Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife

Abstract

Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game AfterlifeRaiford Guins Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Appendix, notes, bibliography, index. 376 pp. $35.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780262019989A new generation of video game historians must preserve the medium's heritage before it disappears. In Raiford Guins's compelling journey as an adventuring media archaeologist, arcade machines from the heyday of arcade video games are an endangered species: they rot away in dumps, corrode on beachfront boardwalks, and succumb to the indignities of a ceaseless tide of button mashing without the care to keep them running. While threatened in the wild, some fortunate games have been removed from their natural habitats and placed into preserves ranging from museums, private collections, and historically minded arcades. By exploring and documenting the many ways in which people and institutions preserve digital games, Guins challenges the status quo of game history, surveys, and underused artifacts and archives in the United States, and invites others to follow in his footsteps to write a richer history of video gaming. Crucially, Guins's project is not to engage with games-as-artifacts merely to recapture the authenticity of the play experience at the moment of its release as a consumer product. Instead, he seeks to trace the path of games as they travel through time and space and in so doing take on different meanings, cultural environs, values, and epistemologies.Following Erkki Huhtamo, Guins chides video game historians for not moving beyond the "chronicle era," (p. 22) characterized by collecting information from written sources often provided by manufacturers or regurgitated by the enthusiast press with little analysis or theoretical motivation. In opposition to the written accounts of early game history, Guins provides an overview of the collection and presentation of games in museums in chapter 1, using the remains of the Atari Pong prototype from 1972 (the harbinger of the coin-operated video game industry) as an exemplary iconic object and Ralph Baer's fragile "Brown Box" prototype (the origin of the home console) as a treasured object held but not displayed. In chapter 2, he challenges scholars to engage with archival resources in research libraries and material history- especially extant games and their contemporaneous ephemera and documentation- by providing an overview of major game archives and interviews with the librarians and curators who tend them. For scholars interested in working in video game history, this section provides an invaluable road map to moving beyond industry chronicles and towards in-depth study of gaming's material culture.The remainder of the book focuses not on resources suited to the learned scholar but of the role video games play out in the world after their release, a vital part of the "afterlife" of a product of consumer society. Despite their purported technological obsolescence, games from decades past have been taken up by enthusiasts and proponents of video game culture in travelling exhibits like Videotopia, "musecades" like the American Classic Arcade Museum at Fun Spot, private collections like Supercade, fan histories like the International Arcade Museum, and collector exhibitions of classic and rare games like California Extreme. …