Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games

playing past HISTORY AND NOSTALGIA IN VIDEO GAMES the EditEd b y Zach Whalen Laurie N. Taylor Playing the Past Playing the Past History and Nostalgia in Video Games Edited by Zach Whalen and Laurie N. Taylor Vanderbilt University Press • Nashville © 2008 by Vanderbilt University Press Nashville, Tennessee 37235 All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Playing the past : history and nostalgia in video games / edited by Zach Whalen and Laurie N. Taylor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8265-1600-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8265-1601-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Video games. 2. Video games—Psychological aspects. 3. Video games—Study and teaching. I. Whalen, Zach, 1979– II. Taylor, Laurie N., 1978– GV1469.3.P483 2008 794.8—dc22 2007051878 Contents Preface and Acknowledgments vii 1 Playing the Past: An Introduction 1 Laurie N. Taylor and Zach Whalen Part I. Playing in the Past Negotiating Nostalgia and Classic Gaming 2 Why Old School Is “Cool”: A Brief Analysis of Classic Video Game Nostalgia 19 Sean Fenty 3 Homesick for Silent Hill: Modalities of Nostalgia in Fan Responses to Silent Hill 4: The Room 32 Natasha Whiteman 4 Playing the Déjà-New: “Plug it in and Play TV Games” and the Cultural Politics of Classic Gaming 51 Matthew Thomas Payne 5 Hacks, Mods, Easter Eggs, and Fossils: Intentionality and Digitalism in the Video Game 69 Wm. Ruffin Bailey 6 Screw the Grue: Mediality, Metalepsis, Recapture 91 Terry Harpold vi Playing the Past Part II. Playing and the Past Understanding Media History and Video Games 7 Unlimited Minutes: Playing Games in the Palm of Your Hand 111 Sheila C. Murphy 8 Visions and Revisions of the Hollywood Golden Age and America in the Thirties and Forties: Prince of Persia and Crimson Skies 126 Andrew E. Jankowich 9 Toward a New Sound for Games 145 Thomas E. Gersic 10 Remembrance of Things Fast: Conceptualizing Nostalgic-Play in the Battlestar Galactica Video Game 164 Anna Reading and Colin Harvey Part III. Playing with the Past Nostalgia and Real History in Video Games 11 Just Less Than Total War: Simulating World War II as Ludic Nostalgia 183 James Campbell 12 Performing the (Virtual) Past: Online Character Interpretation as Living History at Old Sturbridge Village 201 Scott Magelssen 13 Documentary Games: Putting the Player in the Path of History 215 Tracy Fullerton 14 Of Puppets, Automatons, and Avatars: Automating the Reader-Player in Electronic Literature and Computer Games 239 Robert P. Fletcher Contributors 265 Index 271 Preface and Acknowledgments It is now seven years since Espen Aarseth declared 2001 to be “year one” of computer game studies, and while this nascent, interdisciplinary field has seen its share of vigorous debate, studying games remains an increas- ingly rich and important intellectual endeavor. Whether one considers the so-called ludology v. narratology debates to be over, or ever to have taken place to begin with, this collection seeks to offer something different by discussing a specific set of ideas emerging from a central question: what do video games have to do with history, memory, and nostalgia? Rather than discussing how best to study video games or invoking video games as a generic metaphor, the authors in this collection put a variety of approaches into practice, reflecting the strengths of their respective disciplines, in order to unpack the complex negotiations of temporality and historical representation in games and gaming culture. The present volume is the product of a conversation that began at the first game studies conference at the University of Florida in 2005. At this relatively small gathering, a diverse group of scholars met to discuss video games and nostalgia, and found surprising and deep interplay among our respective ideas and approaches. The result, this collection, encapsulates a broad and expanded conversation into a cogent statement that video games help us think about history and nostalgia in profound and important ways. A note on terminology: throughout this collection, authors use the terms video game, videogame, computer game, and digital game to refer generally to the same kinds of objects. There are significant shades of meaning among these terms, and it may well be the case that selecting one term over the others may (consciously or not) predispose a given argument to certain assumptions. The prefix video is, perhaps, technically less accurate or inclusive than it may once have been, and even digital may not be a universal descriptor if one traces the prehistory of modern video games to include their analog and mechanical predecessors. It might be argued that computer satisfies the universality requirement, since some vii viii Playing the Past form of computation is nearly always involved in the phenomenon we’re discussing, but since that term is often used (in the United States) to dis- tinguish games made for personal computers from console-based games, computer games may not always correctly denote the same objects for different readers. While video games is arguably the most widely recognized of the terms in question, the decision of whether to separate the two or use the neologism videogame brings up another set of questions and possible assumptions. For example, in a comment thread on gameology.org, Ian Bogost defends his use of videogame in his book Unit Operations by arguing that he does so for rhetorical reasons: “Separating the words, in my opinion, suggests that videogames are merely games with some video screen or computer attached.” Jesper Juul, on the other hand, compares Google results to argue that he uses video game in Half-Real because video game is used far more frequently and is thus already the accepted stan- dard (“Videogames”). For the purposes of this collection, we have left the terminology up to each individual author, and although the term each author uses may betray regional, disciplinary, or rhetorical preferences, the reader should generally assume that video game, videogame, computer game, and digital game are interchangeable. A book like this does not come into existence without the help and encouragement of many different people. The editors would like to thank, first of all, our contributors whose dedication and hard work in refining their chapters made this possible. Also, we’d like to thank Terry Harpold for reviewing drafts of our chapter, and Donald Ault for his advice and encouragement through the whole process. Finally, Betsy Phillips at Van- derbilt University Press deserves all of our thanks and appreciation for her enthusiasm for the project and her unending patience with two first- time editors. — Zach Whalen and Laurie N. Taylor, Editors Works Cited Aarseth, Espen. “Computer Game Studies, Year One.” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research (www.gamestudies.org). 1.1 (2001). Accessed 27 June 2007. “Videogames or Video games—What Are We Talking About?” Comment thread at gameology.org (2 December 2006). Accessed 27 June 2007. Playing the Past 1 Playing the Past An Introduction Laurie N. Taylor and Zach Whalen Outbreaks of nostalgia often follow revolutions. —Svetlana Boym (2001) In late 2006, Sony’s PlayStation 3 console and Nintendo’s Wii (codenamed “The Revolution”) promised to usher in a new era of gaming with pow- erful graphics and innovative approaches to play. Joining the Xbox 360, these game systems complete the seventh console generation, and already (as of 2007) speculation is growing over the eighth. At the same time that gamers were lining up to pay over $700 for the PlayStation 3’s high- definition capabilities, many other game enthusiasts were drawn to the moderately priced Wii—not for its graphics or even its motion-based in- put, but rather for the ease with which it allows players to reexperience classic games like Super Mario Brothers (1985) and Donkey Kong (1985) through its Virtual Console. Nintendo’s branding has always emphasized its franchise characters like Mario and Yoshi; with the Wii, that nostalgic branding is fully realized in the form of a commodity—downloadable emulations of the actual games many of us grew up playing. In the lead-up to the 2004 presidential election, game publisher Kuma Reality Games released a free downloadable game mission that allowed players to reenact the then-controversial Swift Boat patrol on which can- didate John Kerry earned his Silver Star. (Completing the mission is not that easy, it turns out, and one may conclude that Kerry’s actions were deserving of the medal he received.) At the same time that media outlets were running hotly-contested stories about the Swift Boat patrol, Call of Duty was one of the best-selling PC games of 2003, and it was recognized both with a Game Developers Choice Award and as the Academy of In- teractive Arts and Sciences’ Game of the Year. 1 2 Playing the Past Call of Duty is an intense first-person shooter (FPS) set during World War II. Its impressive visuals are frequently celebrated for their “cine- matic” quality. As one reviewer observed, the game “shamelessly [re- creates] scenes from such recent films as Band of Brothers and Enemy at the Gates … I’ve never played a game that captures the feel of Hollywood’s version [of] World War II like Call of Duty. It really is like being in a war movie” (GamesFirst). This displacement of the documentary function of games—those ostensibly based on “actual” events—toward a Hollywood or pop-media measure of their realism suggests that something more is going on than the straightforward reenactment of history. In all of these examples (Nintendo’s Virtual Console, John Kerry’s Silver Star, and Call of Duty), video games operate with a clear—and a clearly mediated—rela- tionship to the past.

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