I’ll be blogging from the International Communications Association annual conference in Montreal over the next few days.
The proceedings started on Thursday with a range of pre-conference events, including one taking a historical perspective on new media, entitled the Long History of New Media.
Some initial thoughts from the first session, discussing what is new in new media. Each presenter had five minutes so there was little time for detailed presentations.
Two of the speakers looked at video games, which is an emerging field of study.
Carl Therrien from the University of Quebec in Montreal tackles issues in studying video game history. He makes the point that games are now more than 40 years old and evolving at a rapid rate.
But studying this area is fraught with difficulties, as there is no institution dedicated to preserving video games and it can be hard to find or even run old games. There are online, often amateur databases, he says, but they are an incomplete record.
Therrien makes a good point about how the constant technological evolution in video games means that much of the history of video games is based on technology, such as new consoles. This then creates a progressive, linear conception of the history of video games.
Paul Skalski, assistant professor in the School of Communication at Cleveland State University, seeks to draw parallels between the history of video games and films.
Similarities between films and games include:
- how they created a sense of awe and wonder among audiences
- they were first shown in public places
- the role of artistic and commercial pioneers in developing new techniques and approaches
- a shift in distribution from public places to the home
Skalski argues the parallels are due to the fact that both mediums share language of the moving image, share the idea of a narrative often based on archetypal myths, and create greater sense of presence.
One issue that he doesn’t tackle is the question of control. In video games, a player can, to a certain extent, control outcomes, whereas in film, a viewer cannot affect the direction of a movie.
PDF
I don’t know what databases Carl Therrien talks about, or how old are the videogames he is hoping to find, but I’d say the MAME project does a great job at preserving and distributing playable roms of arcade videogames 1975-present, and you can find emulators and roms of almost every 8bit computer you can think about. And all of them multiplatform, OS-independent. There are tons of websites dedicated to store data about old videogames: screencaptures, ost, covers, reviews… I don’t think any institution could do a better job.
And when you say:
“In video games, a player can, to a certain extent, control outcomes, whereas in film, a viewer cannot affect the direction of a movie.”
Well, from the point of view of the plot, you can’t do much about it in most videogames. Only in some RPG’s your actions directly affect the direction of the plot, but in a very limited fashion (x number of alternative paths to an x number of alternative endings to the game).