Carly A. Kocurek
I am a video game historian. I have spent hours tracking down arcade uprights for historically significant but rare games. I have pored over trade journals from the 1980s. I have played games I wish – desperately wish – I could scrub from my brain. In my off hours, I may while away time playing Fruit Ninja or Game Dev Story on my phone, enmeshed in the eerie world of The Path, or cursing my poor in-game driving skills as I wander through L.A. Noire , but during the work week, I’m often swearing at Atari 2600 games or mapping classic arcades so I will know where to detour to next time I head to a conference.
While I came by my subfield honestly – I have fond childhood memories of an obsessive back-and-forth Tetris high-score battle with my mother –I took an indirect route. When I entered graduate school, I wanted to study something about the burgeoning growth of web-based DIY and craft businesses run by young women, or maybe something about music. But, then I drifted, first back toward technology and gender, then through an oral history project about barbecue, and I might have continued off on some other fascinating tangent had it not been for an adviser’s suggestion that I consider turning my oral history skills to video gaming. At that point, my personal gaming interest had waned to the point that I rarely played anything past computer solitaire or a time management game of some stripe. As I dug first into existing gaming scholarship and then into primary sources, I realized this needed to change immediately. A trip to see The King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters sealed my fate. The infamous 1982 photograph of “the world’s best gamers” published in Life Magazine became an obsession. I wanted to know how and when gaming had become the presumed domain of young men.
So, like any sensible person, I bought an Atari 2600 on eBay and started keeping quarters in my purse. I kept reading, but I also spent hours with the stray vintage arcade uprights I encountered in the lobbies of local movie theaters and tucked in the corner of the bowling alley up the road from my apartment. I developed a fair game of Q*Bert on my 2600, one which has translated into a couple of top scores on the Q*Bert machine at the local arcade. And, the years of childhood and adolescent training on Tetris have served me well; on my one visit to Funspot, I managed to rank on their Tetris machine’s top scores. While Q*Bert and Tetris are games I play largely because I enjoy them, I have played many more games out of a desire to cultivate first-hand knowledge of the topics I write about. Some of these games I enjoy, but often the experience leaves much to be desired. An opportunity to play on one of the few remaining uprights of Exidy’s 1976 Deathrace , while exciting for my research, proved an exercise in in-game tedium. The game, which set off the first video gaming moral panic, is historically interesting but dull. Other games make me wish for the aforementioned brain scrub. E.T. (1982) for the Atari 2600 is every bit as bad as you’ve heard, and yes, there are really truckloads of cartridges buried in the desert. Exidy’s Chiller (1986), which I played at the insistence of a colleague, still haunts my nightmares, low resolution graphics and all.
Video game history is an emergent concern in game studies. A few journalists and scholars have done excellent work on the topic, and new archives are springing up even as more established ones have started welcoming gaming related materials into their collections. Most recently, Before the Crash: An Anthology of Early Video Game History edited by Mark J.P. Wolf presents essays – one of them mine – that focus on pre-1983 video game history. Game studies as a whole is a deeply interdisciplinary effort, one that encompasses work by computer scientists and anthropologists, rhetoricians and game designers. While I’m a historian in training, I’m in a field that supports work from diverse scholars, fans, and game industry professionals, most of whom are dedicated and accomplished gamers. I feel pretty confident in my scholarship, but when gaming abilities are on display, things can get a little intimidating.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, as someone whose first adult game system purchase was an Atari 2600 in the year 2008, I have what can be gently described as a deficit of skill at modern games. In-game driving confounds me; I don’t enjoy most combat; I get frustrated with shooting. While I’d like to think that the constant exposure to my own mediocrity might have infused me with some type of moral benefit – a character-building exercise if you will – it’s mostly increased the likelihood of me shoving the controller at whomever is closest at hand and demanding they finish out the in-game task that currently has me so stumped. On my better days, I’ll stumble through games at my own lumbering pace, the in-game plot moving inching along like chilled molasses. Patience is a virtue, I’m sure, but gaming hasn’t helped me develop it; it has, however, made me more comfortable with failure and more willing to experiment, qualities in which I can see the value. And, perhaps most importantly for me, it has emboldened and enlivened my research.
It is rare for me to write about a game I have not personally played, either on an old upright or console or at the very least through MAME. When I talk about the in-game experience of Pong (1972), I’m talking about an experience I’ve had. When I throw up my hands at the difficulty of Galaga (1981), I’m speaking of my own difficulties. And, should I gush about the soothing, hypnotic effect of Tetris (1984), I am talking not only about a game, but about a game that is among my personal go-to treatments for insomnia. When I critique the advertising and popular media construction of Deathrace that precipitated public outrage, I’m writing not only about the numerous archival advertisements and newspaper articles I tracked down, but about the game I played last summer in New Hampshire. I play games with the same obsessive intensity that drives the most dedicated gamers; I just have a different goal. Games are fun, but they’re also artifacts. I’m just as thrilled to make the scoreboard on Q*Bert as I am to feed too many quarters into the one Deathrace I’ve ever seen in person.
