Fans and Videogames

Histories, Fandom, Archives

Melanie Swalwell, Angela Ndalianis, Helen Stuckey, Melanie Swalwell, Angela Ndalianis, Helen Stuckey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317191902
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Cultura popolare

This anthology addresses videogames long history of fandom, and fans' important role in game history and preservation. In order to better understand and theorize video games and game playing, it is necessary to study the activities of gamers themselves. Gamers are active creators in generating meaning; they are creators of media texts they share with other fans (mods, walkthroughs, machinima, etc); and they have played a central role in curating and preserving games through activities such as their collective work on: emulation, creating online archives and the forensic archaeology of code. This volume brings together essays that explore game fandom from diverse perspectives that examine the complex processes at work in the phenomenon of 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.

1 Introduction

Melanie Swalwell, Helen Stuckey and Angela Ndalianis

Whilst there has been a substantial amount of work on fan culture published over the past two decades, little of this addresses the videogame fandom phenomenon. What little work exists is almost exclusively focussed on the current moment, and on specific fandoms. Virtually none of it attends to the important roles of videogame fans in historic contexts, or fans’ historical endeavours. Similarly, a great deal has been published within Game Studies over the past decade or so. Yet whilst many texts have focused on player culture, very few focus in any depth on fan culture as a phenomenon that has its own history and modes of practise, or the extent to which videogame fans might differ from other fan communities. We see this as a significant gap which demands critical consideration. Fandom in videogaming has a long history. It is time to recognize the impact and centrality of videogame fan communities – as a collective intelligence, as a pool of individual creators of games and as interested and engaged parties in the collecting and remembering of game history. This collection responds to these gaps, offering the first dedicated examination of the roles of fans in videogame history.

There have been significant academic writings focussed on the impact and centrality that fan communities play in games; however, this work has appeared in isolation in Game Studies or is located in texts addressing fandom across a number of media, including games. Few focus directly on game fandom. In addressing this academic gap, this anthology offers a historical and critical study of the nature of, and activities around, fandom in game culture. It also extends fan cultural analysis beyond its frequent collapse into, and association with, cultish audiences. The collection sits at the intersection of Game Studies and Fan Studies, each of which constitute large and complex bodies of knowledge. Here we present a brief overview of some of the key texts to situate this anthology within this scholarship, as well as to delineate the new areas of research that are examined.

Foundational texts about fandom as a practise that required new theoretical models include the influential texts by Henry Jenkins (1997, 2006), Nancy Baym (1999), Matt Hills (2002), and Jonathan Gray et al. (2007). Whilst establishing and expanding on fan theory, none of these texts examine game fandom. Likewise, the Fan Phenomena series (Intellect/University of Chicago Press) focusses on significant fan subjects, predominantly in film, television and comics – such as Batman, Star Wars, and Doctor Who. Currently there are no titles in the series addressing games. More recent publications in the area have tended to offer examples from a range of media whilst also extending theories about fandom to digital media. For example, the texts Participatory Cultures Handbook (Delwiche & Henderson 2013), Digital Fandom: New Media Studies (Booth 2010), Playing Fans: Negotiating Fandom and Media in the Digital Age (Booth 2015), Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World (Ito, Okabe & Tsuji 2012), Bastard Culture! How User Participation Transforms Cultural Production (Schäfer 2008) and Fan CULTure: Essays on Participatory Fandom in the 21st Century (Barton & Lampley 2013) all offer overviews of fan culture as it relates to film, television, otaku and comics, but they pay marginal attention to game fandom.

A number of texts that do examine game fandom are concerned more generally with player culture. James Newman’s books (Newman 2004, 2008, 2012) offer different methodological approaches to the study of games and a few of the chapters examine gamer fan art and cosplay, walkthroughs, speed-running and recording and game play preservation. However, his primary interest is the gamer rather than the game fan – a distinction that Newman makes quite clearly. The Well Played book series (ETC Press) is similarly about the played game, rather than fan culture. There are also some examples of books about player activity that intersect with our interests but, again, the focus is more on the player. John Banks (2013) examines user-generated content, looking at the co-creative relationship between amateurs and professionals as a cultural and economic phenomenon, and whilst some of his findings intersect with our own, the book is less about fandom and more about the possibilities opened up by digital culture that impacts on the player’s role and identity. Rene Glas’ (2012) Battlefields of Negotiation and Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg’s (2008) collection Digital Culture, Play, and Identity analyse the multiplayer, online role-playing game World of Warcraft as a community-based game. These authors examine game design and how it encourages players to appropriate and shape the game, however – as is the case with Banks – they are more interested in evaluating the complex consumer-producer relationships that emerge in online gaming.

A number of authors have addressed aspects of the Game and Fan Studies nexus, for example, studies of machinima, modding, cheating, market convergence and the rise of the casual gamer, and forms of the expanded world of fan engagement with games such as cos-play (Busse & Gray 2011; Consalvo 2007; Lancaster 2001; Lowood & Nitsche 2011; McKee 2003; Newman 2008, 2012; Postigo 2007, 2010; Sotamaa 2009). Whilst we recognise these contributions and build on the traditions of scholarship in both Game and Fan Studies, we also seek to stimulate a fresh engagement between these two inter-disciplines. Our specific concern with videogame history takes us into what is – somewhat surprisingly – quite new terrain, for both fields. As such, this book represents an exciting moment of initial inquiry into currently underdeveloped territory.

Fan Studies is a well-established area of study within Media Studies, and in our judgement is likely to play an increasingly significant role in future Game Studies scholarship. As noted, much of the extant work on fandom focusses on the fan’s relationship with producers, and the fan’s growing role as prosumer in the digital era. Rather than revisit what are by now very familiar arguments – for instance, that ‘fans are no longer passive consumers’, a point which has now been made repeatedly, and which in our view is not the most interesting facet of the game fandom phenomenon – we have sought out contributors to critically address, variously: fans’ roles in videogame history, and their contributions to documenting games and game history. Notwithstanding this, some of the fan activities profiled certainly involve creation and artistry. In examining fans’ roles in the collection and preservation of videogames and engagement with game history, the essays together subject the term ‘fan’ to some critical pressure, as it is used to refer both to figures familiar within Fan Studies (users, players, amateurs and aspiring professionals, citizen journalists, collectors, enthusiasts) as well as some less familiar ones (adopters, programmers, tinkerers, archivists, preservationists).

Following on from this, the collection profiles a set of practices that are not necessarily found in other fandoms associated with film, television, and celebrity. The book presents medium-specific accounts of the relationships that have been developed between fans and a variety of videogaming technologies. Authors discuss a wide spectrum of videogames, including a virtual universe with an open narrative structure, casual games, ‘classic’ platformers, and wargames. Platforms represented range from 1980s microcomputers, to arcade games, consoles, mobile games, and games for PCs. The collection’s focus on fans’ engagement with game history means that many of the chapters address particular games, systems and companies of the 1980s and 1990s. Discussion addresses games as they are made, unmade and remade, which is appropriate given the mutability of game software and hardware. The historic focus also allows us to include discussion of videogames’ relationship to earlier modes of playing games, such as board games.

The collection’s historical emphasis means that we are concerned with a longer history of game fandom including fans’ documentation of games and game history itself, from the beginnings of the digital game era to the present. In adopting this time frame, we push back against the common tendency to treat the popularization of the Internet and other new media from the mid-1990s on as a watershed moment in fan production. It is often erroneously assumed that before the Internet, fans were working in an analogue universe – literally cutting and pasting and photocopying their zines, for instance. With the appearance of the Internet, a range of other forms became visible to fan researchers – for example, blogging and modding, in the case of Jenkins’ Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers (2006). Yet as Matt Hills usefully points out: “an emphasis on user-generated content as something newly technologically enabled also downplays ‘a history of user-made websites, many of them fan-based, since the early days of the Internet’ [citing Paul Booth] as well as a longer pre-Internet history of fan-generated material” (Hills 2013: 131, emphasis added). We seek to redress the limited attention paid to a longer history of digital fan practices, which constitutes a curious omission or blind spot within some Fan Studies scholarship. In our efforts to historicize digital game fandom, we are encouraged by work such as Ellen Gruber Garvey’s on nineteenth-century scrapbooking, which so elegantly pushes the period of interest back well before computer or electronic media ever existed (2003).

Game history has also been a relatively understudied aspect of Game Studies. Whilst there have been a range of histories written on ‘the’ videogame industry (e.g. Donovan 2010; Loguidice & Barton 2009), these have often been journalistic or written by industry ‘insiders’. Fans and collectors have also authored histories, whether in book form (e.g. Burnham 2003; Gielens 2000) or collaboratively online, with platform-specific sites such as World of Spectrum, Lemon64, and Hall of Light and compilations such as the “The Arcade Flyer Archive” notable and longstanding examples. More recently, the advent of crowdfunding has led to an increase in the production of fan-produced books and films, such as U.K. publishers Read Only Memory’s Kickstarter-funded Sensible Software 1986–1999 (Penn 2013), Bitmap Brothers: Universe and Britsoft (Wiltshire 2015). Britsoft is a collection of interview transcripts from the documentary film “Bedrooms to Billions” (Caufield & Caulfield 2014), whose directors are currently seeking crowdfunding for a third instalment in the series. Game historians, curators and preservationists have long appreciated the very rich knowledge that game fans and fan communities – encompassing collectors, authors, preservationists and system specialists such as those who program emulators – possess, and are often willing to share. Indeed, in his study of the collection and representation of the material history of videogames, Raiford Guins notes that fan archives are currently the unofficial standard of archival research for game history (Guins 2014: 85). Most major game exhibitions draw on repositories of fan knowledge. For example, the 2010 exhibition “MuseoGames” at the Musée des arts et métiers relied on the input of the game preservation network, MO5, to provide some of the playable exhibits¹.

A recent stirring of critical scholarship is now addressing videogame histories, seeking to move beyond the amassing and organization of data identified by Erkki Huhtamo as representing videogaming’s “chronicle era” (2005: 4). The First International History of Games conference was held in 2013, and a range of book series are now in production from major publishers (the Game Histories series from MIT Press, the Landmark Video Game series from University of Michigan Press, and the Influential Video Game Designers series from Bloomsbury). Scholarly histories of gaming beyond the ‘centres’ of North America and Japan are increasingly receiving attention (Gazzard 2014; Kirkpatrick 2015; Saarikoski & Suominen 2009; Svelch 2013; Swalwell 2010; Wolf 2015), as are the less attended to social and cultural aspects of these histories.

Collectively, the essays in this volume address videogame fandom from diverse perspectives. Configurations of the key terms in our title – fans, videogames, histories and archives – structure the contents into three sections. These seek: to historicize game fandom; to recognize and theorize fan contributions to game history; and to critically assess the role of fans in ensuring the persistence of game culture through the Archive.

Historicizing Game Fandom

Contributors to Section I “Historicizing Game Fandom” wind back the clock, attending to fan practices beginning at the moment when home computing was born. The essays in this section present perspectives on: the creative dialogue between game developers and early computer users to support user production; the identity of the user as a ‘gamer’, how this was constructed historically in gaming magazines of the 1980s, and the value of fan labour; how attending to other types of games such as pre-digital wargames enables different attributes of the fan relationship to early digital games to be recognized; the way that fan practices extend the life of a platform, defying the logic of supersession and hardware obsolescence; and the way that fans’ intimate relationship and knowledge of the Sega Dreamcast platform facilitates practices – some illicit – extending its circulation and imbuing the platform with ‘post-consumer’ value.

Building on his earlier scholarship on the emergence of ‘gameplay’ as evaluative criterion for computer games and the rise of the ‘gamer’ sensibility in magazines in mid-1980s Britain, Graeme Kirkpatrick argues that the rise of game construction sets and the emergence of the game engine marked a shift in who could develop games. Following the moment when so-called ‘bedroom coders’ created their own games, the emergence of more sophisticated software development kits marked a containment of ludic imagination and an end to the experimentation of the early days. It became less feasible for individuals to acquire the development kits, and Kirkpatrick reads this as a key turning point in capitalism’s use of computer technology. For Kirkpatrick, magazines offer a way to tap the then extant social perceptions of computers and games, and his Foucauldian analysis highlights the role of power in largely closing off the underlying levels of the machine from gamers, a process that he reads as reinforcing the producer-consumer boundary.

Also concerned with the 1980s, Helen Stuckey recounts the moment when a pre-existing fandom of wargaming transitioned to computer games. Her case study of Run5 – the magazine published by the Australian company Strategic Studies Group (SSG) – studies the way that readers were instructed in how to become computer wargamers, as well as the way that the dialogue with developers revealed the underlying operations of the machine-coded routines. A key aspect of SSG’s computer games was the ability for players to create their own scenarios, gaming speculative histories of warfare, and SSG’s construction kits placed co-creation on the agenda from as early as 1984. As well as offering a view of the changing nature of audience relations with producers, Stuckey reflects on the survival of these documentary traces from the first decade of computer gaming (which have endured far longer than those from the web era) and their significance for the game historian.

Jaroslav Švelch hones in the ZX Spectrum, the platform that supported the most populous user community in Communist Czechoslovakia, and the transition that Czech and Slovakian Spectrum enthusiasts subsequently underwent as their revered platform moved through the stages of obsolescence in the 1990s. His chapter reminds us of the importance not only of historicizing fandom, but also of recognizing that fandom is constrained and shaped differently across different spaces, located in culturally specific contexts. Švelch reads behind the inevitability which attends the discourse of hardware ‘revolutions’ to discern three user strategies for keeping the platform alive – treasuring it; squeezing the most out of it; and extending the platform. Evidencing the very strong emotional bonds that fans felt – and some still feel – to their computer, Švelch’s essay contributes a valuable affective and communal dimension to...