Jonathan Lessard, Martin Picard, Carl Therrien   In spite of preservation and accessibility issues, the history of video games has become a topic of interest for a growing community of scholars and museum curators around the world. In Digital Play (2003), Stephen Kline, Greig de Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford invited us to understand video games […]

Jonathan Lessard, Martin Picard, Carl Therrien   Malgré les problèmes d’accessibilité et de préservation, l’histoire du jeu vidéo est devenue un intérêt de recherche pour une communauté grandissante de chercheur(e)s universitaires et de commissaires à travers le monde. Dans Digital Play (2003), Stephen Kline, Greig de Peuter et Nick Dyer-Witheford nous proposaient de comprendre le […]

Mark J. P. Wolf Concordia University, Wisconsin   We present history as narrative to examine cause and effect, action and consequence, and the way these shape the subject of that history.  Without these, what is the point of history? The desire for narrative structure influences research; one looks for connections between events, influences, motivations, shared […]

Conducted by Carl Therrien Carl Therrien: In 2007, the Library of Congress made a significant move to integrate video games in their collection. Through a project set forth by Henry Lowood, ten video games were selected to be part of the “game canon.” New games are now added to the collection more systematically; game publishers […]

Jonathan Lessard Concordia University   1. Talkin’ about a revolution At the turn of the 21st century, the video game industry became increasingly interested in catering to so-called « casual gamers”—that is players interested in easily accessible games requiring limited time, effort and expertise. In his book on the phenomenon, Jesper Juul (2010) has termed “Casual […]

Sébastien Genvo Université de Lorraine   Serious games, news games and persuasive games show that games today permeate numerous other spheres of activity previously considered as separate from the gaming sphere, thus reciprocally blurring the definition of what a game actually is. It seems clear that the characteristics and dichotomies which are habitually used to […]

Christopher Lee DeLeon Georgia Institute of Technology (1) One of the three main traditions applied to the study videogames within the humanities is the history and analysis of board games, card games, or games like Dungeons & Dragons. While by no means representing the totality of the authors’ research and methods, books including this angle […]

Helen Stuckey Flinders University   Introduction The challenge of collecting and exhibiting videogames is a significant issue for contemporary museums. This paper provides a case study of Beam Software’s successful text adventure of the 1980s, The Hobbit, which offers some insight to the challenge of videogames for museums.  The Hobbit is an exemplary text in […]

Simon Dor Université de Montréal   It is quite usual in strategy games to claim that strategies have a history of their own, chess being the canonical example (Murray 2002). The common strategies of a certain game change over time—often called the “metagame”—and can be retraced from a historical perspective. StarCraft II’s (Blizzard Entertainment, 2010-) […]

Eric Kaltman University of California, Santa Cruz   Introduction The approach here is not a comprehensive history of Sid Meier’s Civilization series. I have little interest in reciting a general account of the series’ development or the early history of its developer Microprose, the company founded by Bill Steele and Sid Meier. My purpose is […]

Kristin MacDonough New York University   As the History of Games International Conference has demonstrated, the past decade has seen an exponential rise in video game scholarship and preservation as video games edge their way into cultural institutions, most notably libraries, university archives, and museum collections.  Commercially released video games were never intended to be […]

Carl Therrien and Martin Picard Université de Montréal   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. In his foreword to Roberto Dillon’s The Golden Age of Video Games […]

Henry Lowood Stanford Libraries, Palo Alto   Introduction I have a problem: it’s called preaching to the choir.  Nobody here lacks faith in the history of games, and I can only hope that my talk will not reduce your enthusiasm.  That realization eliminates the need for a homily on the value of historical studies.  Instead, […]

Stephen Kline Simon Fraser University             Section 1: On Writing Video Game History In his sequel to the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, Douglas Adams (1980) described the ideal place where media historians can go for a night out on the town. It is called Milliway’s, the Restaurant at the […]

Jon-Paul Dyson The Strong Museum of Play How should a museum study and preserve the history of video games? The Strong faced that question in 2006 when it began to build its collection of video games and related materials. In tackling this question, The Strong developed approaches that reflect its own particular nature and its […]