Fans and Videogames: Histories, Fandom, Archives

Description

In order to better understand and theorize video games and game playing, it is necessary to study the activities of gamers themselves. Gamers are not only active creators in generating meaning; they are creators of media texts they share with other fans (including games, mods, walkthroughs, machinima, etc); and they have played a central role in curating and preserving games through their collective work on emulation, the creation of online archives and the forensic archaeology of code. This volume brings together essays that explore game fandom from diverse perspectives to reveal the complex processes at work in game fandom and its practices. Contributors aim to historicize game fandom, recognize fan contributions to game history, and critically assess the role of fans in ensuring that game culture endures through the development of archives. Cover......Page 1 Half Title......Page 2 Titel Page......Page 4 Copyright Page......Page 5 Contents......Page 6 List of Figures......Page 8 Acknowledgements......Page 10 1 Introduction......Page 12 SECTION I: Historicizing Game Fandom......Page 28 2 Early Games Production, Gamer Subjectivation and the Containment of the Ludic Imagination......Page 30 3 Transitioning to the Digital: Run5 Magazine as Archive and Account of SSG’s Dialogue with Wargamers in the 1980s......Page 49 4 Keeping the Spectrum Alive: Platform Fandom in a Time of Transition......Page 68 5 Pirates, Platforms and Players: Theorising Post-Consumer Fan Histories through the Sega Dreamcast......Page 86 SECTION II: Fan contributions to Game History......Page 102 6 EVE Online’s War correspondents: Player Journalism as History......Page 104 7 NES Homebrew and the Margins of the Retro-gaming Industry......Page 122 8 Museums of Failure: Fans as Curators of “Bad”, Unreleased, and “Flopped” Videogames......Page 139 9 World –1: Glitching, Codemining and Procedural Level Creation in Super Mario Bros......Page 157 SECTION III: The Archive......Page 174 10 Repacking My Library......Page 176 11 Sega Saturn Fan Sites and the Vernacular Curation of Videogame History......Page 191 12 Unusable Archives: Everyday Play and the Everyplay Archives......Page 208 13 Moving on from the Original Experience: Philosophies of Preservation and Dis/play in Game History......Page 224 List of Contributors......Page 246 Index......Page 250