Moderator: Aurelia Brandenburg (Bern Academy of the Arts)
Michael Wagnières (University of Lausanne)
Learning to play video games in the emerging home market: A typology of paper manual functions in the 1980s
Extended abstracts will be added by the time of the event.
Robin Bootes (Freelance researcher)
User Generated Content as representation and regulation – reader’s letters, and the early UK gaming magazine
User Generated Content (UGC) has a long tradition within pre-digital media, most notably via the popularity of reader’s letters pages in periodicals and magazines, and the study of such archival texts continues to feed into contemporary debates on consumerism and participation. These readers’ letters can be understood as constituting a fan-writing genre, a medium that brings together the individual user and the wider fanbase they constitute, with the publications operating as gate keepers to such interactions. My research examines the role played by readers’ letters within the early UK gaming magazine industry (1982-1992), specifically in relation to the determination of meaning for the new technology of videogaming, and the attempts made to regulate such community led discourse.
This study contributes to studies on UGC, gaming culture, and a growing body of academic work on early gaming magazines (Kirkpatrick, 2015; 2020; Bootes, 2023; Lima et al., 2023). It examines how the specialist gaming press of the 1980s worked to develop its own ‘synthetic discourse’ (Fairclough, 1988), in part by appropriating the kudos of both the alternative media and its own youthful readership. Such appropriation enabled the gaming magazine to fulfil one of its three core functions; to distribute what has been termed gaming capital (Consalvo, 2009). The other core functions of the gaming magazine being to ensure the profits for its own controlling interests, and to support the products of the wider gaming industry by acting as “buyers guides”. The various sections (reviews, UGC, editorial features etc.) of the gaming magazine would work to balance these often competing functions, in an attempt to maintain both critical legitimacy and advertising revenue.
The mixed-methodology of this research combines content and textual analysis to analyse a sample of 127 letters, all taken from April issues of CVG magazine from 1982-1992. The content analysis had two main propositions: these centred on the type of language being used in the UGC, and the changing genres of the letters. Regarding language, a general assertion can be made that up to 1987 humour is present but occasional within the letters, whereas from 1988 it is a consistent or systematic feature of the letter writing style. Alongside this is a consistent use of slang from 1986 onwards, two years before this comedic turn. Thereby, a general trajectory can sketched out as going from formal/informal/comedic. Each of these stages signals an increasing discursive complexity on the part of the letter writers, and can be usefully compared to the growing self-reflexivity of the games reviewer. Together these readers & reviewers will formulate a coherent field of gaming critique by the end of the 1980s.
In terms of the second proposition, around the letters genres, this research identified shifting patterns of request and argumentation across the period 1982 to 1992. To summarise, the earliest readers are making requests for information: How does the new technology function? This evolves into discussion or argumentation around the meanings of the new technology/activity of gaming eg. What is the best use of the computer/What makes a good game? By the end of the 1980s, however, there is a shift from information seeking & discussion, towards banter, or synthetic discourse, with the magazine staffers that respond to the letters. This analysis suggests that whilst UGC is one means of establishing meaning for new technologies, it is also a means to reflect such determinations. The potentiality of a path leading from enquiry to reflection is one that is re-directed, and thereby stalled (Kirkpatrick, 2012), by the early gaming press. Instead of critical contemplation the process becomes instead a question of consumer choices, and a broader strengthening of consumerist values.
Textual analysis on the editorial side of the conversation – via the initial call-outs for letters, and the responses to those letters – reveal key dichotomies emerging within 1980s gaming culture, ones that can be summarized as a struggle between the (i)serious/fun, (ii)adult/child, and (iii)work/play. Here there is a dialectic within the UGC between the need for seriousness (and to be taken seriously), and a demand for utility free fun. This tension is between the amateur and the professional; the casual and the hard-core. There is a ongoing embracing and resistance towards both the serious and the fun across the sample, as the new gaming press struggles to locate itself culturally between the two. One response to these tensions by the letters editors is to state that such tensions are illusory; that one form of usage (be it work or play) leads eventually to all others, rather than supplanting them. Furthermore, and centrally, that consumer choice is always already sovereign in any matters of technological determination. The discourse of what technology is for is thereby nullified by the core tenet of commodity logic – it’s whatever you want (pay for) it to be. Yet, such attempts to reconcile tension as consumer choice is transitory, and unable to provide any lasting form of rhetorical closure.
This contest around the meaning of the new gaming medium of the 1980s is one adjudicated by the letters page Editor: a set of hyperreal cultural intermediaries (characters such as the Robot ‘Big Red’, and skinhead rebel ‘The YOB’). These figures become increasingly detached from any normative sense of the real. Through such characters the reader is encouraged to interact with the magazines via a fantasy roll call in what becomes a precession (Baudrillard, 1983) of simulated authority figures. The unreality of these fabricated avatars is not coincidental, or merely playful, but rather a form of playful labour, where their use of irony and pastiche detaches the rebellious persona of the gaming magazine brand from the utility of their profit margins. Fostering an impression of organic independence from the wider gaming industry. From a Baudrillardian perspective it is the artifice of such caricatures as The YOB that makes the rest of the publication appear authentic.
One aim of this research has been to recognise the users’ voice, and the collective identity of that voice, whilst locating it within the wider set of power relationships that constituted the gaming magazine as a whole. To try and understand UGC as a tool for both representation and control. The letters from this sample together form a richly textured mosaic of interests, debates, and aspirations, and covered a wide variety of topics. Whilst these letters are tightly framed, and regulated by, the editorial prerogatives of the publications they appear in, it is important (for historians of gaming culture) to recognise the playful inventiveness of their writing, as well as the level of expertise and personal investment they display. In conclusion it is clear that the reader’s letters do produce a valuable textual feedback loop that was at once personal, informed, and critical in its operations, and as such these letters pages provided a vital collective space for the gaming community.
References
Baudrillard, Jean, et al. Simulations. New York: Semiotext (e), 1983.
Bootes, R. Adolescent Masculinity and the Geek Aesthetic: A Study of Gaming Magazine Imagery 1982 to 1993, in International Conference on Videogame Sciences and Arts. pp. 217–237. Springer, 2023.
Consalvo, Mia. Cheating: Gaining advantage in videogames. Mit Press, 2009.
Fairclough, N. Language and power. Routledge, 1988.
Kirkpatrick, G. The formation of gaming culture: UK gaming magazines, 1981-1995. Springer, 2015.
Lima, L. et al. Home Computing and Digital Game Piracy in the 1980s in Portugal, 2023.
Francis Lavigne (LUDOV, University of Montréal) and Clément Personnic (LUDOV, University of Montréal)
Genealogies of 3D games: a conversation around the Sony Playstation
In this presentation, we will revisit the transition between 2D and 3D games through the launch of the Sony PlayStation in the United States in the video game press. This console is generally viewed as a historical and technical pivot regarding the development of 3D video games for the home console market. Several historians put emphasis on the PlayStation and other consoles launched between 1993 and 1996 as heavily focused on the development and adoption of 3D environment and video game design (Arsenault 2008, p. 180-181; Wolf 2008, p. 11; Young 2012, p. 592).
But as Carl Therrien demonstrated in a genealogy of the first-person shooter (2015), the emergence of new game design practices is not something linear. His comparison of publicities, reviews and critics shows how the first-person perspective is something that predates Wolfenstein 3D (id Software, 1992), Doom (id Software, 1993), Quake (id Software, 1996) and Half-Life (Valve, 1998). Those games are generally celebrated as founding the genre. Thus, Therrien’s study nuance this idea of a sudden apparition of the genre when he reveals “hidden” or ignored genealogies. Indeed, his account on techniques to create the illusion of 3D illustrates how historical studies benefit from expanded approaches to grasp the rise of videoludic phenomena. As put in perspective by Dominic Arsenault, video game design and technology are an iteration process rather than a revolutionary one (2009, p. 169). The notion of graphical regime proposed by Arsenault, Pierre-Marc Côté and Audrey Larochelle (2013 and 2015) aims to understand the techniques employed to build video game presentation on screen. Part of their project use the vocabulary of perspective from paintings (Larochelle 2013) to understand how players and critics make sense of video game spaces, more specifically in the transition between 2D and 3D games in the 1990s.
Texts analyzing graphical innovations and gameplay, i.e. borrowing methods from media archeology studies, are sparse. And those who cross those methods with first-hand documents like magazines or publicities are even more uncommon. Yet, as Mia Consalvo (2007) and Graeme Kirkpatrick (2015) defend, video game magazines are both witnesses and actors in the gaming culture. They shape discourses on technological evolutions. In that sense, we believe that technical evolutions of games influenced the kind of expanded paratextual works (Švelch 2020) that are video game reviews and vice versa. Changes in graphical regimes and the way journalists deal with those transformations can tell us a lot about how video games visual elements are perceived through time.
In this presentation, we will engage in a genealogical perspective to understand the transition from 2D to 3D games. For the first part of this conference, we will revisit proto-interactive devices (Huhtamo 2016, p. 24) as well as arcades to highlight the usage of techniques that create the illusion of depth. For us, such a genealogy opens a wide array of questions regarding the reception of 3D by game reviewers. In the second part, we analyze the launch of the Sony PlayStation in magazines published in the United States in the mid-1990s. We try to understand how magazines frame such innovations, although some of the aspects praised are already effective in past games. Lastly, we will open discussion on how journalists make sense of video game spaces, and the experience they convey through the analysis of reviews of PlayStation classics such as Crash Bandicoot (Naughty Dog, 1996), Ridge Racer (Namco, 1995) and Final Fantasy VII (SquareSoft, 1997).
References
Arsenault, D. (2008). “System Profil: Sony PlayStation”. In M. J.P. Wolf (dir.), The Video Game Explosion: From Pong to PlayStation and Beyond, pp. 177-182. Greenwood Press.
Arsenault, D. (2009). “Video Game Genre, Evolution and Innovation”. Eludamos, 3(2), p. 149-176. https://eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/article/view/vol3no2-3/5894
Arsenault, D., P.-M. Côté and A. Larochelle. (2015). “The Game FAVR: A Framework for the Analysis of Visual Representation in Video Games”. LOADING…, 9(14), pp. 88-123. https://journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/loading/article/view/155
Arsenault, D., P.-M. Côté, A. Larochelle and S. Lebel. (2013). “Graphical technologies, innovation and aesthetics in the video game industry: A case study of the shift from 2d to 3d graphics in the 1990s”. G|A|M|E, 2, pp. 79-99. http://gamejournal.it/2_arsenault_cote_larochelle_lebel/
Consalvo, M. (2007). Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames. MIT Press.
Kirkpatrick, G. (2015). The Formation of Gaming Culture: UK Magazines, 1981-1995. Palgrave Pivot.
Larochelle, A. (2013). “A new angle on parallel languages: The contribution of visual arts to a vocabulary of graphical projection in video games”. G|A|M|E, 2, pp. 33-40. https://www.gamejournal.it/a-new-angle-on-parallel-languages-the-contribution-of-visual-arts-to-a-vocabulary-of-graphical-projection-in-video-games/
Huhtamo, E. (2016). “Amusement Arcade”. In H. Lowood and R. Guins (dir.), Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon, pp. 21-28. The MIT Press.
Švelch, J. (2020). “Paratextuality in Game Studies: A Theoretical Review and Citation Analysis”. Game Studies, 20(2). https://gamestudies.org/2002/articles/jan_svelch
Therrien, C. (2015). “Inspecting Video Game Historiography Through Critical Lens: Etymology of the First-Person Shooter Genre”. Game Studies, 15(2). https://gamestudies.org/1502/articles/therrien
Wolf, M. J.P. (2008). “Imaging Technologies”. In M. J.P. Wolf (dir.), The Video Game Explosion: From Pong to PlayStation and Beyond, pp. 9-12. Greenwood Press.
Young, B.-M. (2012). “Sony PlayStation”. In M. J.P. Wolf (dir.), Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology and Art of Gaming, pp. 590-592. Greenwood.