Introduction

Game History is a deceptively simple term, which speaks to every reader slightly differently. It brings together an idea of Game Ontology and a conception of history, and both of these have varying interpretations and forms. In general, contemporary historians think of history not only as concerned with the past but also our relationship with that past, and we should be mindful that history – or perhaps more accurately histories – presents discourses about the past and not objective truth (see, for example, Jenkins, 2003, pp. 31–32). Although for many game researchers Game History simply means 'the history of games', and often 'the history of video games', the term can be used in a variety of ways, with a much broader range of implications (see Webber, 2014). In fact, its usage suggests a meaning closer to 'history and games', reflecting a rich, multidimensional space of relationships between people, games and the past. Game History, then, is history in, of and around games of all kinds. As contributors to the inaugural issue of the journal ROMChip made clear, it currently represents both a space of possibility and of significant limitations (Nooney et al., 2019). It is also a space that, as some scholars have suggested, may require some debugging (Lowood & Guins, 2016).

History in Games

Given its breadth, Game History has overlaps within Game Studies with a number of other ways of describing relationships between games and the past. History Games are games concerned explicitly with the representation of the (human) past, but this idea incorporates only a fraction of those games that 'deal' with history in their content. There are many games that concern themselves with a diegetic past (known sometimes as lore), perhaps building on a sense of deep historicality as in Call of Cthulhu (Petersen, 1981) or historical pastiche as in the Fallout series (e.g. Interplay Entertainment, 1997), or allowing player movement through or engagement with a form of historical or remembered time (e.g. flashbacks, retellings or time-travel) as in Call of Juarez: Gunslinger (Techland, 2013) or Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology (Atlus, 2017).

This broader range of historical ideas is usually captured under the umbrella term Historical Game Studies (HGS), along with the historical, and historian-like, practices of players and developers (much of this qualifying as history around games). In its broadest conception, HGS is:

the study of games that in some way represent the past or relate to discourses about it, the potential applications of such games to different domains of activity and knowledge, and the practices, motivations and interpretations of players of these games and other stakeholders involved in their production or consumption. (Chapman et al., 2017, p. 362)

Finally, History of Games is not only established terminology but also the name of a conference series that focuses on the past of games, with limited crossover into other areas of History Games and Historical Game Studies.

History of Games

As noted already, for many people Game History is concerned with the past of games as objects and as a cultural form. It is difficult to chart a beginning for games, especially in light of Huizinga's (1949, p. 1) argument that "play is older than culture", but many writers seek a 'first' as a starting point when writing about games (Therrien, 2012, pp. 19-20). While the first game is likely to have left little trace in the archaeological records, the first board game is speculated upon, and it is not always clear whether or not ancient artefacts are games or something else (Depaulis, 2020). Given their later - and better documented - emergence, the earliest playing cards can be identified in the historical record (Farley, 2019, p. 8), as can the origins of other, later forms. The debate recurs in discussions around electronic games, with the variety of identified starting points emphasising that selection really depends on the specifics of the history being explored, with scholars typically looking to OXO (Douglas, 1952), Tennis for Two (Higinbotham, 1958), Spacewar! (Russell, 1962), Computer Space (Syzygy Engineering, 1971) or Pong (Atari, 1972), depending on whether they are pursuing histories of electronic games, computer games, video games or the games industry. Notably, early games, both electronic and not, constitute a form of canon with which students of Game History are often expected to be conversant.

Although this is changing, Game Studies has typically paid considerably more attention to video games than it has to other game forms. As a consequence, much of the historical work on pre-modern games sits in an intellectual context outside the field, from disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology or (art) history. Concentrated attention can be found in the Board Game Studies Journal, as well as in a number of generalised board game histories (e.g. Bell, 1979; Parlett, 2018), but research published in core Game Studies spaces is lacking (although not nonexistent: see, for example, Danilovic & de Voogt, 2021). There is more in-field engagement, however, with those non-electronic games which have emerged in the context of increasingly industrial production (e.g. Nielsen, 2019; Wood, 2018), and particularly those whose circulation is closely connected to contemporary capitalism. This includes work published through the journal Analog Game Studies, and a range of books and articles (for example, Pavšič, 2020; Price, 2020; Woods, 2012) that consider the pasts of modern board games such as The Settlers of Catan (Teuber, 1995) and Monopoly (Magie & Darrow, 1935).

There are also a number of studies of two significant non-electronic game forms which are understood to have informed a range of video games: wargames and roleplaying games. Wargames are miniatures games and occupy a historical position that runs broadly alongside the development of modern games of all forms. They are seen as emerging from abstract games such as chess, progressing via the 19th century Kriegsspiel - "the world's first professional conflict simulation in official use" (Wintjes, 2017, p. 5; see also Wintjes, 2019) - to contemporary wargames such as Warhammer (Meriläinen et al., 2020), itself set into history through ideas such as "Oldhammer" (Williams & Tobin, 2021).

Wargames are often seen to have exercised a significant shaping force on roleplaying games, both in electronic and non-electronic forms (e.g. Nikolaidou, 2019). Emerging - at least in commercial terms - in the 1970s, tabletop roleplaying games have received only limited historical attention (e.g. Zagal & Deterding, 2018), although many analyses offer some historical context (for example, Schallegger, 2018). Historical engagements with Dungeons & Dragons are, perhaps unsurprisingly, most common (such as Trammell & Crenshaw, 2020; Peterson, 2021). Larp (LARP/Live Action Roleplaying) has also received independent historical accounts (Raven, 2012a; 2012b; 2012c; Semenov, 2010), including explicit reflection on how a process of documentation and historicisation can work in such a space (Stenros & Montola, 2011).

It is noticeable that, while pre-modern studies are typically fairly international in scope and language and focus on the provenance of a wide range of games, studies of modern games are often more limited and shaped by industrial dominance. The connection of this dominance with specific nations or regions plays forward into histories of electronic (computer/video) games as well, although approaches to Game History have diversified significantly in recent years. It is commonly the case, as well, that a lineage is assumed between non-electronic and electronic games, but it is important to remember that video games also have much in common with other media forms (e.g. Shaw, 2010). Game History thus incorporates a range of artefactual forms, which are sometimes more loosely connected than straightforward progression histories might suggest.

In more typical histories of games, a route is traced between non-electronic and electronic games via a range of intermediate mechanical forms (Huhtamo, 2005), most commonly - but by no means exclusively - games such as pinball or pachinko (Amano & Rockwell, 2021; DeLeon, 2014). In both cases, the locale for this transition is the amusement arcade, a site of gameplay that remains integral to discussions of Game History (Kocurek, 2015; Wade, 2016, pp. 77-101), along with a range of other leisure spaces in which some of the trappings of the arcade can be discovered (for example, the British public house; Gazzard, 2014). Such sites of historical play, and the game forms produced to populate them, also lie at the centre of another key piece of game-historical activity: game preservation (see below).

The US/Japanese Hegemony

For many years, the 'standard' history of video games was articulated through a hegemonic Hollywood-style narrative that foregrounded US and Japanese history (e.g. Kent, 2001; Burnham, 2003) at the expense of video games as a global phenomenon. In this history, 1972's Pong (Atari) demonstrated the transition of video games to an everyday concern, and 1978's Space Invaders (Taito) marked the transformation of the market through Japanese intervention. American-made consoles such as the Atari 2600/VCS (Video Computer System), Magnavox's Odyssey and Mattel's Intellivision dominated the household market until 1983, when the "video game crash" or "Atari shock" almost destroyed the industry. This led to a slow recovery, as US console-makers struggled with and lost out to Japanese producers Nintendo and later Sega, represented by the Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Master System respectively. The Alamogordo landfill site, a graveyard of a hoard of unsold E.T. cartridges for the Atari 2600, provides totemic imagery for this transformative moment, particularly in its contemporary re-excavation (Guins, 2014, pp. 207-235).

Local Game Studies/Histories

Problematically, of course, this account represented only part of a story. More recent work in the fields of Local Game Studies and Local Game Histories (e.g. Garda & Grabarczyk, 2021; Swalwell, 2021a; 2021b; see also Wolf, 2015) has demonstrated the intense local specificity of Game History, in a range of national and regional forms. South Korea, for example, had tight controls on the circulation of Japanese goods and media, leading to a thriving local industry that produced its own consoles and games industry (Derboo, 2014). Similarly, although US consoles such as the Atari VCS did make it to Western Europe, the scene there was dominated by microcomputers, headlined by the American Commodore 64 and the British ZX Spectrum (e.g. Wade, 2016), but also including a range of less popular (and often quirky, local) models such as the Radio Shack/Tandy TRS-80, Commodore PET and VIC-20, BBC Micro (Gazzard, 2016), Dragon 32 and Acorn Electron. Eastern Europe also played host to a panoply of local microcomputers, many in fact clones of the ZX Spectrum (Švelch, 2018). The mechanics of global economic empires fairly reliably circulated the appropriate mixture of gaming goods to other nations, such as Australia and New Zealand (Swalwell, 2007), and Latin America (Penix-Tadsen, 2016, pp. 44-53) but attention to these histories has been limited, particularly with respect to the Global South (Penix-Tadsen, 2019, pp. 9-10). Such a range of histories is also a reminder that the scholarship here is not exclusively in English, and substantial work has been published in a range of languages (for example, Blanchet & Montagnon, 2020; Carbone & Fassone, 2020; Esteve & Peinado, 2019).

Through 'history of games' approaches, Game History covers many dimensions of the game-related past: histories of technology and game development, histories of national games industries and cultures, and histories of both the national and international circulation of games. With that said, a historic and self-perpetuating focus on "industry luminaries" (Pargman and Jakobsson, 2007, p. 27) and highly successful products is widely acknowledged (e.g. Nooney, 2013; Therrien, 2012; Wade & Webber, 2016), and this has led to the neglect of failure as well as of the quieter voices of the past - for example, players, marginalised developers and hackers - and the incomplete, messy and contested aspects of these histories. Recent work has acted to significantly diversify the histories available in order to sketch a much broader cultural history of games but there remain significant absences.

Technology and Preservation

Given the centrality of technology to the histories of games, whether electronic or not, Game History also pays close attention to specific game technologies and their cultural contexts and uses. In academic work, this is especially visible for video games, through "platform studies" (e.g. Montfort & Bogost, 2009; Therrien, 2019) and "software studies" (e.g. Wardrip-Fruin, 2009). Both approaches are typically understood as part of, or closely related to, "media archaeology" (Parikka, 2012), and each is the subject of a dedicated series published by the MIT Press. Although the identification of a platform worthy of study often requires some temporal distance, platform studies is not explicitly historical in conception, but is sometimes referred to or understood as a "historical method" (e.g. Apperley & Parikka, 2018). Software studies is intentionally historical; as the foreword to the MIT series indicates, it is concerned with "critical, historical, and experimental accounts of (and interventions via) the objects and processes of software" (see, for example, Wardrip-Fruin, 2009, p. ix).

Game History's interest in the technologies and systems of play is further developed and applied through the practice of preservation. Discussions about how video games in particular might be restored, kept for posterity and exhibited have a long history in Game Studies (e.g. Guins, 2014; Newman 2012) and connect directly to some of the ways in which the field has built scholarly legitimacy through association with established cultural infrastructure. Significant here are exhibitions in major museums and art galleries - for example, the Museum of Modern Art in New York - as these curated 'summaries' of games have a naturally historical bent. Equally important are the spaces for dedicated game exhibitions, which not only include extensive historical and contextual material but also develop expertise in tackling the challenges of making a range of games accessible in the longer term. Such institutions include the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin, the Strong Museum of Play in New York, and the National Videogame Museum in the UK. These museums also hold extensive archives of game materials, and indeed archival processes around games are widespread, capturing not only the games themselves but a broad range of ancillary and supporting materials which include the artefacts of the design and production process, promotional materials, game magazines (Kirkpatrick, 2017) and the remnants of play, such as character sheets, notes and maps (Webber, 2019). Alongside interviews, game historians rely heavily on such archival materials to explore the history of games.

Popular/Public History

Both preservation and more general histories of games rest on a huge body of popular history work conducted by people who are neither academic historians nor game scholars in universities. Game Studies is a comparatively young academic field and continues in many countries to struggle for scholarly legitimacy, meaning that the labour of Game History has long been undertaken by other writers and practitioners, including journalists, film and documentary makers and game developers, but also players and fans. In combination, they have produced a wealth of Game History, including history books - both international (e.g. Chalk, 2017; Donovan, 2010) and more local (e.g. Anderson & Levene, 2012; Fernández García & Pérez, 2015) - published interview transcripts (e.g. Wiltshire, 2015; 2019), online resources (e.g. Derboo, 2014), documentaries (e.g. Caulfield & Caulfield, 2014; 2016), films (e.g. Metzstein & Saint, 2009), reproductions of historical hardware (see Freeman, 2019) and extremely detailed guidance on restoring older gaming equipment (e.g. ibraud et al., 2017), as well as collections of historical gaming materials (e.g. Evans, 2013).¹ Such historical work typically emerges from a close personal attachment to the histories in question, and they often include nostalgic framing (particularly around the 1980s and 1990s) or a basis in a personal collection.

This work plays a critical role in capturing the histories of games that would otherwise have been lost. Formal preservation attempts are often limited by the availability of resources, and by regulatory frameworks that understand the copying and ripping² of games - necessary for emulation - as copyright infringements ("piracy"). The video games industry has had a long, complex and sometimes confusing relationship with piracy and copy protection (see, for example, Poor, 2012), and this has played an important role in shaping the technologies of play. However, there is evidence that piracy is often seen positively by game developers themselves, as a form of decentralised community archiving (Bachell & Barr, 2014, p. 152). Certainly, community or fan-driven efforts are often the principal route for the preservation of failed or "flopped" games and systems, such as the Virtual Boy (Mora-Cantallops & Bergillos, 2018), and a range of unofficial sites and hacking groups collect and make available the ripped data from game cartridges and discs (ROMs) without seeking permission from copyright owners (Newman, 2013). This historical enterprise is further complemented by exhaustive grassroots initiatives such as The Old School Emulation Center/TOSEC, which seeks "to maintain a database of all software and firmware images for all arcade machines, microcomputers, minicomputers and video game consoles" (TOSEC, 2011), establishing cataloguing standards for general use.

History around Games

These popular historical practices also speak to a further aspect of Game History, which concerns the more general historical activities that circulate around the games themselves. All of this activity fits within a more general sense of game culture but is explicitly historical in orientation. It is informed by, and informs, how we understand the relationship between history and games, broadening our sense of what Game History is or might be about. In addition, it is productive, creating new artefacts and ideas which put Game History to work in the present. Many of these practices are also understood as aspects of fan culture, and a substantial epistemological overlap exists between fan work and historical work (Stevens & Webber, 2022).

Retrogaming, Chiptunes and the Demoscene

One significant example of this activity is "retrogaming": an explicit engagement with older video games which celebrates their ongoing value as cultural and historical objects. Retrogaming is sometimes newly productive, with the development of new games for 'obsolete' hardware and the development of new hardware based on older systems (Urbas, 2020). This extension of use sits alongside a series of related practices which are not solely located within the domain of Game History. These include the musical genre of chiptunes (Driscoll & Diaz, 2009; McAlpine, 2019), where historic hardware, often from 1980s and 1990s consoles or microcomputers, is employed to produce game-like music and soundtracks, and the (predominantly European) demoscene (Reunanen, 2017) - highly expert programmers and artists who push back the boundaries of possibility for a range of (usually older) video game hardware. Histories of European games industries often point to the crossover between the demoscene and formal games industry work (Jørgensen et al., 2017). The complex interplay of historical material and contemporary production visible in these practices can also be seen outside video games, for example in well-established board games such as (modern Western European) chess, where the historical information captured in its form and piece names is overwritten with other forms of historical representation (e.g. sets themed around particular battles or sports competitions).

Fan-Historians

There is substantial evidence that History Games can prompt players to engage in historical practices (Chapman, 2016) but this activity can also be seen amongst players of a much broader range of games, in a manner that goes beyond attention to the histories of the games themselves (Webber, 2016). This form of Game History can be seen in a range of productive activities which often appear in spaces focused on fandom but directly concern the relationship between players of specific games and the past. Most closely related to the activities of players of History Games, and as Historical Game Studies attempts to capture (see above), there is widespread player interest in 'lore', the diegetic past of the gameworld. Many players seek to capture or to understand this information, producing summary documents, wikis, compilations and creative work based upon it, and also holding game producers to account when errors are made.

There is also a significant amount of historical work taking place in the capturing of game experiences. These include the systematic detail of walkthroughs and after-action reports, along with a range of text, audio and video which capture the experiences and stories that constitute the history and memory of gameplay and its social and cultural context. In their most substantial form, these include tournament videos, recordings of streams and Let's Plays, memory books and developer-backed graphic novels; in their most ephemeral, forum posts, comments on news pieces or on social media and short-lived personal blogs (Webber & Stevens, 2020). While such stories are often not especially remarkable, they remain critical to our future ability to construct a sense of how games are and have been played, and to inform efforts of preservation, exhibition and historical analysis. Our sense of some of the oldest games that we know of comes to us not simply through their artefactual remains, or through a record of their rules, but through images and accounts of play.

Summary: What is Game History?

Game History, then, is a very broad term, due to the huge variety of different game forms and histories which are captured by it. It describes history in, of and around games of all kinds, but is often used only to refer to the history of (video) games. It includes not only hegemonic narratives shaped by economic power, but also a diversity of histories from around the world, although there is more work to be done to address absences (for example around race and gender, and the histories of the Global South). Importantly, it includes and benefits from both scholarly and popular historical work and a vibrant community of game historians who often demonstrate an affective connection with the pasts in question. It is interested in the development, preservation and exhibition of games and game technologies, the industries and cultures that produce and consume them, the histories which they communicate and the historical practices of those around them.

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Author Information

Nick Webber is an Associate Professor in Media, and the Director of the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research at Birmingham City University, UK. His research focuses on (video) games, cultural history and identity, and explores the impact of games and virtual worlds on history and our relationship with the past. He is particularly interested in the historical practices of players and fans, and the stories they tell about their game experiences. Nick is a co-founder of the Historical Games Network (https://www.historicalgames.net).

Citation Information

Webber, N. (2022). Game History. In Grabarczyk, P. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Ludic Terms (Spring 2022 Edition). URL: https://eolt.org/articles/game-history

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