Host: Selim Krichane (Swiss Museum of Games)
"What makes a collection transcend mere accumulation is not only the fact of its being culturally complex, but the fact of its incompleteness, the fact that it lacks something. Lack always means lack of something unequivocally defined: one needs such and such an absent object." (23)
– Jean Baudrillard: "The System of Collecting" (1968)"Fool’s Errand: A pointless, fruitless, and otherwise unreasonable undertaking."
– The Proverbs, Epigrams, and Miscellanies of John Heywood (1562)A quarter-century ago (1999), we established the Learning Games Initiative Research Archive (LGIRA), a circulating (i.e., items may be checked out) physical and digital collection representing video game history and culture in the widest possible terms. Among our guiding principles were that the archive needed to be internationally accessible, artifactually open, and supportive of collaboration. Its framing organizational policy aimed to resist the tendency of archives to constrain knowledge through canon formation, knowing full well that such intentions were delusory.
These early principles guide LGIRA today. Our acquisition policy states “LGIRA is representative, not comprehensive” and “We’ll take almost anything – it might be important someday.” By 2003, these principles had helped LGIRA amass nearly 10,000 physical and digital objects, from vintage promotional materials and legal filings to failed consoles and original concept art. Other archives around the world were growing too – the Cabrinety Collection in California, Silicium in France, Computerspielmuseum in Germany, the National Videogame Archive in the UK, and others – and most of us didn’t really know what we were doing. We did know that preserving computer games and game culture were important undertakings. We also knew we needed to get more organized.
To that end, in the early 2000s a cadre of volunteers established the Game Preservation Special Interest Group within the International Game Developers Association. By 2004, we had drafted for that organization’s members “Before It’s Too Late: A Digital Game Preservation White Paper” (Monnens et al. 2009), a document that stands as one of the earliest moments when LGIRA’s archivists and researchers wrestled with the philosophical idea of “the local.” Specifically, we came to understand in drafting this document that, from a certain perspective, everything about computer games is local at some point in time. The 1980 Atari arcade hit Missile Command, for example, could be found in bowling alleys and shopping malls around the world, but the game’s visuals and mechanics have their origins in its creator’s literal nightmares. Some years prior to Missile Command’s development, Dave Theurer, had dreamed of a nuclear apocalypse while he slept in his bed in Mountain View, California – just a few miles from an epicenter of US Cold War military innovation, the Ames Research Center (Ruggill and McAllister 2015, 56-7). The local becomes the global, we realized, and by reverse engineering the commodity fetishism endemic to our (and any) archive, an intimacy with the artifacts and the many people who had produced them was made possible.
Yet even as LGIRA was expanding – in terms of the objects it held and the number of locations it established—its members were realizing that, despite their intentions, they were actively engaging in canon formation. This self-understanding was also articulated in the “Before It’s Too Late” white paper. In a section considering the implications of not attempting to preserve computer game history and culture, we had to admit that (echoing Baudrillard) we were obsessed, not only with collecting a particular genus of plaything, but also with valorizing our decisions to do so (1994). We had fashioned ourselves as ersatz saviors of throw-away culture, and in so doing both localized and globalized our project. The work was personal and idiosyncratic (local) and driven (madly at times) to acquire more – and especially more rare – stuff (global). As we put it in the white paper:
"At a certain level, though, the question at hand – "What if we do nothing to archive and preserve digital games?"—is spurious: collectively, we (i.e., publishers, players, pundits, and scholars as well as developers) do nothing every day. Rather than collaborate systemically and systematically to conserve the cultural and material heritage of our medium, we go about the process of preservation idiosyncratically and haphazardly, if at all. We carefully preserve some things (e.g., limited edition consoles, games, and memorabilia), casually discard others (e.g., poorly rated games, game packaging and documentation), and generally think more about present and future titles than past ones. Occasionally, fortune smiles and a case of well-preserved games or consoles is discovered in a long-neglected back room or storage closet (Cavalli 2008). More often, though, tastes and technologies change and "old" games (i.e., titles more than ninety days old) simply—and perhaps naturally—fade from view. The art and practice of digital game preservation is left to hobbyists and collectors, whose interests, archival sensibilities, and preservational expertise vary greatly and are often less about the importance of art, labor, organization, and memory than the exchange value of rare goods." (Monnens et al. 17)Since coming to this realization, LGIRA members intentionally and regularly puzzled over the inseparability of local/global, not only in research papers and conference talks, but also in digital musings and museum exhibits. In 2019, for instance, LGIRA worked with the Museum of Texas Tech University titled “Global, Glocal, and Local: Tracing the Personal in Computer Game Business and Culture” (Ortega-Grimaldo 2019). Through more than 100 objects from LGIRA’s holding, visitors were challenged to answer questions about the cultural identity of the exhibit’s artifacts, from Belgian Super Mario postage stamps to homemade videogame club t-shirts bearing unlicensed versions of the Atari logo to graffiti of Pac-Man eating hamburgers instead of ghosts.
Today, LGIRA has amassed more than a quarter-million items, thousands of which can be described – not always unproblematically – as “local”: fan-made arts and crafts; indie games; developers’ and artists’ preliminary materials; counterfeit, cracked, and bootlegged items; and so on. And LGIRA’s members – now dispersed around the world – pursue questions related to games and locality in a wide variety of ways. Dr. Steven Conway – Regional Director of LGIRA’s Australian chapter– studies indie game development culture and the complicated ways its participants both resist and idolize the world’s largest game studios. Drs. Jen deWinter and Carly Kocurek– Regional Directors of LGIRA’s Chicago chapter – specialize in fan culture and “feelies” (tchotchkes bundled with games to help players feel tangibly linked to a game). Connecting all of these projects is an interest in the ways that “local” and “global” can readily exchange signifiers and utilize each other’s discursive tactics.
This panel will offer a curated overview of LGIRA’s artifacts with this complexity in mind, partially to inculcate attendees into our mania, but also to illustrate some of the other ways that we in LGIRA have attempted to understand what “local” means in the context of an intrinsically globalized game industry. Panelist 1 will provide a brief history of LGIRA and show how its acquisition policy has been a surprisingly useful tool for helping researchers complicate the idea of “local.” Panelist 2 will focus on a particular collection within the Archive – an assortment of privately produced and distributed gaming newsletters – to show how even in the most obviously “local” artifacts, the presence of globalism is unmistakable. And Panelist 3 will describe the Archive’s collection of business simulations – many produced confidentially in-house by multinational conglomerates – in order to show how even large companies can produce “local” artifacts and how in doing so, they are able to assimilate and capitalize on less powerful local signifiers.
Judd Ruggill (University of Arizona)
A Genealogy of Preservation
Video game archiving and preservation today is in much the same state as games and game culture were in the 1970s: not a globalized practice (as this conference’s CFP emphasizes) but hyperlocal, experimental, and both reminiscent of and divergent from the technical, historical, and cultural remembering associated with antecedent media. As such, the art and craft of game archiving and preservation provide a unique opportunity to consider the materiality and locality of leisure electronics, conjuring the artifacts, practices, and habits of mind associated with an emergent, pre-industrial time (see Bak 2016). In this portion of the panel, we will touch on all three of the conference streams – Leisure Electronics As A Cultural Context For The Emergence Of Video Games; Video Games As Simulations, Remediations And Continuities Of Previous Games; and The Birth Of A Culture: Have Videogames Became Autonomous From Previous Practices And Cultures? – as we use the saving of games for posterity to understand the making of games and their communities in the early days of the medium. Specifically, we will consider (1) the general cultural context for the advent of game preservation; (2) the game archive as a simulation, remediation, and continuity of the media archive; and (3) the ways in which game preservation has departed from previous ways of seeing and doing (see Monnens et al. 2009; Gabrys 2013; Geimer and Beisel 2021). LGIRA will serve as our regional case study, but we will also describe how other memory institutions attempt to recall the dubious origins, doubtful progressions, and other conceptual and functional elephants in the room associated with the dawn of the video game complex.
Ken S. McAllister (University of Arizona)
Local Hacking: Gaming Newsletters
LGIRA’s stacks of old newsletters, produced over many decades by self-described “superusers,” “ENIX Warriors,” “Atari Enthusiasts,” “Acclaim Masters,” and other platform or franchise devotees, clarify why game archives and libraries often keep such documents separate from official corporate materials. While game companies’ glossy strategy guides, fan magazines, members-only swag, and other “authorized” materials may contain much of the same insider information as chintzy, fan-produced newsletters, there is a Benjaminian “authenticity” or “aura” about the newsletters that makes them special (Benjamin 1968). Produced in a particular locale, for a particular audience, at a particular time, these periodicals – 2600 Connection; Warrior World Newsletter (for owners of ENIX games); Portland Atari Club Computer News; The Australian Atari Gazette; The POKEY Newsletter; Micro of Monmouth, Optimized Systems Software Newsletter, and many others—despite almost always being short-lived, regularly smashed between their covers a panoply of testimonies, reviews, tips, and rumors that both shill and grouse, and are at turns playful, ruminative, and bored. Notably, however, nearly every issue articulates the community’s complicity in advancing the global game industry, even as they aggressively reify the idea of the local through the community newsletter genre. Building on Édouard Glissant’s concept of “mondialité” (Obrist and Raza 2017) and Hans Ulrich Obrist’s work on the epistemology of collecting (2014), Panelist 2 will unpack this liminal phenomenon of local gaming, considering the newsletter as a paratext that authorizes deviant uses of commercial hardware and software even as it renders to the industrial complex the devotion it requires.
Rolf Nohr (Braunschweig University of Arts)
The Ludic History of Business Simulations
Business simulations and games do not appear from thin air. They are extricated from the (idealized) cultural practice of play—that is, purpose-free, creative, or entertaining practice in a “magic circle” (Huizinga 1955) – and transferred to a platform for rational action with target consequences. Business games may still call for euphoric players, but they also call for players who are more homo oeconomicus than homo ludens (Nohr 2019a). Business games are part of the emerging mathematical computer culture of the 1950s and 60s, meaning that their history is integral to the history of what early designers imagined the computer could be (Winkler 1997). Burroughs, UNIVAC, General Electric, Bull, Remington, Siemens, and IBM were key players in this envisioning process (see Nohr 2019b), and their role in the epistemological shift that followed is what now requires a genealogical analysis. The complex of basic research, experimental economics, and the rationalization of corporate control not only culminated in a cooperation between computer science research and corporate application (Pircher 2004), but also resulted in changes in university education, including the establishment of business game-based training facilities for use in university courses and business schools designed to cultivate new talent. The discursive history of business games is thus sewn into the fabric of computer history, and therefore requires an archival dive into source materials to find and examine those hidden seams. In addition to extensive archival research and guided interviews, this project primarily uses methods of critical discourse analysis and media archaeology to explore its subject matter. In addition, a series of existing (economic) historical studies (e.g., Mirowski 2002) will be used to open up the subject area. The aim is to design a comprehensive reconstruction of a dispositive of playful and gamified control policies that are oriented, among other things, towards Foucault’s concept of self-control and self-government (Foucault 2000). This presentation unstitches business game history, and in the process explores the early days of gaming culture, military simulation, the prehistory of modern scientific education, and the development of scenario-based instruction for economic, governmental, and administrative planning. In so doing, it contributes to broader understandings of the role of decidability, predictability, contingency, and rationality in the development of industrial society.
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