Game Canon and Game History

Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-3-032-25217-3
Verlag: Springer-Verlag GmbH

Buch, Englisch, 218 Seiten, Format (B × H): 148 mm x 210 mm

Reihe: Perspektiven der Game Studies

Games have developed into an important form of cultural expression that needs to be appropriately archived and examined in relation to established cultural forms. They are part of various cultural institutions that collect cultural artifacts. The selection of computer games varies not only according to the profile of the institution, but also in terms of format, accompanying material, and, in particular, the consoles used. For purely pragmatic reasons, cultural institutions that collect define specific criteria for the cultural assets to be collected. How can these criteria be defined for a game collection in order to achieve a documentation of game history that is as comprehensive, diverse, and varied as possible? Can the canon debates from literary or film studies and the associated practices, such as retrospectives in cultural centers and film museums, be transferred to game studies? What are the milestones of game culture? What approaches arise in comparison to other media and their archiving practices? What is archived in a game collection beyond the code or the game board? What is interesting in terms of game mechanics, technology, or narrative? What dependencies arise in the relationship between software and hardware? Can game history be written nationally? What does a pluralistic and grassroots history of games look like?

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Çakir, Dîlan Canan

Rauscher, Andreas

Weitere Mitwirkende

Welz, Lilly

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftssektoren & Branchen Medien-, Informations und Kommunikationswirtschaft
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Populärkultur
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Kommunikationswissenschaften Digitale Medien, Internet, Telekommunikation

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Chapter 1. Game History and Game Canon.- Part I: Canon as Reflection and Critique .- Chapter 2. On the Canon: A Realist and Objectivist Account.- Chapter 3. Canonizing the Uncanonizable: Dynamic, Demotic, and Performative Approaches to Preserving Digital-born Literature.- Chapter 4. Beyond the Canon – On Other Means and Methods of Collecting Material for Games History.- Part II: Games as Historical Self-Reflection.- Chapter 5. Metareferential Video Games and/as Game History.- Chapter 6. What Was Producing and Publishing Games Like in the 1980s and 1990s? LINEL — a Swiss Game Publisher.- Chapter 7. Remembering, Reframing, and Reselling the Virtual Boy: From Commercial Failure to Nintendo Classic.- Chapter 8. Video Game Top Tens as Sources for Canon Research – The Ephemeral Fame of the “Calippo Fresser”.- Part III: Institutions, Practices, and Methods of Game Historiography .- Chapter 9. Computational Game Studies.- Chapter 10. Collecting, Selecting, Rejecting: The Deutsches Spielearchiv Nürnberg as a Research and Documentation Centre.- Chapter 11. Manual Save Required: The Performance of Preserving Digital Games.- Part IV: Canon in Practice: Education and Accessibility.-  Chapter 12. Beyond Books: An Educational Canon of Video Games for Schools.- Chapter 13. The “Godfather of Accessible Video Game Hardware”: The Pioneering Work of Ken Yankelevitz in the History of Accessible Video Game Controllers.

Über Autor(innen)

Dr. Dîlan Canan Çakir has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Cluster of Excellence “Temporal Communities” at Freie Universität Berlin since July 2023. There she conducts research on activism and literature, digital exile literature, and games and literature. She holds a Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which includes a research stay at the University of Cambridge beginning in January 2026. Until June 2023, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the “Born-digitals” project at the German Literature Archive in Marbach.

Prof. Dr. Andreas Rauscher, Professor of Media Theory and Media History at the University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern (Virtual Design) teaches also as a private lecturer in Film Studies and Media Dramaturgy at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, as well as at the University of Darmstadt-Dieburg and the Film Academy Ludwigsburg. Curator for the Frankfurt Film Museum (Film & Games exhibition, 2015), member of the coordination team for the AG Games (Research Group Game Studies) in the German Society for Media Studies and freelance journalist (epd Film, testcard, among others).