Half a Century of Digital Gaming

Less than half a century has passed since engineering students first projected interacting dots, lines, and circles onto cathode-ray screens, but today, digital gaming is big business. Its annual revenues rival those of the cinema box office in most industrialized countries, its video-game consoles receive the same attention and acclaim in the media as do more traditional consumer-electronics items, and its individual games are critically reviewed in the manner of literature, music, and films.

The exhibition Game On examines the rapid evolution of digital gaming from a niche activity to a mainstream phenomenon over the last five decades, a story that ought to be of more than passing interest to historians of twentieth-century technology. For as Martin Campbell-Kelly and others have argued convincingly, any history of modern computing that purports to be thorough must include the hard- and software of interactive games.{1} On the other hand, Game On demonstrates that the technology of computing is but part of the larger story of the sociotechnical realm of digital gaming.

Game On debuted at the Barbican Art Gallery in London in 2002. Since then it has toured the globe, appearing in museums in Scotland, Netherlands, Finland, Israel, and the United States before returning to the United Kingdom at the Science Museum, London, in October 2006. In 2007 and 2008 it will appear in Thailand and Australia, respectively. It consists of thirteen sections, the first of which explores the precommercial roots of modern gaming as well as the public-venue machines that first popularized the notion of the “video game.” The second section is a series of video-game platforms of the sort that brought gaming into the home during the 1970s and 1980s. Critically, the emphasis here lies not with the development of video games for general-purpose home computers, but rather with the diverse, game-only consoles that were available during those years. These sections aim to present what we might call a rough genealogy of the video-game machine.

Fig. 1 An original PDP-1. The first video game, “Spacewar,” was written for this type of machine at MIT in 1962. (Courtesy of the Science Museum, London.)

Sections three through seven examine gaming through the lens of cultural studies, detailing the present-day types or “families” of games, the sound effects used in them, the relationship between gaming and the modern cinema, and the culture of gaming in the United States, Europe, and Japan. In sections eight and nine, the exhibition adopts a more historical perspective, examining the evolution of two key types of digital games, those designed for children and those designed to allow more than one person to play at once (“multiplayer games”). Sections ten through thirteen dissect the creative process of contemporary game production, from character design and multimedia storyboarding to marketing and sales. Here the visitor is treated to an in-depth examination of the technologies and programming skills that make the modern video game possible. Of particular interest is section thirteen, which details the historical interplay between state-of-the-art gaming hardware and state-of-the-art gaming software.

When Game On moved to the Science Museum, its curators decided to add a bit of contextual flair. They commissioned artist Jon Burgerman,{2} for example, to produce a wall-painting time line that places key moments in the development of video gaming within their proper historical context. They also added three so-called “debate walls,” large panels presenting a number of hotly debated issues related to the history of gaming in an accessible manner. These supplementary elements help to better establish the connections between the gaming artifacts on display and their respective sociocultural contexts. Burgerman’s time line therefore places a drawing of the PDP-1 microcomputer—the machine on which the first video game, “Spacewar,” ran at MIT in 1962—alongside references to Moore’s law, the first VCR, the Beatles, Andy Warhol, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, and Ian Fleming’s James Bond hit Dr. No. Arranged adjacent to this pop-cultural–historical time line are a series of personal gaming memories submitted by those who have visited the exhibition.

Peppered throughout Game On are a number of interactive installations. The first section, “Early Arcade Games,” includes twelve original upright game cabinets, period-correct public-venue machines that visitors are welcome to play. Also featured are an original “Pong” machine, a table-style “Space Invaders” cabinet, a PDP-1 computer (fig. 1), and one of only three surviving “Poly Play” coin-operated machines produced by the former German Democratic Republic. Nearly all of the home consoles featured in section two are fully functional as well, and visitors can play most of them with their original knob-controllers and joysticks (figs. 2 and 3).

Fig. 2 Early home consoles, including Magnavox’s Odyssey of 1972 (foreground, left) and Atari’s popular VCS of 1977 (second from left). (Author photograph.)

The reasoning behind the curators’ selection and categorization of the playable games in section three remains obscure, however. They are organized and displayed according to Alain and Frédéric Le Diberder’s three “game families” (thought games, action games, and simulation games), but the curators do not explain why they have chosen this model rather than, say, the seven-game-type model of Kate Berens and Geoff Howard or the forty-two-type model of Mark J. P. Wolf.{3} As James Newman has noted, video-game “categories are extremely nebulous,” and perhaps the curators have chosen the three-type model for the sake of simplicity.{4} But because the three-type model does not allow for an extensive comparison of video-game content with that of literature and film, as several of the more elaborate alternative models do,{5} Game On is unable to provide a rich cultural critique of the video-game medium.

Instead, the exhibition focuses on the social impact of video gaming, particularly on the “debate walls.” An oversized, comic-style poster on one of these walls proclaims that “video gaming is a young medium. Like all new areas of cultural expression, it takes time to build up a body of research and opinion [regarding its social impact]. In the meantime we are bombarded by contradictory claims surrounding the impact of gaming.” Twelve small renderings of video-game characters then follow, each of which is grouped with a small body of text that briefly addresses one positive or one negative social impact related to gaming. These include video-game addiction, childhood obesity, and the often questionable role models who appear in popular games, as well as the emergence of therapeutic video games for children with cancer, games which encourage physical exercise, and games which foster the development of motor-cognitive and strategic-thinking skills.

Fig. 3 An original Atari 2600 from 1982, one of the many home consoles featured in Game On that visitors are welcome to play. (Author photograph.)

These comic-style “debate walls” provide excellent starting points for discussion, encouraging visitors to reflect on the values that video games communicate, the users the games help to construct, and the symbols and the language of the games themselves. But the curators could have done a better job in leading visitors farther. The Science Museum’s website featured a small section about Game On while the exhibition was open, but it did not provide any reading links or other substantive material resources for those who might have wanted to follow up on a particular idea or theme.{6} Likewise, the museum’s bookshop offered none of the many available popular volumes on the history of video gaming, such as the excellent books by Steven L. Kent, Steven Poole, and Rusel DeMaria.{7} Curiously, this shop also did not sell the comprehensive popular volume on the Game On exhibition edited by its original cocurator at the Barbican, Lucien King.{8} This generalized inattention to supplemental materials fosters the impression that Game On is rich on flash but poor on explanatory substance.

At least in part, the interactive nature of Game On serves to reinforce this impression. During my visit on a weekday, I saw crowds of schoolchildren who rushed through its hands-on installations, skipping from game to game in seemingly random fashion. Though I was amazed at the way in which these kids took the historical video-game consoles and systems they were playing for granted, their approach to the exhibition’s displays left me wondering whether they—or anyone else—would actually remember anything about Game On’s sociohistorical narrative. To my eyes, it seemed as though the games themselves were drowning out any broader message that the exhibition was attempting to convey.

Indeed, the explanatory power of this exhibition seemed to be at its strongest in those sections that were not interactive. For example, the hands-off section on the design, manufacture, and marketing of video games is remarkably thorough. With the aid of posters, sketches, storyboards, screenshots, and other artifacts, it provides a detailed look at the technology behind contemporary video-game production. One of its showcases features a black leather jacket, a brown-and-orange T-shirt, and a gray pair of pants—the original costume worn by actors during the development of the popular game “Max Payne”—alongside a screenshot of the digital Max Payne character wearing those same clothes. A detailed panel alongside this showcase explains the complex techniques (computer-aided design, 3-D face-scanning, and an engine that controls interactive screenplay inputs) that went into the production of the game (fig. 4).

Fig. 4 The outfit, storyboard, and other materials that went into the production of the “Max Payne” video game, along with a screenshot from the final product. (Author photograph.)

Another section at the end of the exhibition, “Future Technology,” links the state-of-the-art games and consoles of today with those of the past thirty years. Thus, adjacent to a showcase featuring the sophisticated motion-sensing controllers of the contemporary Wii console stands another that displays earlier attempts—many of which were technological and commercial failures—to incorporate alternative input technologies into video-game controllers. Because it features technological flops and failures alongside those that succeeded, this particular section’s presentation stands in marked contrast to much of the rest of Game On, which could be read as a linear tale of technological progress in the video-gaming world. For as “Future Technology” emphasizes, the history of gaming, like that of most of the other technologies that we study, is one of trial and error. It is a pity that Game On’s curators elected to withhold this message until the very end.

Though sponsored by the video-game company Nintendo, Game On is much, much more than a simple showcase of digital gaming technologies. It is a rich and varied exhibition that attempts to address the social implications of video gaming and to trace the history of the phenomenon through time. Historians of technology might well be disappointed by its failure to link the story of digital gaming to that of digital computing, or by its tardy introduction of the notion that the history of video games has not been simply a series of triumphant developments. Nevertheless, its chronology elegantly demonstrates the many ways in which video games have been an integral part of popular culture in recent decades. And in so doing, those who researched, assembled, and sponsored Game On have made a valuable contribution.

{1} Martin Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).

{2} See http://www.jonburgerman.com/index.php/Work/comments/game_on/ (accessed 11 April 2007).

{3} Alain and Frédéric Le Diberder, L’Univers des jeux vidéo (Paris, 1998); Kate Berens and Geoff Howard, The Rough Guide to Videogaming (London, 2002); and Mark J. P. Wolf, ed., The Medium of the Video Game (Austin, Tex., 2001).

{4} James Newman, Videogames (New York, 2004), 12.

{5} Wolf, 114–17.

{6} The Science Museum’s website for Game On was at http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/exhibitions/gameon/. When the exhibition first opened in 2002, the Barbican Art Gallery also had a website for Game On, at http://www.gameonweb.co.uk. It too is no longer online.

{7} Steven L. Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games, from Pong to Pokémon: The Story behind the Craze that Touched Lives and Changed the World (New York, 2001); Steven Poole, Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution (New York, 2004); and Rusel DeMaria, High Score! The Illustrated History of Electronic Games (New York, 2004).

{8} Lucien King, ed., Game On: The History and Culture of Videogames (New York, 2002).