Playing with Media’s Past: Representing the Intangible Histories of Media Technology in Independent Videogames

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Playing with Media’s Past

Representing the Intangible Histories of Media Technology in Independent Videogames

MA Thesis

Department of Media Studies Graduate School of Humanities

24th_{June, 2016}

Supervisor: Dr. Floris Paalman Second Reader: Dr. Blandine Joret

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From the return of vinyl records and Polaroid cameras, to the popularity of Instagram and retro-styled videogames, the pasts, present and futures of media technology are converging. Media shape and facilitate memory, and now more than ever they are influencing the memory of media technologies themselves. Media experiences are embodied, but much of this sensory data is not accounted for by existing methods of historicising media objects. As amalgams of visuals, sound and interactive systems, videogames can simulate the user experience of past media objects, offering valuable new methods of historicism of interest to historians and media archaeologists alike. Nostalgia and retro style have long been a key presence in independent videogames but a recent trend has seen the emergence of number of independent works which deal specifically with past media objects and the history of new media culture in general. This thesis examines a number of these works - A Slow Year (Bogost, 2010), Emily is Away (Seeley, 2015), Digital: A Love Story (Love, 2010), Cibele (StarMaid, 2015) and Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer 2013-) - and demonstrates how they critically engage with the past in a media archaeological fashion, uncovering the forgotten experiences and possibilities of old media and establishing their new meanings in the present. While partly complicit in popular culture’s ongoing retro phenomenon, they are shown to eschew the accusations of cultural stagnation often levelled at nostalgia and to provide alternative accounts of new media culture than those perpetrated by retro’s corporate historicism.

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Introduction

With the renewed excitement around virtual reality technology, the possibilities and limitations of digital simulation are once again the subject of much popular imagination. While perhaps VR’s most radical proposition is to deliver us into environments totally unlike our own, its capacity to present us with increasingly convincing approximations of the ordinary, physical world is of great interest to archivist and historians, and has been for some time. At the turn of the century, towards the end of the previous VR craze, scholars Bernard Frischer, Diane Favro, Dean Abernathy and Monica De Simone of the UCLA’s Digital Roman Forum project speculated as to how virtual reality apparatus might enhance “3D computer models of cultural heritage sites” (1). Their model, an approximate (albeit meticulous and highly scientific) virtual recreation of Rome’s iconic ancient civic centre as it is believed to have appeared in 400 A.D., was designed to be exhibited via “interactive 3D reality theater”, in which it appeared at a lifelike scale (the theater’s spherical screen measured “7.5 meters in diameter by 2.5 meters high”) and could be navigated by observers (2). Such a project, they imagined, might “be used as a point of departure for a wide range of urban-historical and architectural-historical studies that rely on solid data. That could include, for example, experiential studies involving the alignments of monuments and their impact on the observer” (2).

In their report on the Digital Forum, Frischer et al. do note the obvious empirical advantages of a fully rendered 3D model compared to non-digital methods of representing the structure (plaster-of-Paris models “leave out the interior spaces”, while engravings lack “color and photorealism”) (1). However, they are also keen, as in the quote above, to stress the experiential qualities of their project. Unlike a drawing or photograph, they explain, their digital model “can be explored at will in the three dimensions”, and can “offer high interactivity and, potentially, high immersivity when presented in a reality theater” (3).

Implicit in their use of terms like “interactivity” and “immersivity” is a desire for a more involved engagement with historical structures than is ostensibly permitted by static, two dimensional renderings. Similarly, their emphasis on the “impact” of their model’s physical characteristics such as its spatial arrangement and sense of scale suggests an interest in a kind of perception-based historical knowledge which virtual reality simulations are propitiously positioned to convey. As well as what it allows us to see, it would seem, just as important to the historical value of the Digital Roman Forum is what it makes us feel.

This idea of a preconscious knowledge about an object or space acquired through sensory perception is of course the central tenet of phenomenology. The work of archaeologist Christopher

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Tilley outlines a precedent for a phenomenological approach to historiography, emphasising the kind of sensory knowledge accessible to an archaeologist who actually visits a site that cannot be derived from “the peculiar perspective of a ground plan, or a map” (153). Such an archaeologist, he posits, understands “...what it feels like to move around inside the passages and chambers: the experiences of light and darkness, constricted spaces and open spaces, the sounds, textures, colours, touch and texture, and other material qualities of the stones” (ibd).

Clearly one who engages with the Digital Roman Forum or similar virtual reality projects does not perceive the same breadth of sensory stimuli as they would visiting their respective real world locations. Just as certainly though, following Tilley and Frischer et al., they will nevertheless garner a great deal of additional sensory information than compared with schematic drawings or textual descriptions; one imagines it would be a great deal easier, for instance, to conduct a psychogeographical analysis of the Arch of Septimius Severus from a VR demo than a plaster-of-Paris miniature.

This points to a crucial preservational role fulfilled by 3D models of historically important sites. While UCLA’s Forum, a speculative reconstruction built manually with 3D graphics software in the late 1990s, might appear crude and inadequate compared with the “accurate and objective” models of the likes of the Scottish Ten project (which has successfully “documented” several UNESCO world heritage sites using modern day “point cloud” scanning technology), it still conveys valid sensory data about the Forum that is irreplaceable in video or on paper. Were disaster to strike and an earthquake level the real Roman Forum tomorrow, at least something of this information, something of “what it feels like to move around inside [its] passages and chambers”, would be preserved .

Citing Husserl, Tilley underlines the impossibility of attempting to understand or appreciate an artefact, landscape or structure while sidelining its sensory qualities:

Husserl argued that there is a fundamental distinction between the manner in which the world is represented in scientific descriptions and the manner in which humans actually experience it. In short, a scientific account is both inhuman and very impoverished[...] In a scientific description primacy is given to variables that can be quantified and measured: size, weight, distance, etc. But what of aspects of things that cannot be abstractly measured such as colour, taste, smell, touch and feeling? All these may be very important aspects of the

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meaning of an artefact but they inevitably become regarded as of secondary importance from the prejudice of a scientific approach. (151)

These features (“colour, taste, smell, touch and feeling”) can be said to belong to a wider category of attributes that can be called the experiential qualities of an object. If an object’s empirical qualities include objective properties like its measurements, chemical composition and provenance, then its experiential qualities encompass all those which are subjective: its sensory features, the contexts of its usage and the meanings that those properties produce. Traditionally, these experiential qualities have been conveyed through secondary sources, translated via testimony in writing or speech. The Digital Roman Forum and virtual reality technology, however, point to how computer simulation can preserve at least some of these experiential qualities - in Forum’s case, a direct, embodied sense of its spatial arrangement and scale - even after the object itself has disappeared. But what of the other experiential qualities of historical objects? Their meanings, their social uses, their capacity to inspire? And what other methods of representation might convey these properties?

This question of how objects might be better historicised is the key project of media archaeology, “an approach - or a bundle of closely related approaches” to new media which attempts to make sense of “the media culture of late modernity” through the reevaluation of its past (Huhtamo & Parikka, 1). In the same way that Tilley positions his phenomenological approach to archaeology as a counterweight to field’s empirical bias, so too do Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka present media archaeology as corrective, a means to redeem new media’s hitherto “neglected” history:

Media archaeologists have concluded that widely endorsed accounts of contemporary media culture and media histories alike often tell only selected parts of the story, and not necessarily correct and relevant parts. Much has been left by the roadside out of negligence or ideological bias. (3)

Also like Tilley, Huhtamo and Parikka favour a history of objects which takes into account perspectives and responses of their users:

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The past has been visited for facts that can be exciting in themselves, or revealing for media culture at large, but the nature of these "facts" has often been taken as a given, and their relationship to the observer and the temporal and ideological platform he or she occupies left unproblematized. (3)

While the authors stress that “media archaeology should not be confused with archaeology as a discipline”, they do so less to refute the similarity of their projects than to avoid the pigeonholing of media archaeology into a single discipline with “‘correct’ principles or methodological guidelines” (1). Rather, they claim, media archaeology is characterised by a breadth of its possible approaches, “allowing it to roam across the landscape of the humanities and social sciences and occasionally to leap into the arts” (3).

To the extent that media archaeology may be understood as an attempt to understand the meanings that media objects produce for their users, both historically and in the present, this research proposes that certain practices in modern videogame design may be construed as media archaeological in nature. These include the development of new works for commercial defunct platforms, the communication of new media’s cultural underlying conditions through videogame form and the representation of the experiential qualities of past media objects.

Claus Pias’ essay “The Game Player’s Duty” has detailed already some insights which videogames may bring to light viewed through a media archaeological lens, from the way technology “organizes relationships” to the contingency of “play” upon concrete material things instead of a broad “attitude” innate to “humankind”. (165) This thesis, however, contends that the actual making of a videogame can constitute a media archaeological act, one which reveals historical “ruptures” and reads media history “against the grain” (Huhtamo & Parikka 2).

Given their technological basis, videogames are an obvious fit to probe the history of technical media, though the same could be said of film, recorded music, photography and likely many other media. Like these other examples, there is a lot at stake for videogames in the past and possible futures of technology. The very possibilities of expression in videogames are vastly altered in proportion with technological advancements, with paradigm shifts like the emergence of polygonal three-dimensional graphics, the introduction of online play and developments in artificial intelligence having instigated significant transformations in the medium. While these shifts might be comparable

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to, say, the transition from silent films to “talkies” in cinema, the sheer number of these evolutions and the ferocious rate at which they have occurred have spawned a wealth casualties in the form of unexplored ideas and unfilled potentials left, all ripe for media archaeological investigation. In addition, the understanding and preservation of old technologies are vital if videogames are to retain access to their past given that the integrity of videogame’s experience may be fundamentally compromised when removed its initial conditions of presentation. As Brendan Keogh indicates, the categories of text, subject and apparatus are so permeable and phenomenologically intertwined in the context of videogame play that even so much as using a different controller can significantly alter the experience: “The way a videogame feels to play will depend on the very specific makeup of a particular controller—the strength of the springs beneath the buttons, the texture of the plastic buttons, the shape and size of the gamepad itself” (133).

During play, Keogh explains, the player, the moving image and all the wires and plastic in between become a “cybernetic amalgam of material and virtual artefacts across which the player’s perception and consciousness are transmitted and transformed” (70). It is this near symbiotic relationship which videogames engender between their players and technology which, more so than the above arguments, renders the form such an auspicious case study for investigating the experiential qualities of media objects. It could be one explanation, for instance, the acute sensitivity towards “retro” technologies expressed in a growing number of independent videogames, a trend that this thesis takes both as a matter of curiosity in itself and as resource of textual data to better understand how videogames convey what could be called (to borrow a conspicuously technological term from realms of cognitive science and product design) the “user experience” of media objects.

This fascination with old media in independent games takes numerous shapes and forms, ranging from playful references to the aesthetic peculiarities of obsolete media, like the simulated screen curvature effect in Her Story (Barlow, 2015), to those that go as far as actually incorporating antiquated devices into the experience, such as What Hath God Wrought? (Lazer-Walker, 2015), a game played using a custom made telegraph key and preserved 19th century sounder. That this re-engagement with retro aesthetics and practices has emerged from and remained largely exclusive to the “indie” games movement is not insignificant. Nostalgia, the emotional currency of retro, had been typically understood as a reactionary response to current circumstances.

Literary scholar Svetlana Boym, for instance, frames nostalgia “as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals” (10). For her, nostalgia constitutes “a yearning for a different time—the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and

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progress” (8). Media studies scholar Pat Gill describes nostalgia in similarly oppositional terms: “Nostalgia arises as a response to the historical combination of an uncertainty about the continued usefulness of historical and traditional forms and formulae, the nature of unpredictably changing political situations, and the scope of indeterminate technological innovations” (164). While the “indie” games community might not share the underlying conservative impulse implied by these descriptions, there is a clear similarity between the dissatisfaction with the status-quo which characterises the nostalgic attitude and the discontent towards the mainstream videogames industry often ascribed to and voiced by “indie” developers. As with all cultural movements, what actually constitutes “indie” game development is diffuse and contested, leading Felan Parker to quite rightly discourage scholars from “mythologizing oppositional relationships between various forms of indie game development and the hegemonic, mainstream industry” (2). Even so, some degree of resistance to mainstream trends must be acknowledged here to understand the different nature of independent games’ relationship with technology in comparison with the mainstream industry (with the term “independent” in this instance referring specifically to commercial works developed and distributed without the aid of a publishing company). Although the advent of digital distribution, the availability of cheaper, more accessible development tools and likely many other factors were critical to the independent games “boom” in the late 2000s, particularly crucial was the adoption of what were perceived as retro aesthetics and practices - i.e. a return to “classic” genres like the 2D platformer or “forgotten” visual styles like “pixel art” - a move that both constituted and was constitutive of a greater defiance of the mainstream industry’s persistent drive towards increased technological sophistication. As such, the potential of old technology as a catalyst of change and creativity is inscribed in the very foundations of the indie movement and is invariably reflected in the majority of contemporary independent games that engage with old and obsolete media artefacts.

The mainstream games industry is not without works which prominently feature old technology. Two notable examples are the Bioshock (2007-) and Fallout (1997-) series’, both counterfactual fictions of a steampunk inclination which would no doubt be of considerable interest to media archaeologists. As paradigmatic examples of contemporary major studio design practices however (these are violent, action-oriented games with fantasy settings), such works are not aligned with the interests of this research. Rather, this thesis is concerned with understanding the connection between historically sidelined technologies and the subversive, comparatively marginal work of indie game designers. It turns to a number of independent games which deal with the limitations, creative avenues and political opportunities afforded by technical media, which delve into their social meanings and material consequences, in order to discern what videogames, in their

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capacity to convey the user experience of media objects, can contribute to media archaeology’s ongoing excavation of the pasts and futures of new media culture.

The first chapter begins with a more thorough investigation of the indie movement’s relation to contemporary retro phenomenon. In doing so, it considers media studies scholar and videogame designer Ian Bogost’s A Slow Year (2010), a games which displays a fondness for the consumer commodities of the recent past that could be perceived as indulging in nostalgia in typically hegemonic way. A closer inspection, however, reveals that nostalgia is not an end in and of itself; rather, A Slow Year recontextualises the Atari VCS, a media device from 1977, as valid platform for contemporary artistic expression. Contrary to the popular conception of retro as creatively moribund, the game is shown to point to the new possibilities enabled by the experiential engagement with historical objects through videogames.

Emily is Away (Seeley, 2015), Digital: A Love Story (Love, 2010) and Cibele (StarMaid, 2015),

three games which invite the player to participate in an interactive re-enactment of the internet’s past, are the focus of the second chapter. These games show that, as well the experiential qualities of objects themselves, videogames can convey something of the social experience created by media technologies. This chapter proposes that understanding the early internet as a “virtual world” opens up possibilities for the creation of experiential histories of the internet which may aid in understanding the transformation in social dynamics enacted by transition from a pre-social media internet of anonymity to the contemporary internet of hyper-identity and surveillance.

The final chapter engages with Hertz and Parikka’s concept of “circuit-bending” as media archaeological act of intervention in new media culture as well as Thomas Elsaesser’s reservations about media archaeology’s radical credentials through the lens of Kentucky Route Zero (2013-), a game series which confronts the material cost of new media through a magical realist narrative which also serves as a meta-commentary of computer and digital media history. By conveying common media practices like “planned obsolescence” and “black box” design through the videogame form, the chapter argues that Kentucky Route Zero demonstrates a kind of “dark media archaeology” which observes the futility of technological advancement to bring about social change.

In sum, this thesis provides and overview the ways in which modern independent games engage with past media technologies and, by extension, the retro phenomenon. While acknowledging that this recent confluence of interest in past technologies among independent game designers is likely symptomatic of the same conditions which have catalysed the retro phenomenon (and perhaps media archaeology too), textual analysis of the aforementioned works reveals that they

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are hardly complicit in the status quo of new media culture. Rather, by exploring novel means of conveying the experiential qualities of media objects, they illustrate new kinds of critique and resistance.

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Chapter One: Independent Games, Nostalgia and the Retro

Phenomenon

The retro phenomenon - broadly defined by Kristian Handberg as a culture-wide fixation on the mass-produced products from “the recent past, decades rather than centuries ago” - is becoming increasingly tricky to pin down. Scholars generally agree that retro as we know it today began in the 1970s with the trend towards resurrecting the subcultural styles of the “Fifties era” (which spans from the early post-war years to the onset of hippiedom and psychedelia at the beginning of the 1960s), as exemplified by films like American Graffiti (Lucas, 1973), the television series Happy Days, and revival rockabilly bands sporting “Brylcreemed hair, drape jackets and brother creepers” (Reynolds 243). Identifying what constitutes retro in contemporary times is much less straightforward however. This is partly due to the ever increasing supply of recent past from which pop-culture can pillage, with essentially the entire second half of the 20th century now qualifying as retro. More confusing however, is the fact that after more than four decades of persistent retro fever, the ideas, commodities and aesthetics of yesteryear now so thoroughly permeate the present that the difference between modern culture, retro revivalism, and genuine historical artifacts is becoming harder to distinguish.

This is especially true of the videogames industry, in which retro aesthetics and practices are both a highly lucrative source of revenue and a fundamental creative force. Much like in modern cinema, reboots and revivals make up a large number of all major studio videogame releases and are frequently among the highest grossing titles in a given year. A prototypical example is Doom (id Software, 2016), a recent blockbuster production released to commercial success and unanimous critical acclaim that is at once a reimagining of and successor to the 1993 videogame of the same name (“Doom..”). Much of the praise for Doom has an implicitly nostalgic tenor, attributing its appeal to how faithfully it recaptures the original game’s pleasures. Simon Parkin in The Guardian calls it “a reboot that captures all the crazed, adrenaline-pumped purity of the original”, for example, while Patrick Lindsey, writing for Paste, states, “DOOM (2016) [sic] isn’t a departure or a reimagining. It’s something much better, much more pure. DOOM (2016) is a homecoming.” Almost no iconic videogame is without a similar “back to basics” remake, with some notable examples including New

Super Mario Bros (Nintendo, 2006), Sonic the Hedgehog (Sonic Team, 2006), Tomb Raider (Crystal

Dynamics, 2013) and PacMan: Championship Edition (Namco Bandai, 2007).

Besides these innumerable resurrection projects, the videogames industry also maintains a fierce regime of reissues and re-releases, partly fueled by the swift turnover of console “generations”

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(when a new set of platforms are released, historically occurring in approximately six-year cycles) which encourages publishers to periodically make their back catalogue available for modern technologies. Again, this is a routine practice in all entertainment media - every new video format is seemingly guaranteed a release of Star Wars (Lucas, 1978) for instance - but not at the same rate. For comparison, The Beatles’ Please Please Me has been reissued about six times since 1963 whereas there are so many versions of the puzzle game Tetris (Pajitnov, 1984) (well over a hundred) that even discerning what counts as a reissue versus a remake is a herculean task.

It would appear, therefore, that videogames typify Svetlanna Boym’s claim that “while many nineteenth-century thinkers believed progress and enlightenment would cure nostalgia, they have exacerbated it instead” (9). Indeed, the correlation between the industry’s rapid technological turnover and its accelerated propagation and commodification of nostalgia seems irrefutable proof that, as she observes, “technology and nostalgia have become co-dependent” (10). But while nostalgia is certainly pervasive in modern videogames, it is by no means homogenous in its deployment or its effects. Rather, with reference to the videogame A Slow Year, this chapter contends that videogames both reflect and defy common assertions about the role of nostalgia in contemporary culture. As such, it is first necessary to outline how nostalgia has commonly been and is currently theorised.

Nostalgia

As film scholar and media theorist Paul Grainge notes in his essay “Nostalgia and Style in Retro America”, much of the early writing on nostalgia tends to describe the phenomenon as a pathological response to a crisis of the present, “the consequence of socio-political disorientation and creative enervation” (27). Grainge cites Fred Davis, who, taking stock of retro’s first decade in 1979, perceived the then “current nostalgia boom” as reaction to the “social upheaval” of the sixties, as well as Allison Graham, who connects the nostalgia of the 1980s to what she observes as a disintegration of a “spiritually fulfilling integration of past and present” (363). Related to these ideas is the notion that nostalgia supposes the preferability of the past over the present. Philosopher Scott Alexander Howard terms this belief the “poverty of the present” and demonstrates how it involves not only the favourable judgement of the past but also its retroactive reconstitution whereby virtues thought to be lacking in the present are inscribed onto the past in hindsight. In this context, nostalgia takes on the connotations of escapism: “first, one makes a negative assessment of the present, and then, aided by a selective memory, one flees to an idealized and imaginary past” (644).

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These initial accounts characterise nostalgia as something like a coping mechanism, a source of comfort in the face of confusing present and a way of amending a sense of discontinuity with the past. Fredric Jameson, in his Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, also links nostalgia to present historical circumstances, in his case “a crisis in the postmodern historical imagination” (28). But rather than a palliative, Jameson accuses nostalgia of contributing to the breakdown of historical memory at the end of the 20th century. For him, nostalgia functions something more like an addictive narcotic, the highly stylised pastiches of the past in modern media providing a temporary fix for a feeling of alienation from history, but in turn exacerbating the overarching systemic problem of communing with an “authentic” past (29). By undermining historicity in this way, this “mesmerizing new aesthetic” imperils “our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way”, producing a different kind of poverty of the present - a poverty of reflection - in which “we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current experience” (21).

The endurance of Jameson’s critique is evident in the prevalent conception of modern popular culture as terminally cannibalistic (as in the popular maxim “pop will eat itself”) having purportedly reached a creative standstill and now resigned to regurgitate existing ideas and aesthetics ad infinitum. Examples range from music journalist Simon Reynolds’ Retromania, a book-length examination of pop music’s apparent stagnation in which he claims “instead of being about itself, the 2000s has been about every other previous decade happening again all at once” (x), to German director Wim Wender’s pithy diagnosis that "most American films are now comments on the history of cinema, not comments on life" (qtd. in Graham, 349).

As Graham observes however, this proposed dichotomy between some “true” life and that which is mediated is a false one. “Comments on the history of cinema,” she writes, “are, however inadvertently, comments on life” - media fundamentally structures modern life, thus media objects are an increasingly substantive feature of the past (349). This realisation informs an alternative branch of theory which understands nostalgia not as a “mark cultural amnesia or creative bankruptcy, but a way of acknowledging that the past exists through textual traces in cultural and ideological mediation with the present” (Grainge 29). For film scholar Kaija Silverman, for instance, nostalgia “makes clear that the past is available to us only in a textual form, and through the mediation of the present” (qtd. in Grainge 29). In such accounts, nostalgia does not obfuscate the past but instead offers more nuanced and self-conscious access to it through mediation, capable of constructing (in Grainge's words) “meaningful narratives of cultural memory” (29).

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Recognising the media’s role in engendering nostalgia, Grainge himself further abstracts this line of thinking to illustrate the way in which changes to media distribution and programming are also responsible for the growing prevalence of the past in the present. Focusing on broadcast media, Grainge shows that a series of developments in the media landscape, from “the expansion of the cable industry and the growth of commercial radio in the 1980s” through to “the digital and video revolutions”, has brought droves of old archive content back into circulation, “transform[ing] our ability to access, circulate, and consume the cultural past” (33). It no accident, he posits, that it is in this context that “the aestheticization of nostalgia has emerged”, cementing for him the notion that nostalgia “cannot be explained through any single master narrative of decline, crisis, longing, or loss” (32).

If nostalgia for these latter theorists constitutes a kind of memory of media - that is, the memory of the past as it is represented through media - then media studies scholar Tim van der Heijden’s concept of “technostalgia” addresses the means by which the apparatus which facilitate the creation of these memories is itself remembered. Van der Heijden finds an obvious popular example of technostalgia in the smartphone application Instagram, which emulates the “‘vintage’ look of analogue film and photography technologies” by artificially reproducing the aesthetic qualities of pre-digital photography like “film grain” and “degraded colors” (104). Instagram and other new contemporary memory practices like it indicate for Van der Heijden “an attentive shift in contemporary media culture from technologies of memory to a memory of technologies” and are typically nostalgic in that they appear to compensate for a sense of loss, in this case the materiality and collective ritual consumption of analogue media. By returning to new media the aesthetic markings and degradation associated with analogue media which the slick clarity of digital technology effaces, these practices purport to undo the transformation of meaning inflicted upon mediated memories by the digital’s disruptive effect on traditional consumption conditions and contexts. Giuseppina Sapio, quoted in Van der Heijden, offers family photographs as an example. If the digitisation of photography has now rendered the habitual group viewing of family photo albums an endangered activity, then manipulating digital images to make them look old, she explains, “gives the idea of symbolic continuity to the reservoir of family images” (107).

Retro Style in “Indie” Games

Whether or not the popularity of retro in today’s popular culture indicates a memory crisis

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both), all of these accounts testify to the interdependence of media and nostalgia. And just as pop music, cinema, smartphone applications and broadcast media have all for the above authors served as axes to comprehend and question the roots and meanings of nostalgia, so too may videogames provide insights into contemporary culture’s relationship with the past. As discussed in the introduction, the particularities of videogames’ relationship with technology - the heightened involvement of the apparatus in the phenomenological experience of games; the anxiety over the potential loss of the medium's past through the “forgetting” of technologies; the rate of technological turnover the medium has witnessed in its short history - makes them an apposite case study with which to probe Van der Heijden’s “attentive shift” towards the remembrance of technologies. Moreover, videogames’ capacity to mediate the user experiences of retro technologies gives rise to new modes of technostalgia which (this thesis claims) move beyond the evocation of past media aesthetics to convey the embodied experiences and social contexts of media objects. All of this is to say that the retro operates in peculiar ways in videogames (especially so in independent games) and that the nature of this relationship deserves further elaboration.

In many ways, videogames seem an ideal posterchild for the retro phenomenon. Besides their previously enumerated proclivity for remakes and rereleases, early videogames themselves have become perennial icons of retro, alongside lava lamps, platform shoes and pastel coloured cadillacs; the eponymous space invader from the 1978 arcade game is a mainstay of retro iconography, as are the ghosts from PacMan (1982). If there exists any proof that retro is really just “a symptom or expression of capitalist culture’s final victory” then videogames are a prime candidate (Handberg, 174). This is, after all, an industry remarkably well-practiced in what Reynolds prescribes as the telltale signs of nostalgia’s commodification, “the logic of renovating the tried-and-true, of milking the cult status of the original”, what with its extensive portfolio of long-running, evergreen franchises which are iterated at an intense clip - as Fifa (EA Sports) games for every year since 1993, fifteen Final Fantasy’s (Square/Square-Enix, 1987-), and innumerable other examples can attest (xvii). But there are two sides to videogames’ retro drive. There is the one which emphatically reflects Reynolds’ assertion that “nostalgia is now thoroughly entwined with the consumer-entertainment complex”, that preys upon consumers’ “pangs for the products of yesteryear, the novelties and distractions that filled up [their] youth” via the perpetual trotting out of childhood icons like Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog (xxix). And there is the one, rife in independent game development, that has emerged not out of savvy boardroom decision making but practical necessity.

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In her essay “Nostalgia in Retro Game Design”, videogames researcher Maria B. Garda compares the use of older and simplified videogame development tools (relative to mainstream industry standards) like Game Maker by independent game designers to the adoption of “less sophisticated devices” like “amateur lightweight camera[s]” by independent filmmakers, both of which have lowered “the entry level competencies” in their respective media, enabling artists of more modest technical and economic means to pursue “ambitious and innovative projects” (4). A side effect of this strategy, however, is that works created in these conditions are inevitably less technologically impressive than those produced using the latest, most expensive equipment, and are thus often perceived as “inferior” or dated (5). Both commercial norms and technological determinism work to create this impression. Regarding the former, the mainstream industry typically deploys teleological ideas about videogame design to market its products. Each successive “generation” of hardware boasts more computational horsepower than the previous, while the promotional material for the games themselves often aims to convince players of their technological novelty and purported empirical superiority over older works. In a press release for the recent major studio title Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst (DICE, 2016) for instance, the project’s senior producer Sara Jansson claims the game is “pushing the boundaries of first person movement” and “brings a lot of great new, interesting gameplay and features to the experience for our players” (“Welcome…”).

Even setting aside this marketing rhetoric, the very real presence of technological determinism in videogame design cannot be ignored. Advancements in the likes of computer graphics, physics simulation and artificial intelligence have expanded the expressive possibilities of videogames and, in doing so, produced an effective chronology of genres and styles. Hence, older genres and presentational styles (e.g. the 2D platformer and “pixel art”) are commonly perceived as being “retro” compared to more recently established modes of expression (e.g. the first-person shooter and polygonal 3D graphics). During the “indie boom” of the late 2000s, when independent games experienced a groundswell of mass market attention and became categorised by consumers and press under the unifying label “indie”, many independent designers gravitated towards these older styles on account of their amenability to small development teams of limited resources. Subsequently, nostalgia became a common trope associated with the indie “movement”, evidenced through what videogames scholar Jesper Juul has called “independent style” (which “emulate[d] visual styles from earlier times”) and the 2D platformer’s prevalence as the indie genre du jour (see

Braid (Number None, 2008), LIMBO (Playdead, 2010), Super Meat Boy (Team Meat, 2010), Fez

(Polytron, 2012), among others). As communications scholar Nadav Lipkin explains, the term “indie” at this point in time was less a sign of a developer’s political or economic stance vis-a-vis the mainstream industry than an indicator of their adopted style, which was more often than not, a

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nostalgic one. “Insiders and developers distinguished themselves as indie by presenting games that featured chiptunes, more simple graphics, retro game designs and heaps of nostalgia for earlier titles” (18). “The puzzle-platformer with retro pixel art has become a careworn cliché of the indie game scene,” wrote videogame critic Oli Welsh in his review of the canonical indie title Fez, a typical indication of the sentiment of time.

While the discourse around independent games has since shifted (largely due to their newfound ubiquity and diversity following the “boom”) and the kind of works Welsh describes are now considered much less indicative of the “scene” as a whole, independent game development remains overwhelmingly an act of swimming against the mainstream industry's tide of better, newer and more. With respect to mainstream industry standards, most independent games could be perceived as backward looking and technologically regressive. Garda suggests, for instance, that the independent game Hotline Miami (Dennaton Games, 2012) is “inferior in the sense of game design to its almost two decades older inspiration – Grand Theft Auto (DMA 1997)” on account of being a “2D experience with a very linear story” compared to the latter, which features “3D physics” and is “perceived as the protoplast of modern sandbox [i.e. non-linear] games” (4). As Garda observes, such developments complicate the teleological “narrative of technological advancement” which dominates popular accounts of videogame history (5). They also illustrate, as Jesper Juul shows, the peculiar nature of independent games’ relationship with the medium’s past, which he calls a “counterfactual nostalgia”. Because the retro style espoused by many independent games is realised and displayed using more modern technology than that of their inspirations, they are inevitably “rendered at a quality not found in earlier video games” and thus, Juul claims, “involve a nostalgia for a time that never actually happened” (“The Counterfactual…”). As Ian Bogost’s A Slow Year demonstrates however, even retro-leaning games developed using more appropriately dated technology can be just as tricky with the past.

A Slow Year

A Slow Year (2010) is a collection of four “game poems” created by videogame academic and

designer Ian Bogost for the Atari Video Computer System (later renamed the Atari 2600), a home videogame console released in 1977 and discontinued on January 1st, 1992. Though digital versions are now available for PC and Mac, A Slow Year was initially distributed on original Atari VCS cartridges and thus playable only on original Atari VCS hardware. Bogost’s game is not alone in its commitment to a commercially defunct platform - Wikipedia lists a few dozen original VCS games

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released since the year 2000, and other platforms like the NES have also attracted hobbyist development communities (Furino). With regards to independent videogame development as a whole however, A Slow Year’s engagement with retro aesthetics and practices is highly atypical.

Case in point: while A Slow Year is certainly a work of counterfactual nostalgia, it does not fit the criteria with which Juul defines the term. For Juul, the counterfactual nature of retro-leaning independent games arises from their paradoxical pairing of new technologies with old aesthetics, resulting in visual styles like Minecraft’s (Mojang, 2008) “blocky 3D” which “refer to styles that were not actually part of video game history”. By virtue of its being a legitimate VCS game rather than a new work imitating the style of the old hardware, this is obviously not true of A Slow Year - it does not so much refer to a style but rather is that style. On the contrary, part of what makes Bogost’s game counterfactual is actually its fidelity to the original production and presentation contexts of VCS development, effectively enabling it to pass as an “authentic” product of the console’s era on an technical and aesthetic level, while simultaneously being motivated by ideas and design choices which were not present in genuine games from that time.

Svetlana Boym’s categories of “restorative” and “reflective” nostalgia are useful concepts to help unpack the idiosyncrasies of A Slow Year’s brand of retro. Restorative nostalgia “attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home” (13). It tries to safeguard “truth and tradition” and “return to origins”, and hence can be analogised as a futile act of retroactive preservation. The “total reconstructions of monuments from the past” are examples of restorative nostalgia in action; they are concerted efforts to have old objects “remain eternally young”, as if they were not “past” at all (The Future…, 41). If restorative nostalgia is obsessed with the uncompromised survival of the past, then reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, is precisely interested in how the present impeaches upon and creates an imagined “past”. Reflective nostalgia denotes how the past in remembered (e.g.

reflected upon). It involves both “longing” and “critical thinking” and can be “ironic and humorous”

in doing so (“Nostalgia…” 15).

Garda invokes Boym’s categories in her discussion of “retro game design”, though largely focuses on reflective nostalgia. For Garda, only re-releases of existing games can qualify as restorative, while any new work which exhibits a “retro longing for a bygone time in the history” is considered reflective on account of its interpretative approach to the past (4). A Slow Year - at once a reflection upon and restoration of Atari VCS aesthetics, presentation styles and development procedures - prompts a reconsideration of these categories as they apply to videogames.

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Firstly, it is important to note that restorative nostalgia need not be fixated upon a specific object (e.g. a “monument”) but can be directed towards a tradition - and furthermore, that this tradition is often imagined. A fixation upon traditions is very much at the heart of A Slow Year. In the written material which accompanies the game, Bogost describes the differences between programming for the Atari VSC and more modern devices, suggesting that relative constraints (“which are many and severe”) imposed by the older system lend themselves to a minimalistic, abstract method of expression similar to certain kinds of poetry (9). “The game embraces maximum expressive constraint and representational condensation,” he writes, “and for that reason it has much in common with the poetic tradition.” (xix) By “interpret[ing] the Atari’s constraints through the lens of poetry, and particularly Imagism”, A Slow Year, in a decidedly media archaeological fashion, is able to excavate hitherto unrecognised artistic histories of Atari games, such as their “unacknowledged tradition of naturalism” (12). Being a game which consists entirely of observing and interacting with images of nature - a cold winter’s sky, rain and thunderclouds, a twig floating on water, a tree shedding its leaves - A Slow Year brings to the fore the elements which were typically confined to the backgrounds and incidental scenery of games about jumping over chasms (Pitfall! (Crane,1982)) and flying aeroplanes (Barnstorming (Cartwright, 1982)), but nevertheless there. It reconsiders these games, with their “rain forest[s]”, “aurora borealis” and “mountain sunset[s]”, as “place[s] to visit” as much as amusing pastimes, and, by relocating their expressive constraints within the poetic traditions of naturalism and Imagism, invites their representations of nature to be viewed not as crude, primitive artefacts of an underdeveloped technology belonging to a bygone era but as potentially beautiful works of a purposeful and perennial artistic style (13).

At a conceptual level then, A Slow Year’s project is a restorative one. By reconceptualising the Atari’s conditions of production as formal principles rather than technological limitations, it positions Atari game development as a legitimate contemporary artistic method - a marginal one perhaps, but not anachronistic. While mainstream videogame development tends to equate innovation with greater technological sophistication and higher graphical fidelity, Bogost argues that older media is still brimming with unexplored frontiers:

...to me, programming the Atari offers more rather than fewer connections to the history of art. Working on the Atari is no different than writing sonnets, or fashioning vessels by glass blowing, or capturing photographs with view cameras. Those forms are old, but they are far from dead. The Atari too is a living platform. It still has secrets to give up to us. (18)

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An additional tradition the game revives is the physical media and packaging of original Atari games. Initial copies of A Slow Year were released on salvaged Atari cartridges, complete with newly printed labels that meticulously emulate the visual styles of the “real” thing. This is another gesture with media archaeological insights: at a time when digital sales of videogames now eclipse physical purchases and when several of the biggest publishers now longer include instruction manuals with their products, A Slow Year’s packaging brings to light meanings and pleasures afforded by the material artefacts that once accompanied videogames which only become apparent in hindsight (“Breakdown…”; Fahey). This seemingly secondary packaging and printed matter, Bogost implies, actually has a considerable effect upon how the play experience is distributed (spatially and psychologically) and, potentially, how games are designed.

For one thing, this material seems to constitute part of a games’ apparatus, “extend[ing] the experience of a game” by “making it possible to peruse and contemplate the title away from the computer”. (20) In A Slow Year’s case, the computer generated haikus included in the instruction manual facilitate this activity, recounting scenes which recall the images seen in the game. For another, it “allowed developers to clarify the systems or fiction of a game” outside of the diegesis of the experience, a task which is often achieved in modern videogames via in-game tutorials, explanatory text and cinematic sequences respectively. Again, A Slow Year’s instruction manual contributes to the experience in a formative way in this respect. By off-loading all explanatory and expository duties to the manual, Bogost was able allocate as much of the Atari cartridge’s four kilobytes of storage space a possible for achieving the game’s images and effects. This might seem a trivial to designers working under less restrictive technological constraints, but it also affords the experience a certain kind of “purity” which transcends logistics - there are no menus or text in A

Slow Year, for instance. It also introduces a degree of desirable misdirection to the play experience.

The instructions for how to play A Slow Year are written as haikus and are as such brief and fairly ambiguous, leaving the player to consider for themselves how the lines might be translated into rules. Take the haiku for the “Summer” section of the game, for example:

Afternoon craves nap Eyes follow the aimless twig Waken when they meet (20)

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Figure 1.1 “Eyes follow the aimless twig”. A Slow Year.

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Figure 1.3 “Waken when they meet”. Releasing the button opens the player character’s eyes. A Slow

Year.

Upon loading the “Summer” section, the player sees the image pictured above. First, they notice that a bundle of brown lines emerges in the bottom-left corner of the screen and drifts automatically from the left side to the right, that moving the Atari joystick horizontally will make the green rectangle at the bottom of the screen to move in a corresponding direction, and that holding down the button will cause each of the black borders to grow until they meet in the middle and the whole image has turned black. Releasing the button, they discover, will return the image to normal. In combining this procedural information gleaned from experimenting with the controls and observing the game with the text of the haiku, the player can interpret the objects on-screen and parse the rules of the game. The brown lines, they discover, are the “aimless twig”; the green rectangle is the focal point of the player’s “eyes”; the encroaching black borders are their eyelids. From this information they can discern how to play the game, which unfolds like this: first the player notes the distance between the green rectangle and the incoming twig (“Eyes follow the aimless twig”, fig. 1.1). Then, they press the button close their eyes (“Afternoon craves nap, fig. 1.2). Finally, once they estimate that the log has arrived at the same vertical position as the rectangle, they open their eyes (“Waken when they meet”, fig. 1.3).

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In much the same way as a reader is expected to infer the meaning of poem through interpretation, A Slow Year asks the player to draw upon similar mental faculties to uncover the logic of its four short games. This unconventional and, by mainstream standards, fairly obtuse mode of play is achieved through past media technologies and formats no longer favoured by contemporary creators. As Bogost notes, the “low fidelity graphics intrinsic to the hardware” of the VCS demand abstraction and thus lend themselves well to the kind of ludic ambiguity he pursues in A Slow Year (17). While the technologically meagre visuals of early videogames are typically thought of as one of their deficiencies compared to mainstream modern works, Bogost turns this “shortcoming” into a feature, affording a kind of play experience arguably more novel than many of the formulaic genre games, created with the latest and greatest in technological innovations, which crowd the mainstream industry’s release calendar. Furthermore, it rediscovers pleasures of the videogame experience which have been forgotten in the move to digital distribution. “Back in the day, written instructions and other materials that came with a game served a much greater role in the overall experience of the artifact,” Bogost writes. “Today those sorts of paratextual materials have all but gone extinct...” (15).

This last point reveals the reflective side of A Slow Year’s brand of nostalgia. Boym notes how “new technology and advanced marketing” have been mobilised by corporations to stimulate what she cynically calls “ersatz nostalgia”, a nostalgia “for the things you never thought you had lost” (10). In discovering the unrecognised experiential values intrinsic to the material components which used to accompany videogames, as well affording the retroactive recognition that “part of a game’s enjoyment came from figuring out how to play it”, A Slow Year offers a sort of Joni Mitchell-ian twist on Boym’s ersatz nostalgia, which instead pines for the things you never realised you had lost (i.e. “you don’t know what you got ‘till it’s gone”). Similarly, in a truly reflective fashion, Bogost’s game conjures nostalgia for experiences that never actually existed; it projects ideas onto the past that are as foreign to yesteryear’s world as they are to today's. His insistence that “the Atari is a slow machine”, for instance, is informed modern technological standards. A market leader in its prime, the pace of programming for the VCS would have been the norm for the majority of videogame developers. Furthermore, the crawling pace of the games included in A Slow Year convey a typically nostalgic longing for “the slower rhythms of the past” that are, again, an invention of imagination. Indeed, despite its contingency on decades old technology and its efforts to disguise itself as an authentic VCS release, A Slow Year is a thoroughly contemporary work and Bogost is aware of this fact. One of the key advantages of developing games for defunct platforms, he explains, is that one is freed from the constraints and expectations of modern development: “For once, it’s possible to plumb the depths of a game console without worrying about competition, accessories, upgrades,

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expectations, shelf space” (11). Much like Thomas Elsaesser’s claim that cinema’s retirement from its role as modernity’s primary storyteller into the curatorial purview of artistic institutions has freed the medium to pursue other purposes and functions, the VCS has, for Bogost, through its commercial death and subsequent resurrection become a platform for experimenting with different kinds of videogame styles than those encouraged by modern technology and market expectations (362).

As a digital videogame that is at the same time a larger holistic entity consisting of software and material elements, A Slow Year both restores and reflects the user experience of videogames from the Atari VCS era, conveying something of how the experience actually was while at the same time emphasising and exaggerating certain elements so as to establish the meaning of that experience in modern contexts. It also demonstrates that celebrating the methods and practices of the past need not be a regressive gesture leading to cultural stagnation, as critics of nostalgia warn. Lastly, A Slow Year illustrates how, by simulating phenomenological qualities of the past, real or otherwise (in this case an imagined “slowness”), videogames may discover in past media new avenues of expression - avenues which only become visible in retrospect.

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Chapter Two: Remembering the “Early” Internet as a Virtual World

The “Preserving Virtual Worlds” project, undertaken by a number of US institutions in conjunction with the Library of Congress, is the most substantial academic initiative to date to reckon with the alarming perishability of videogames. Recognising the enormous cultural influence videogames now exert, the project sought to establish urgent strategies for the preservation of a wide range of works, from early experiments in interactive fiction to the blockbuster production

Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (Blizzard, 2002) (12). As broad a spectrum of videogames as their corpus

of virtual worlds represents, however, it is just that - a collection of videogames. It seems that as far as the project is concerned, the term “virtual world” is synonymous with “videogame”. Contrastingly, the actual definition of virtual worlds which the report provides, which is taken from the defunct online journal the Virtual Worlds Review, is much more open, and could apply to far more experiences than just videogames. A virtual world, it states, is simply “an interactive simulated environment accessed by multiple users through an online interface” (9).

Could it be possible, therefore, to consider what might be called the “early” internet as a virtual world? The internet is, after all, is an “interactive… environment accessed by multiple users”. What exactly it “simulate[s]”, if anything, is less clear, but with regards to how the early internet might be preserved, such quibbles are outweighed by the conceptual advantages of approaching it in much the same way as the fantasy universes of online multiplayer videogames. For one, the reasons the Preserving Virtual Worlds project posits for preserving online games are just as applicable to the early internet. The human interactions that take place in virtual worlds, the report argues, are no less important than those that occur away from the screen, involving similarly significant “social, political and economic activities” and thus should be documented (89). This is surely true of all interactions which take place on the internet, whether inside a multiplayer videogame, on social media or in a chatroom. Furthermore, the knowledge already accrued about from the preservation of online multiplayer games - the challenges as well as the strategies devised to tackle them - can provide an initial roadmap for how to archive the early internet.

The “Early” Internet

But what exactly is the “early” internet? Clearly any attempt to separate the history of the internet into discrete periods or eras would be an oversimplification, though at least one well known

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example exists in the form of “Web 2.0”, a designation for the internet of the mid-2000s onwards popularised by the entrepreneur Tim O'Reilly. According to O'Reilly, what set Web 2.0 apart from previous incarnations of the internet were new services built around “harnessing collective intelligence” - websites like eBay and Amazon, as well new methods of content creation like blogging and wikis (37). All of these, he argued, produced a web in which the line between users and creators became less discernible. Many have dismissed O’Reilly’s reasoning however, including internet inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who denies the existence of such a clear cut new paradigm. “If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people,” suggests Berners-Lee. “But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along” (“developerWorks...”).

Still, regardless of the validity of Web 2.0 as a genuine juncture point, one cannot deny the stark differences between the experience of being an internet user today to that of ten, never mind twenty, years ago. Online interactions from before the mid-2000s were characterised by different dynamics such as asynchronous communication and relative anonymity, resulting in a distinctly different kind of environment with different behaviour norms. In a piece reflecting on two independent videogames about older forms of internet communication, Cibele and Emily is Away, journalist Leigh Alexander draws out some of these differences:

I often think about the fact we don't really have 'online lives' any more. When I was small, to have a 'handle', to get on the Information Superhighway, was like attending a masquerade ball on a brand-new planet. All of you were suddenly someplace else, strange and new. ...nowadays, in the age of remote working and Real Name Policies, some corners of real life feel more forbidden, more secret, than the internet does or perhaps ever will again. (“Cibele...”)

Alexander’s comments address how the decline of privacy and anonymity on the internet have impacted upon her personal experience as an internet user, changes which are likely hard to comprehend for someone who has no memory of an internet prior to social media. They highlight an intangible, subjective history of the internet - a history of emotions, feelings and experiences - that is swept aside by the more empirical accounts that portray web history as a procession of new products and services - from “domain name speculation” to “search engine optimization”; from “Britannica Online” to “Wikipedia”; from Web 1.0 to 2.0 (O'Reilly 18). But how does one convey an experiential history of the internet?

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Cleary preserving the actual content of the early internet, as organisations like The Internet Archive (an automated web archival project) as well as vigilante initiatives like Archiveteam (which backed-up the entire catalogue of sites hosted on Yahoo’s Geocities) are currently doing, is of great importance. These primary sources provide empirical evidence about how the early internet was used, as well as how it looked and functioned. Such material in isolation, however, divulges very little about how it felt to use. It says little about why it might have felt like “someplace else, strange and new”, “forbidden” or “secret” to Alexander and her contemporaries.

The authors of the Preserving Virtual Worlds project encountered a similar predicament in their attempts to preserve the online multiplayer game Second Life (Linden Lab, 2003-). No matter how extensively archivists preserve the software and hardware components which make executing an online game possible, they concluded, all they will have procured is an empty framework which conveys very little about how players experienced the game.

If we were to manage to archive all of the objects from a given region, including all scripts, animations and other inventory content that are typically protected, we would, in effect, have managed to archive a ghost town, an empty set of architecture and geography with no information about how the space was used or what its inhabitants were like. A static snapshot of a world such as Second Life may in some sense serve as a surrogate for the original, but it is a poor substitute. Part of the fundamental nature of Second Life is that it is a living, evolving, dynamic space. An archived copy of a region provides some documentation of what the world was like, but it is hardly a complete set of documentation, and in a very real sense it is not and cannot be a complete version of the original. (91)

There is a parallel to be drawn here to the Digital Roman Forum project discussed in the introduction, and its ability to capture or at least approximate some of the phenomenological qualities of the real life Forum that cannot be communicated through statistical documentation alone. The digital Forum and other 3D models address to some degree the problem of preserving the experiential qualities of an archeological site - they can approximate, for instance, the psychogeographical information that emerges from a site’s scale, layout and architecture. As of yet, no clear, comprehensive solution has presented itself with regards to the preservation of virtual worlds’ similarly elusive properties: their emergent social dynamics and behaviours; the sense of being part of a virtual community. As the Preserving Virtual Worlds report points out, secondary sources like “video, images, audio, and first-hand testimonials from players and player

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communities[…] information from trade magazines, conventions, reviewers, commercial outlets” go some of the way (85). Indeed, writing like Henry Jenkins’ essays “Love Online” and “Do You Enjoy Making the Rest of Us Feel Stupid?”, two nascent works of internet ethnography, provide a valuable window into the customs of early internet culture, including information about users’ discussion habits and how relationships were maintained before social media.

Videogames as Re-enactments

Just as diagrams or photographs of the Roman Forum communicate scarcely little of its experiential qualities however, such data provides only a very limited insight into first-hand experience of occupying an interactive virtual world populated by thousands of users, be that virtual world an online multiplayer game or some pocket of the early internet. One preservation strategy which poses a potential solution to this quandary, however, is “re-enactment”. Re-enactment, the Preserving Virtual Worlds report explains, “covers a range of possible techniques, including the reconstruction of an experience from historical record and game-related artifacts, the reconstruction of the environment through technology, and the documentation of game-related experience through secondary sources” (83). It seems clear that a full-blown “reconstruction of an experience” stands as the most promising, while also the most challenging, method of emulating the experiential qualities of the past. And a precedent does exist for re-enacting past media experiences; there are a myriad of methodologies being implemented to understand the historical consumption and usage of cinema and live music, for instance. Early film spectatorship is re-enacted through the reconstruction of 19th-century nickelodeons, such as those housed at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and the Riverside Museum in Glasgow, as well as through revival screenings of silent films with live Wurlitzer organ accompaniment. Rock concerts, too, receive similarly imaginative archival treatment; there are theatrical length documentaries like The Last Waltz (Scorsese, 1978) and Shut Up and Play

the Hits (Southern & Lovelace, 2012) (the latter of which aims to situate the viewer in the crowd

through camera positioning), and also literal moment for moment re-enactments, such as Concerto

for Voice and Machinery II (Mitchell, 2007), a “restaging” of an infamously riotous performance by

German group Einstürzende Neubauten “complete with the disorder” of the original event executed 23 years later (Reynolds 49).

At the report warns, “re-enactments pose significant risks of altering the appearance and performance of games”, and the same goes for the imitation of any past object or event (6). While it is plain that the content of re-enactments should not be mistaken for objective historical fact and are