The New History of Culture
Like any other literary medium, gaming has an immense and dynamic history. However, unlike other genres like movies or novels, a game has the option to adapt to changing markets almost immediately by process of interaction with the gaming community, integration of emerging popular styles or mechanics, and patching or adding downloadable content to already existing games. However, gaming’s relatively recent boom in demand can be at least partly attributed to rapidly advancing technological innovations that make new graphical or mechanical or gameplay concepts accessible to be incorporated. Gaming can cross generational gaps and adapt to shifting demands and worldviews; this is what sets them apart. From this, we are able to log its history as a medium back in time with relative ease, and understand how it adapted and how it influenced changing tides.
The group presenters for this week remarked that games have somewhat evolved alongside movies. While this could be brought up in practices such as cutscenes, I think their relationship is more deeply intertwined. There is no shortage of video games based on movies, and certainly none of movies based on video games. The way they operate is innately similar through not only appealing to certain trends (think culture surrounding zombies and their very recent decline, as well as all the knock-off games made with the same style and mechanics of Minecraft), but to culturally held ideals. Think of the popularity of violent games. While Grand Theft Auto cannot be compared to “torture porn” movies like the Hostel series, both feature a pervasive and unconditional violence. Society puts on a front of being disgusted with these premises, but these series were not the birthplace of idealization of violence. While I won’t get into whether these medias cause people to be violent, my point is that video games, like movies, do and always have reflected ideologies that are held by society, whether they be overt or more obscure.
However, while video games have adapted alongside cinema ideologically and technologically, it is important to note that the development of video games occurred far later. The first “television game” had been completed by 1967, whereas the first developments with movies happened in the late 19th century. However, we could go back even further into the 50s where, according to Riad Chikhani of “The History of Gaming: An Evolving Community,” the first game machine was developed during New York’s World Fair in 1940. “However, the first game system designed for commercial home use did not emerge until nearly three decades later, when Ralph Baer and his team released his prototype, the ‘Brown Box,’ in 1967” (Chikhani p. 5). This went on to be liscenced by Magnavox as the “Odyssey.” Depending on one’s definition, the first “video game” as we know it could be anywhere in time, and it is apparent in how game historians pinpoint different dates for when the first video game and console were conceived. This phenomenon is not exclusive to video games: the first painting, the first book, the first movie, the first dance can be and are often contested. Like video games, all of these mediums reflect changing tides throughout time.
It is important to note how video games have crossed over with other studies. Scott Nelson, writer of “Intellectual Property Pong: Three Classic Matches that Affect Your Play Today” goes into the history of the legal ramifications of copyright within patents for consoles and video games. Games have developed to become intellectual property, and as such it is far too easy to run into various issues defining intellectual property and defending it within the courtroom, especially when the product can be abstract and theoretical. The lawsuits concerning gaming have largely been confined to when it was emerging as an industry, but the trouble is far from over. Patents and copyrights are a spendy and time consuming process to navigate, and this is why Nelson suggests that law must adapt and shift meanings for copyright because this landscape is so complicated for video games. “Fortunately, video games have progressed beyond the initial mechanics of objects hitting other objects, and creativity has escaped the original rectangle of play. Perhaps intellectual property law can take a similar route and find new ways of dealing with media that balances the interests of commerce and culture” (175). With this, Nelson has identified a clear dilemma, one that happens with all forms of culture: the ability to navigate a capitalist landscape while protecting the interests of all producers and consumers is a daunting if not impossible task.
The point of Nelson’s essay is this: video games do not exist within a box. They allow us to navigate our cultural landscape; even if it is two lines and a bouncing dot, it is the product of our time’s whims, ideologies, and technological capacities. From a relatively late conception, video games have, in a short time, come to dominate the cultural discourse. What we discuss about our real and theoretical world can take place within the context of gaming, and as time progresses we find this frame to be more and more predominant. As the first games are unrecognizable as video games in comparison to modern ones, “it appears that gaming in 2025 will be almost unrecognizable to how it is today” (Chikhani p. 55). By now the world of video games has firmly planted itself in our world’s history, and forever more will be part of culture by impacting the larger world around it and allowing itself to be impacted by that world in turn. Culture will constantly be evolving, thus it is crucial to look to video games for insight into how previous generations have worked with cultural constructs on a mechanical basis. Hopefully future generations too will look at our video games as products of our time to understand a history they never experienced.
