1.2 What is Video Game History, Anyways?

What is Video Game History, Anyways?

I hope that our first discussion was enjoyable for everyone. Personally, I love thinking about and reading people's personal histories of digital games. Part of why I like it is because it exemplifies one of the most interesting things about approaching digital games historically.

That is: Every digital gamer is intrinsically historian of digital games.

What do I mean by this?

Think about it this way. "World History", or the start of the Holocene, is generally. To quote Wikipedia:

"The Holocene is the current geological epoch. It began approximately 11,650 calendar years before present, after the last glacial period, which concluded with the Holocene glacial retreat. The Holocene and the preceding Pleistocene together form the Quaternary period." - Wikipedia

To that last image, we might add a teeny tiny 100 year span that denotes: The age of Digital Technology. That's a period that overlaps with your own life! The artifacts you have from the digital age, such as consoles, and the experiences you've had with game consoles are both forms of how you are constructing your own personal history of digital games.

1. History (as a Story).

Perhaps you've taken a course on world history before, which connected major events – wars, leaders, governments, political movements, nation-states – and told a story about a certain period. For example, when you hear the titles of the Medieval, Renaissance, or Modern periods, what comes to mind for each?

When I think of Medieval times, I think of the Dark Ages... a time before rationality and science, when people were mostly ruled by religious beliefs and kings. If I wanted to learn more about medieval times, I might go and watch one of the countless films and movies that depict medieval times (often by focusing on retelling well known stories of knights).



But, if I'm a medieval historian or student of history, these films would just be mere fictions, projections of the values of the current day into the medieval past for our modern-day entertainment.

If I wanted to understand something about medieval history, I would probably be interested in trying to understand events over time. I'd want to study names, dates, and places! That way, I could start to develop an understanding of how one event in one place might have lead to or affected another one. Through a study of cause and effect, action and reaction, event and consequence, we understand history as the story of things transpiring in time.

When we're assembling our series of things that happened, a key and foundational concept is that you are often reading a combination of primary source literature and secondary source literature. Primary source material means something that was created in the place and time that you are examining, something that has a firsthand quality or account.

For example, if you were studying Medieval times, you might be assigned a text written by a religious leader of a church describing the construction of a cathedral.


The above image is a wonderful illustration of the potential to really experience history through an image. It is a tympanum. In Umberto Eco's Historical Novel "The Name of the Rose", he describes a similar piece of architecture which blends together the immediate experience of the medieval layperson, etc.

When our eyes had finally grown accustomed to the gloom, the silent speech of the carved stone, accessible as it immediately was to the gaze and the imagination of anyone (for images are the literature of the layman), dazzled my eyes and plunged me into a vision that even today my tongue can hardly describe. I saw a throne set in the sky and a figure seated on the throne. The face of the Seated One was stern and impassive, the eyes wide and glaring over a terrestrial humankind that had reached the end of its story; majestic hair and beard flowed around the face and over the chest like the waters of a river, in streams all equal, symmetrically divided in two. The crown on his head was rich in enamels and jewels, the purple imperial tunic was arranged in broad folds over the knees, woven with embroideries and laces of gold and silver thread. The left hand, resting on one knee, held a sealed book, the right was uplifted in an attitude of blessing or—I could not tell—of admonition. The face was illuminated by the tremendous beauty of a halo, containing a cross and bedecked with flowers, while around the throne and above the face of the Seated One I saw an emerald rainbow glittering Before the throne, beneath the feet of the Seated One, a sea of crystal flowed, and around the Seated One, beside and above the throne, I saw four awful creatures—awful for me, as I looked at them, transported, but docile and dear for the Seated One, whose praises they sang without cease. – Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, p. 39

So, now we've defined a little bit about what