Description
MIT Press Ltd GAME AFTER by Raiford Guins
A cultural study of video game afterlife whether as emulation or artifact in an archival box or at the bottom of a landfill.We purchase video games to play them not to save them. What happens to video games when they are out of date broken nonfunctional or obsolete? Should a game be considered an "ex-game" if it exists only as emulation as an artifact in museum displays in an archival box or at the bottom of a landfill? In Game After Raiford Guins focuses on video games not as hermetically sealed within time capsules of the past but on their material remains: how and where video games persist in the present. Guins meticulously investigates the complex life cycles of video games to show how their meanings uses and values shift in an afterlife of disposal ruins and remains museums archives and private collections.Guins looks closely at video games as museum objects discussing the recontextualization of the Pong and Brown Box prototypes and engaging with curatorial and archival practices across a range of cultural institutions; aging coin-op arcade cabinets; the documentation role of game cartridge artwork and packaging; the journey of a game from flawed product to trash to memorialized relic as seen in the history of Ataris infamous E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial; and conservation restoration and re-creation stories told by experts including Van Burnham Gene Lewin and Peter Takacs.The afterlife of video games--whether behind glass in display cases or recreated as an iPad app--offers a new way to explore the diverse topography of game history.