Host: Selim Krichane (Swiss Museum of Games)
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\"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) \n \u2013 Jean Baudrillard: \"The System of Collecting\" (1968)<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n\"Fool\u2019s Errand: A pointless, fruitless, and otherwise unreasonable undertaking.<\/em>\" \n \u2013<\/em> The Proverbs, Epigrams, and Miscellanies of John Heywood (1562)<\/em><\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\nA 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These early principles guide LGIRA today. Our acquisition policy states \u201cLGIRA is representative, not comprehensive\u201d and \u201cWe\u2019ll take almost anything \u2013 it might be important someday.\u201d 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 \u2013 the Cabrinety Collection in California, Silicium in France, Computerspielmuseum in Germany, the National Videogame Archive in the UK, and others \u2013 and most of us didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s members \u201cBefore It\u2019s Too Late: A Digital Game Preservation White Paper\u201d (Monnens et al. 2009), a document that stands as one of the earliest moments when LGIRA\u2019s archivists and researchers wrestled with the philosophical idea of \u201cthe local.\u201d 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<\/em>, for example, could be found in bowling alleys and shopping malls around the world, but the game\u2019s visuals and mechanics have their origins in its creator\u2019s literal nightmares. Some years prior to Missile Command<\/em>\u2019s development, Dave Theurer, had dreamed of a nuclear apocalypse while he slept in his bed in Mountain View, California \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nYet even as LGIRA was expanding \u2013 in terms of the objects it held and the number of locations it established\u2014its members were realizing that, despite their intentions, they were actively engaging in canon formation. This self-understanding was also articulated in the \u201cBefore It\u2019s Too Late\u201d 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 \u2013 and especially more rare \u2013 stuff (global). As we put it in the white paper:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"At a certain level, though, the question at hand \u2013 \"What if we do nothing to archive and preserve digital games?\"\u2014is 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\u2014and perhaps naturally\u2014fade 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)<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\nSince 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 \u201cGlobal, Glocal, and Local: Tracing the Personal in Computer Game Business and Culture\u201d (Ortega-Grimaldo 2019). Through more than 100 objects from LGIRA\u2019s holding, visitors were challenged to answer questions about the cultural identity of the exhibit\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today, LGIRA has amassed more than a quarter-million items, thousands of which can be described \u2013 not always unproblematically \u2013 as \u201clocal\u201d: fan-made arts and crafts; indie games; developers\u2019 and artists\u2019 preliminary materials; counterfeit, cracked, and bootlegged items; and so on. And LGIRA\u2019s members \u2013 now dispersed around the world \u2013 pursue questions related to games and locality in a wide variety of ways. Dr. Steven Conway \u2013 Regional Director of LGIRA\u2019s Australian chapter\u2013 studies indie game development culture and the complicated ways its participants both resist and idolize the world\u2019s largest game studios. Drs. Jen deWinter and Carly Kocurek\u2013 Regional Directors of LGIRA\u2019s Chicago chapter \u2013 specialize in fan culture and \u201cfeelies\u201d (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 \u201clocal\u201d and \u201cglobal\u201d can readily exchange signifiers and utilize each other\u2019s discursive tactics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This panel will offer a curated overview of LGIRA\u2019s 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 \u201clocal\u201d 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 \u201clocal.\u201d Panelist 2 will focus on a particular collection within the Archive \u2013 an assortment of privately produced and distributed gaming newsletters \u2013 to show how even in the most obviously \u201clocal\u201d artifacts, the presence of globalism is unmistakable. And Panelist 3 will describe the Archive\u2019s collection of business simulations \u2013 many produced confidentially in-house by multinational conglomerates \u2013 in order to show how even large companies can produce \u201clocal\u201d artifacts and<\/em> how in doing so, they are able to assimilate and capitalize on less powerful local signifiers.<\/p>\n\n\n\nJudd Ruggill (University of Arizona)
A Genealogy of Preservation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nVideo 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 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? \u2013 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ken S. McAllister (University of Arizona)
Local Hacking: Gaming Newsletters<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nLGIRA\u2019s stacks of old newsletters, produced over many decades by self-described \u201csuperusers,\u201d \u201cENIX Warriors,\u201d \u201cAtari Enthusiasts,\u201d \u201cAcclaim Masters,\u201d and other platform or franchise devotees, clarify why game archives and libraries often keep such documents separate from official corporate materials. While game companies\u2019 glossy strategy guides, fan magazines, members-only swag, and other \u201cauthorized\u201d materials may contain much of the same insider information as chintzy, fan-produced newsletters, there is a Benjaminian \u201cauthenticity\u201d or \u201caura\u201d about the newsletters that makes them special (Benjamin 1968). Produced in a particular locale, for a particular audience, at a particular time, these periodicals \u2013 2600 Connection; Warrior World Newsletter<\/em> (for owners of ENIX games); Portland Atari Club Computer News<\/em>; The Australian Atari Gazette<\/em>; The POKEY Newsletter<\/em>; Micro of Monmouth<\/em>, Optimized Systems Software Newsletter<\/em>, and many others\u2014despite 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\u2019s complicity in advancing the global game industry, even as they aggressively reify the idea of the local through the community newsletter genre. Building on \u00c9douard Glissant\u2019s concept of \u201cmondialit\u00e9\u201d (Obrist and Raza 2017) and Hans Ulrich Obrist\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nRolf Nohr (Braunschweig University of Arts)
The Ludic History of Business Simulations <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nBusiness simulations and games do not appear from thin air. They are extricated from the (idealized) cultural practice of play\u2014that is, purpose-free, creative, or entertaining practice in a \u201cmagic circle\u201d (Huizinga 1955) \u2013 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
References<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nBak, Meredith A. \u00ab\u00a0The Ludic Archive: The Work of Playing with Optical Toys.\u00a0\u00bb The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists<\/em> 16, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 1-16.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBaudrillard, Jean. \u00ab\u00a0The System of Collecting.\u00a0\u00bb In The Cultures of Collecting<\/em>, edited by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, 7-24. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBenjamin, Walter. \u00ab\u00a0The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.\u00a0\u00bb In Illuminations<\/em>, edited by Hannah Arendt, 217-251. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.<\/p>\n\n\n\nCavalli, Earnest. \u00ab\u00a0‘Lost’ Virtual Boy Cache Found in Dubai.\u00a0\u00bb Wired<\/em> blog, September 15, 2008. Accessed April 1, 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\nFoucault, Michel. \u00ab\u00a0Die Gouvernementalit\u00e4t.\u00a0\u00bb In Gouvernementalit\u00e4t der Gegenwart: Studien zur \u00d6konomisierung des Sozialen<\/em>, edited by Ulrich Br\u00f6ckling, Susanne Krasmann, and Thomas Lemke, 41-68. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000.<\/p>\n\n\n\nGabrys, Jennifer. Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics<\/em>. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013.<\/p>\n\n\n\nGeimer, Peter, and Luca Beisel. 2021. \u201cWhat Is the Color of the Past? The Truth of the Archive and the Truth of Simulation.\u201d International Journal for Digital Art History<\/em>, no. 8 (October):132-39. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.11588\/dah.2021.E1.83932.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHeywood, John. A Dialogue Conteinyng the Nomber of All the Prouerbes in the Englishe Tongue<\/em>. London: 1562.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHuizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture<\/em>. Boston, MA: The Beacon Press, 1955.<\/p>\n\n\n\nMcAllister, Ken S., Judd Ethan Ruggill, Tobias Conradi, Steven Conway, Jennifer deWinter, Chris Hanson, Carly Kocurek, Kevin Moberly, Randy Nichols, Rolf F. Nohr, and Marc A. Ouellette. \u201cApportioned Commodity Fetishism and the Transformative Power of Game Studies.\u201d Examining the Evolution of Gaming and Its Impact on Social, Cultural, and Political Perspectives<\/em>, edited by Keri Duncan Valentine and Lucas John Jensen, 96-122. Hershey: IGI Global, 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\nMirowski, Philip. Machine Dreams. Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science<\/em>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.<\/p>\n\n\n\nMonnens, Devin, Andrew Armstrong, Judd Ruggill, Ken S. McAllister, and Zach Vowell. Before It’s Too Late: A Digital Game Preservation White Paper for the International Game Developers\u2019 Association<\/em>. Edited by Henry Lowood. Mt. Royal: International Game Developers Association, 2009.<\/p>\n\n\n\nNohr, Rolf F. Unternehmensplanspiele 1955\u20131975<\/em>: Die Herstellung unternehmerischer Rationalit\u00e4t im Spiel. M\u00fcnster: Lit, 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\nNohr, Rolf F. \u201cThe Development of Decision Support Systems in the 1960s as Antecedent of \u2018AI-Rationality.\u2019\u201d Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture<\/em> 10, no. 1 (2019): 67\u201390.<\/p>\n\n\n\nObrist, Hans Ulrich. Ways of Curating<\/em>. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.<\/p>\n\n\n\nObrist, Hans Ulrich and Asad Raza (eds). Mondialit\u00e9: Or the Archipelagos of \u00c9douard Glissant<\/em>. \u00c9ditions Skira, Villa Empain. Brussels: Fondation Boghossian, 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\nOrtega-Grimaldo, Francisco, Jorgelina Orfila, Judd Ruggill, Ken McAllister, Andrew T. Gedeon, Taylor Stephens, Louis Migliazza, and Nicolas Leuenberger. Global, Glocal, and Local: Tracing the Personal in Computer Game Business and Culture<\/em>. The Museum of Texas Tech University, 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\nPircher, Wolfgang. \u201cKrieg und Management. Zur Geschichte des Operations Research.\u201d In Ram\u00f3n Reichert (Hg.): Governmentality Studies. <\/em>Analysen Liberal-Demokratischer Gesellschaften im Anschluss an Michel Foucault<\/em>, 113\u2013126. M\u00fcnster: Lit, 2004.<\/p>\n\n\n\nRuggill, Judd and Ken S. McAllister. \u201cComputer Game Archiving and the Serious Work of Silliness.\u201d Animation Journal 19<\/em> (2011): 67-77.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\u2014\u2014. Tempest: Geometries of Play<\/em>. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWinkler, Hartmut. Docuverse. Zur Medientheorie der Computer<\/em>. M\u00fcnchen: Boer, 1997.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Host: Selim Krichane (Swiss Museum of Games) 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1002762,"featured_media":0,"parent":570,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-642","page","type-page","status-publish"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.unil.ch\/culture-videoludique\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.unil.ch\/culture-videoludique\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.unil.ch\/culture-videoludique\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.unil.ch\/culture-videoludique\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1002762"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.unil.ch\/culture-videoludique\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/wp.unil.ch\/culture-videoludique\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":889,"href":"https:\/\/wp.unil.ch\/culture-videoludique\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/642\/revisions\/889"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.unil.ch\/culture-videoludique\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.unil.ch\/culture-videoludique\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}