Wolf took part in a discussion with Cindy Poremba and Andreas Lange about the affordances of encyclopedia, narratives and museum exhibitions when it comes to portraying the medium. Christopher Lee Deleon’s presentation invited us to make productive connections between the gameplay conventions of pinball machines and digital games.
Stephen Kline’s keynote address, revisiting the critical history proposed ten years earlier in Digital Play, provided ideal context for the contributions of the day. ‘Telling history’, the first track, sought to reflect on the way we create narratives out of the large amount of relevant data, and on museum exhibits that ‘show and tell’ the history of games. But first, we will introduce the basics of the three tracks and present the contributions that made their way into the proceedings. This short introduction will explore some of the issues associated with these practices. The conference was divided into three tracks, each with a keynote presenter and a dedicated round table on top of the regular panels: telling history, working with history, and building history. As more scholars feel drawn to the discipline, the organizing committee (Espen Aarseth, Raiford Guins, Henry Lowood and Carl Therrien) thought the time was right to gather, lay out the many methodological issues and address the potential solutions. The first international conference on the history of games emerged out of the necessity to question video game historiography, to deconstruct this ‘natural object’ in order to start building with a heightened sense of self-awareness. The willingness of many industry figures to help document the history of games has to be applauded, but we can’t expect people who have an affective connection with their creations to do the critical examination of the myths built around them.
As the publishers of these accounts know too well, the gaming community at large buys it, too. One shouldn’t be surprised about the naturalization of that very specific ‘object’ – the great video game industry – as the major interest of historical inquiry most of the mainstream journalistic accounts of video game history have used hundreds of interviews with interested parties as their primary sources. Who would question such a self-assured statement, comforting us with ever more specific facts about techno-geniuses and providing us with an exciting narrative of nemesis rivalry, truth-deciphering and industrial grandeur? Journalists and aca-fans might have a hard time remembering that the techno-industrial glorification rhetoric is not as natural as some forefathers might have you believe. The real question should be ‘Who created the video game industry?’ Nolan and I get the credit for that one (2011: ix). The truth is, it was Thomas Goldsmith Jr. There is a lot of controversy over who invented the first ‘video game’ Some say it was Ralph Baer while others say it was Nolan Bushnell. In his foreword to Roberto Dillon’s The Golden Age of Video Games (2011), Atari co-founder Ted Dabney presents us with the following statement: What is the object of video game history? If we are to believe many of the journalistic accounts published in the last 20 years, the answer to that question appears to be painfully obvious.