recent
technologies there is much and often rapid development. If the early days were
dominated by coin-fed arcade games, the newer types are built into portable
tablets and mobile phones.
The other emphasis that Guins draws upon in his pursuit is an appreciation for
what I call multistability. Unlike the early, often essentialist, philosophy of
technology-for example, Heidegger-Guins is appreciative of the multiple
contexts and uses of games. If games have become an ever-widening practice
and even obsession, there are often unintended side effects. Only gradually have
we become aware that the special embodiment skills sharpened in game playing
have become part of our contemporary lifeworld. In action, game playing entails
learning bodily skills-as does any other physical sport. What was not foreseen
was the way in which this leads to a reservoir of pre-skills. Friedrich Kittler cited
one such outcome for the late nineteenth century: the invention of the typewriter
with its keyboard, he argued, stimulated, within a very few years, the
replacement of a dominantly male-gendered secretariat with a dominantly female
one. A major factor included the pre-skilling that piano playing fostered among
middle class young women, which easily translated into typing skills.
Contemporarily, we now have a practice called "Nintendo surgery," the style of
surgery utilized in laparoscopy and angioplasty. Seeing and manipulating at a
distance calls for precisely the eye-hand coordination developed in video
gaming. Or, if one switches to far more distant sensing-manipulating, then
robotic warfare and Martian exploration also come to mind. Just this fall my
audiologist told me that her husband, an eye and ear surgeon, had given up his
practice because the newer "kids" skilled at more robotic techniques could
perform better than his now outdated skill level.
Guins is well aware of the multistability of the many points of view available
to players, of the multistabilty of through-the-screen worlds of games and of the
wide varieties from abstract to threedimensional beings of games. However, with
an informal style that invites us to join him in his gaming road trip, he goes
beyond the common player-game interaction to consider a lesser understood
mode of interaction: the material lives of games within cultural institutions
devoted to their preservation and historical documentation.
Game After is a romp. Its readers will revel over their own memories and uses
of games familiar but not disappeared. They are given a sort of second life here,
and like the visitors to "The Art of Video Games," the Smithsonian American
Art Museum's exhibit that Guins walks through to conclude his book, one ends
up as a cheering audience in the midst of games' afterlives.
Don Ihde