Videogames in Historical Perspective
On Tuesday, December 5, 2023, the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest hosted an event exploring Videogames in Historical Perspective. Moderated by Villanova Associate Professor of Communications Dr. Gordon Coonfield, the conversation featured University of Tennessee, Knoxville art historian Dr. Kelli Wood, University of Michigan musicologist Dr. Matthew Thompson, and rhetorician Dr. Trevor Strunk of No Cartridge Audio. Watch the recording here.
This conversation, “Videogames in Historical Perspective” grew out of our continued interest to showcase the vitality and importance of history by exposing our audience to the ways culture reflects the economic and sociopolitical conditions which shape it, as through Fashion and Speculative Fiction. As games are media products and therefore both objects of art and commerce, their analysis represents an opportunity to engage with how their development over time has fit into wider socioeconomic context, through lenses like technological advancement, legislation, and political discussion around them.
Joining moderator Dr. Gordon Coonfield on the virtual dais were Matthew Thompson, DMA, Clinical Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Michigan; Kelli Wood, PhD, the Dale G. Cleaver Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; and Trevor Strunk, PhD, associate editor of the Veteran’s Administration publication The Veteran and host of the podcast No Cartridge Audio. The interdisciplinary approach to the conversation was intended to address the history of games and game development, the interpretation of history in games, and games as a teaching tool.
Dr. Coonfield began the conversation by offering context about how games are typically not enjoyed in isolation, lending to the credence of collaborative learning about them. His opening remarks included prompts such as “How do games as creative, economic, ludic, and technical endeavors figure into historical thinking and historical reasoning? In other words, why should historians care?”[1] Regarding history in games, Dr. Coonfield exemplified appropriation of history in games through the series Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, and God of War, asking “what, then, is important about games as ways of engaging historical matters, with historical texts? What responsibilities do we have as players of games to engage them in this way as critical texts? And what role does scholarship have in interrogating these games?” [2] His final framing questions regarded “a history of games and gamers”: “What role do games and game players have in creating and making culture, not just consuming it? Where do the histories and cultures of such publics fit into our work as scholars?”
Dr. Wood’s intriguing presentation began by addressing the perpetual question of games as art, investigating “the long development of video games in relation to the history of the industries of play […] and the ways that they have relied upon our perceptions of art and technology over the years.” [3] Dr. Wood began by looking at the career of Fusajirō Yamauchi, who began in games by opening the first Hanafuda (flower cards) shop while other playing cards (or karuta) were banned by the Japanese government. Fusajirō founded Nintendo to mass produce these cards, a company that has helped shape the video game industry through systems like the Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom and series like Mario Bros. and Pokémon, which also has a well-known card game. From here, Dr. Wood explained the long durée approach to game studies which understands games through “historically contingent meaning,” while games “spurred important technological advances,” reconciling “the issue of ludology and narratology,” understanding games as “dually competitive & mimetic” and “content laden in their very form.”[4]
With this background, Dr. Wood dove into the twentieth century through the 1939 World’s Fair, featuring Edward Condon’s Nimitron Computer Game, similar festivals in the early 1950s in Britain and Canada showcasing early computers, and videogames shaping the market for and development of home computers from the 1970s to 1990s. Her presentation also demonstrated parallels between the videogame history and the way playing cards helped drive the development of print from the 13th century, down to playing card moral panics which presage panics that contemporary games have been at the center of, as well as later development of board games from the 18th to 20th centuries. Essentially, the presentation was about eliminating the false dichotomies between “art” on one hand and “science” or “technology” on the other in analyzing the history of games, putting that history into the context of the intertwined development of art and technology over time.
Next, Dr. Thompson’s historical perspective on videogames focused on how “technology allows for advancement in what a game can sound like,” looking at both the development of video game music and environmental sound design.[5] Dr. Thompson opened his presentation with a clip from a live performance of his piano duet with Dr. Martin Leung, who he invited to a residency at the University of Michigan in 2018, of the ending music from Super Mario Bros. 2.[6] He then referred to the sound design of early pinball machines and gambling machines in the 1890s as precursors, before showing how audio technology in games developed from Atari’s Pong in 1972 to Sony’s Ghosts of Tsushima in 2020.
Dr. Thompson emphasized how technology limited the range of sounds in Pong (taken from Discovery’s 2007 documentary Rise of the Video Game) or the tones in the original Super Mario Bros. theme in 1985 contrasted with the more complicated sound of its more recent successor, 2017’s Super Mario Odyssey. He also demonstrated how the melody of the Mario theme — in both the original and reworked versions — borrow from Lee Ritenour’s 1979 jazz song “Let’s Not Talk About It” to exemplify how all composers, including game composers like Koji Kondo, borrow from other influences. Dr. Thompson ended with clips from 1990’s Super Mario World and his own playthrough of Ghost of Tsushima to demonstrate how music and sound design in games over time has incorporated concepts like vertical layering to make sound queues reflect gameplay styles in more and more complicated ways — such as denoting when plumber-adventurer Mario has saddled onto talking dinosaur Yoshi or showing the variance between a stealthy and upfront assault on a samurai stronghold. He later mentioned during Q&A that the 1984 game Lazy Jones and the 1991 LucasArts game Monkey Island 2, which utilized proprietary IMUSE software to produce the music, were early examples of dynamic music in games.
Finally, Dr. Strunk pulled on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer and State of Exception, Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Christopher McQuarrie’s Top Gun: Maverick, and the new Grand Theft Auto VI trailer to demonstrate “a hegemonic pushback to mass cultural awareness happening by way of the removal of space and place specificity, primarily by removing historicity.” [7] This media operates outside of being state propaganda or having any obvious political-philosophical polemic by generating simulacra that interprets the real world while too separate from it to directly apply to it; the legally distinct recreations of real places may contribute not to inuring people from propaganda, but to preclude developing consciousness about the sociopolitical context of its assumptions and implications. Top Gun, for instance, exemplifies the “space of exception” because it “launders patriotic propaganda by way of a nameless, faceless generality: a space and place that can be acted upon, but which can never be defined.”
Grand Theft Auto VI — whose trailer came out the day before the presentation — was the perfect example for videogames because of the series’ long-running satire of American life through pastiche of crime films utilize caricatures of American cities, states, and towns such as, in Vice City and GTA VI, Miami, Florida. As Dr. Strunk puts it, “the world of Vice City is able to operate as a placeless version of Miami, with none of the social, historical, or cultural issues that would have to be taken into account if the “actual” space were used. But this is only possible because the player is then stripped of context as well: anything that happens in GTAVI is not subject to critique or applause of any kind or interpretative impulse because any action in the game is delimited by the space in which it takes place.”
He went on to contrast this “bland unspecific politics” in open-world games “always at peace with the devaluation of politics in general” with the specificity of something like the detective game Case of the Golden Idol which “forces a feeling of complicity onto the player” while investigating the changing hands of a stolen artifact. Part of his argument was that these games made on smaller budgets with more experimental design and authored experience “are spaces of potential political value and deserve more attention moving forward.” Because they invite players to think about what they are doing rather than just feel delight or dullness, and because they make players engage uncomfortably with small, even bureaucratic, everyday horrors rather than passively engage in unthinking violence.
As the conversation came to a close, our esteemed speakers shared some recommended reading, prompted by Dr. Coonfield asking for the essential histories of gaming: Dr. Wood recommended Half-Real by Jesper Juul as “essential to any student who is interested in understanding the aesthetics of video games” which “conceptualizes the development of games in our century, but in a way that dialogues with deep discourses on the theories and histories of play.”[8] Dr. Wood also recommended Gonzalo Frasca on the aesthetics of game design, alluding to essays such as 1999’s “Ludology meets narratology” and 2003’s “Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology,” as well as TreaAndrea Russworm’s Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games.[9] Dr. Thompson recommended KC Collins, author of Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design.”[10] He also recommended that now is the time to interview the composers and sound designers that pioneered the medium of video games, so their experiences are recorded rather than lost. Dr. Strunk recommended McKenzie Wark’s 2004 work A Hacker Manifesto, as somewhat beyond the realm of games but a good introduction to “trying to understand how to write about the digital and how to conceive it as its own theoretical space.”[11][12] He further recommended interested people look toward ROM communities to see what has been dug up from the past that had never been brought to the West before.
As a gigantic industry over 50 years old, videogames represent an oft-discussed and simultaneously frequently overlooked component of everyday life in America and across the world. In fact, part of Dr. Wood’s preamble assessed the ways dismissal in one realm of conversation and shameless boosterism in another find people making ideological camps that can limit our ability to understand them as aesthetic objects, parts of material culture, and objects and instruments of history. “Videogames in Historical Perspective” was a primer in some senses, the beginning of a larger conversation for us, uniting distinct perspectives to advance the cause of a more historically-informed public.
[1] Quotes here from Dr. Coonfield
[2] Call of Duty was long a World War II battlefield simulator before shifting to Cold War and near-future post-GWOT settings; Assassin’s Creed began with the historical presence of the Isma’ili sect of Assassins and Catholic Templars during the Crusades before jumping through centuries and settings ranging from Ancient Egypt and Greece to the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, among other settings, across the last 16 years of releases; God of War was originally set in a cartoonishly violent interpretation of Greek mythology in the 2000s before shifting to a more self-serious (but still violent) interpretation of Norse mythology in the late 2010s.
[3] Quotes here from Dr. Wood’s presentation. Dr. Wood is author of several articles and chapters, including contributions to Art History, ArLis: Art Libraries, Renaissance Studies and a review of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt exhibit in CAA Reviews. Esteemed film critic Roger Ebert denounced the possibility of games as art in 2010, while a panel at SXSW Sydney 2023 considered the question of what can challenge popular conception.
[4] “Ludonarrative dissonance” is frequently attributed to videogame designer Clint Hocking for a 2007 blogpost about Bioshock 2 https://web.archive.org/web/20200114172154/https://clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2007/10/ludonarrative-d.html
[5] Quotes here from Dr. Thompson’s presentation.
[6] Dr. Thompson is a pioneer of video game music education at the University of Michigan’s School of Music, Theatre, and Dance. In addition to his responsibilities at U-M, Dr. Thompson maintains a blog at videogamemusicnerd.blogspot.com
[7] Quotes here from Dr. Strunk. Author of Story Mode: Video Games & the Interplay Between Consoles & Culture, Dr. Strunk’s writing can be found at No Cartridge Journal, including a transcript of his presentation for this event: https://nocartridge.substack.com/p/the-only-way-were-going-to-get-through
[8] Dr. Juul is Associate Professor of the School of Design at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.
[9] Dr. Frasca is a game designer and academic researcher on ludology. Dr. Russworm is Professor and Microsoft Endowed Chair at the University of Southern California school of Cinematic Arts.
[10] Dr. Collins is associate director of the University of Carleton’s graduate program in the School of Information Technology.
[11] Dr. Wark is professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School. Among her best known works are A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674025196
[12] For more books about how games develop and work, one might consider the podcast Game Studies Study Buddies, where media scholar Cameron Kunzelman and literature scholar Michael Lutz aim to “make academic games studies available for audiences outside of academia, text by text.” There is also no shortage of critical and personal writing on games (such as last year’s Video Game of the Year by Jordan Minor, or Critical Hits, edited by Carmen Maria Machado and J. Robert Lennon); games labor (such as Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier’s two books), and intersections between games, politics, and culture (such as Villanova psychology professor Dr. Patrick Markey’s co-authored text Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games is Wrong or The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games by Chris A. Paul), and more.
