More specifically, I sometimes find it useful to do some "non-academic" writing around themes that I then tackle more formally (and sometimes very differently) in an actual manuscript. In the past, I have just done this kind exercise for no audience except myself, but I think it might be more productive to write these "thought bursts" with the knowledge that they will be read. In any case, I figured I'd share these pre-writing exercises with you. Feel free to comment and critique, just recognize that this is all "early draft" stuff and that some of it borders on stream-of-consciousness writing that clearly would have no place in any published book.
Also, FYI, the titles of these little blurbs also will line up to content for chapters in the book, so you will at the very least be getting a preview of what topics are covered in the final project.
#1 - Some Thoughts on the Origins of Video Games (this post)
#2 - On Games and Community, Part 1
#3 - On Critical Game Studies
#4 - Games and Activism
#5 - Harvard, 1983 - Part 1
#6 - False Starts
#7 - Game Industry Economic Tropes
Pre-writing exercise #1
Some thoughts on the Origins of Video Games
Every medium has a history and every history of a medium itself has a history. For the medium of radio, for example, the telling of the history of radio’s invention was itself invented, reinvented, and, as documented in Ken Burns’ “The Empire of the Air” frequently utilized to both build and ruin the lives and careers of those involved in such a way as to shape an industry’s future by constructing a particular history of its past. For the medium of the personal computer, reworked and retold tales of the halcyon days of Silicon Valley became endemic and thus intrinsic to shaping everything from corporate policy to consumer purchasing to contested patent disputes and company success and failure throughout the first decades of the medium’s march towards ubiquity. These histories, their varying degrees of decay and preservation, their recasting in light of new developments, and their penetration into the public psyche are important indicators as to how a medium develops, how it is adopted and by whom, and how it connects to or births new mediums.
Video games have a medium history, too. As is the case with either of the examples above, the history of video games as a medium is populated by famous inventors and designers, punctuated by nearly mythical feats of engineering and marketing, and driven by narratives of fierce competitions and their resulting success and failures. There are key moments: early hacking at MIT and Stanford, the golden age of the arcade, the Baer vs. Bushnell saga, the Crash, the rise of Japan, the Senate hearings. There are fascinating market successes: the Atari VCS, the NES, the PlayStation. There are more fascinating market failures: the Vectrex, the 3DO, the 32X. What is the connection between the telling of the medium’s origins and the subsequent moments in its history? How does the historical framing of Pong, Space Invaders, or the VCS’ E.T. bear on the industry’s post-crash recovery? How do we historicize games? How do we track the shifts in that historicization and understand their significance?
Ian Bogost has suggested that we can understand the historical significance of particular video game platforms by studying them intently: Platform Studies functions to teach us about the nuances of hardware, the ingenuity of those who create for it, and the connectedness of gaming platforms to other human design endeavors. But, as a way of doing medium history, Platform Studies offers a level of specificity deliberately eschews what might traditionally be considered “cultural significance” in that it purposefully strives towards that analytical vacuum (and for good reasons).
The Video Game History Museum, an ambitious idea that has thus far manifested itself as a travelling exhibition of key artifacts and notable curiosities of gaming’s past has all the markings of a move towards formalizing a history, but it does not yet offer an understanding of the connectedness of that history or, to return again to an idea, the way that the history itself has changed. Bogost and the Museum approach video game history (and the story of its origins especially) as a static entity, cannon that exists in a preserved state. It is much messier.
The medium offers a historical challenge that is largely unprecedented in media history. There have been, for example, more than 100 different video game consoles, each of which has a unique and potentially important history. One might write a compelling, multivolume historical account of every console released between 1978 and 1982 in a way that would not make sense for medium historians of television, radio, film, or other most other media of the era.
. I think, in the end, it will also prove useful.