Introduction to Game Studies:
Games in Culture
Chapter 3: Play and Games in History
© Frans Mäyrä & SAGE Publications
Challenges for Game History
Needed both aesthetic and formal study of
games, as well as social and cultural study
of play and players.
Challenges for studying games in history:
lack of archives and museums - no public preservation,
not easy to play old games with original devices
lack of professional historians working with games
challenges for public recognition of the cultural value
and significance of games - seen as questionable ‘low
culture’ or industrially-produced ‘mass culture’.
Perspectives for Digital Game History
Digital game history not yet academically
established as a domain of study.
Multiple perspectives available:
art historical perspective
software industry perspective
technology history perspective
social historical perspective
history of mentalities perspective
games historiography, or meta-history.
Art Historical Perspective
Aims to describe in formal and aesthetical
terms the development of digital games.
Gives grounds for what the artistic and
aesthetic criteria are for games’
audiovisual and interaction design in
different decades.
Provides perspective on how the concept
of a ‘good’ or original game has changed
over the years.
Software Industry Perspective
 Focusing on the industry’s historical events and
developments in the market place.
 Some alternatives:
a case study approach; e.g. David Sheff, Game Over
(1999), a book about Nintendo
positioning games industry within the larger historical
context of the software industry; e.g. Martin CampbellKelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog
(2003)
industry critique; e.g. Kline, Dyer-Witheford and Du
Peyter, Digital Play (2003)
biographical studies of industry luminaries.
Technology History Perspective
Fans are already engaged in cataloguing
the various gaming devices of the past.
Academic history of gaming technology
would attempt to understand the wider
social and cultural dynamics behind the
changing hardware.
c.f. published work in journals such as
Technology and Culture, from the Society
for the History of Technology.
Social Historical Perspective
 Studying technology in relation to the social
history.
 e.g. how changes in the family or working life,
the amount of leisure time and money
available to people from different social
backgrounds, are related to the rise of a
phenomenon like digital games.
 In more detail: social history of science and
technology, the social-technological
developments in different countries, the
alternative or subversive histories of
technologies as socially-constructed reality.
History of Mentalities Perspective
 ‘Mentality’: loosely means ‘collective
consciousness’ of a time.
 Histories of mentalities try to make sense of how
certain kind of ideas or practices become
prevalent in some contexts.
 Often done as ‘micro-histories’: studies that
focus on small scale.
 A small group of people who at some point
played or designed computer games might be a
focus of such a micro-history.
Games Historiography
Games historiography is creating metahistory.
Making sense of how we write about the
history of games: what kind of activity it
actually is, and what are the narratives,
interpretations or other ‘discursive rules’
that govern this kind of writing.
Defining Games
How to define the ‘digital game’ as an
object of study?
What was the first digital game?
Early digital games were closely related to
earlier, non-digital games.
Bolter & Grusin (1999): digital media
‘remediates’ earlier forms of media.
The boundary between the digital game
and earlier forms is not clear or absolute.
Definition Game
 Formalist studies aim to capture the key formal
characteristics of digital games.
 A formalist is not as interested in the ‘content’ or
value of the game for some individual, as to the
functions of the artistic form.
 Aristotle claimed that scientific knowledge
should be based on a set of first principles that
are necessarily true and directly knowable.
 Constructing and debating different definitions
for digital games can easily look like a ‘language
game’, an activity governed by rules of its own.
Some Definitions: Caillois
According to Roger Caillois, game playing
is:
an activity which is essentially: free (voluntary),
separate [in time and space], uncertain,
unproductive, governed by rules, make-believe.
(Caillois, 1961: 10-11)
Playing with toys can be part of game
playing according to this definition.
Range of play behaviours become large;
‘game’ as a category becomes loose.
Some Definitions: Costikyan
 According to game designer and researcher
Greg Costikyan:
[game is:] an interactive structure of endogenous
meaning that requires players to struggle toward a goal.
(Costikyan, 2002: 16)
 The ‘endogenous’ part of this definition points
back to the ‘magic circle’ of Huizinga.
 According to Costikyan, game’s structure
creates its own meanings - the meaning grows
out of the structure.
Some Definitions: Jesper Juul
 According to the synthetic definition by Jesper
Juul, in ‘classic game model’:
a game is 1) a rule-based formal system; 2) with
variable and quantifiable outcomes; 3) where different
outcomes are assigned different values; 4) where the
player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome;
5) the player feels emotionally attached to the outcome;
6) and the consequences of the activity are optional and
negotiable. (Juul, 2005: 6-7)
 Informed compromise between generality and
specificity - identifies several ‘borderline cases’.
Borderline Games
 According to Juul there are several borderline
cases that share some, but not all, of the
criteria with the core of ‘classic game model’:
gambling
games of pure chance
open-ended simulations
pen-and-paper role playing.
 Discuss: how do each of these break games’
definitional criteria?
Multiple Layers in Games
 Juul: “video games are real in that they consist
of real rules with which players actually interact”;
yet the digital game worlds are fictional - thus
games are ‘half-real’.
 Salen & Zimmerman: “A game is a system in
which players engage in an artificial conflict,
defined by rules, that result in quantifiable
outcome.”
 This ‘core’ game becomes realised
during meaningful play at the multiple
levels or schemas of rules, play and
culture.
RULES
PLAY
CULTURE
Primary Schemas. Image credits: Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman & The MIT Press.
Prehistory of Games
 Games and play appear to be cultural
universals - they are found everywhere.
 Anthropologist Edward Tylor (1879)
suggested that dice games have their origin
in divination.
 Sacred and profane use of games have
existed side-by-side.
 Warning tales about games’ power, and laws
regulating gambling and gameplay have been
recorded from multiple societies.
Games’ Holding Power
 Games are capable of capturing attention
and energy, and holding them for extended
periods of time.
 Societies have found it necessary to control
this power of games in multiple ways.
 The holding power of games is one of the
major research problems in Game Studies:
why do we play games?
Earliest Digital Games
 Impulse to ‘hack’, or play around with computers’
possibilities.
 Even in 1945, Alan Turing used chess playing as
an example of what computer could do.
 The first functional chess program was written in
1950.
 UNIVAC, the first commercial computer, had
construction costs close to one million dollars in
1951 - its use was extremely expensive and
controlled.
Tic-Tac-Toe (A. S. Douglas,1952)
 Early demonstration of
computer game with
graphical user interface:
‘OXO’, a version of
tic-tac-toe for the British
EDSAC computer.
Tic-Tac-Toe, created by A. S. Douglas, 1952. Image credit: Martin
Campbell-Kelly, Department of Computer Science,
University of Warwick.
 See: http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~edsac/
Other Early Demonstrations
 In January 1947, a patent application for a
‘cathode-ray amusement device’ was recorded.
 The patent was granted to an electronic missile
firing game, designed by Thomas T. Goldsmith
Jr. and Estle Ray Mann.
 In 1958, Willy Higginbotham, working for
Brookhaven National Laboratory, implemented a
two-player tennis game using analogue
computer and an oscilloscope for display.
 See ‘Tennis for Two’ video:
http://real.bnl.gov/ramgen/bnl/pong.rm
Early Commercial Video Games
 Commercial disputes surround the question
of who ‘invented’ video games.
 Electronic games appear to have been
implemented in various forms by multiple
groups and individuals.
 Engineer Ralph Baer developed a
commercial television game system in 19661969.
 The system became known as Magnavox
Odyssey - it came packed with twelve games.
Games of Magnavox Odyssey
Source: http://www.pong-story.com/odyssey.htm
Magnavox Odyssey Game Overlays.
Image credit: David Winter, PONG-Story.
From Spacewar! (1962) to Atari
 Stephen ‘Slug’ Russell, with fellow students,
implemented an early ‘space shooter’ game for
DEC Digital PDP-1 computer.
 Nolan Bushnell, with Ted Dabney, developed
coin-operated arcade game Computer Space,
released by Nutting Associates in 1971.
 Bushnell and Dabney founded Atari, Inc. in
1972, and released their tennis game, PONG,
developed by engineer Al Alcorn.
 Sanders/Magnavox sued Atari, which settled out
of court and paid licence fees to produce
electronic ping-pong games – the video game
industry had been born.
Study of Play in Culture
Romantics considered play as something
that demonstrated free human behaviour
and that essentially belonged to human
nature.
The surplus energy theory: holds that play
has risen to consume the extra resources.
Practise theories: learning is the root of
play; play increases behavioural flexibility,
Ambiguity of Play (Sutton-Smith)
 Almost anything can take place within play.
 Diverse forms of play: mind play, solitary play,
playful behaviours, informal social play, vicarious
audience play, performance play, celebrations
and festivals, contests, games and sports, risky
and deep play.
 Rhetorics of play: Play as Fate, Play as Power,
Play as Identity, Play as Frivolity, Play as
Progress, Play as the Imaginary, Play as the
Self. (Sutton-Smith, 1997)
Play as Performance
 According to sociologist Erving Goffman
(1959), performance is “all of the activity of
a given participant on a given occasion
which serves to influence in any way any of
the other participants”.
 Richard Schechner (2002) has provided a
continuum of performance-related
phenomena:
play – games – sports – pop entertainments –
performing arts – daily life – ritual.
 Games take place as play, and this can
mean very different things depending on
how the game is performed.
Fantasy Play and Liminality
 Play has an important role in children’s
development, as well as in adult life.
 Violent fantasy play is also considered important.
 According to child expert Vivian Gussin Paley
(2002), play is based on pretending; escaping to
the world of ‘what if?’
 In various societies, rites of passage organise the
transitions between cultural roles.
 The space of passage (limen, threshold) means
momentary freedom from the rules of common
behaviour and reality - as expressions of liminality.
 Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin called this
ambiguous area carnivalesque.
Assignment:
Remediation of a Non-Digital Game
Pick a game that exists both as a digital
and non-digital version.
 do a comparison and write about the different
versions’ similarities and differences, strength
and weaknesses.