Half a Century of Digital Gaming: Game On, at the Science Museum, London, 21 October 2006-25 February 2007

Abstract

Half a Century of Digital Gaming Game On, at the Science Museum, London, 21 October 2006–25 February 2007 Stefan Schmitt Less than half a century has passed since engineering students first projected interacting dots, lines, and circles onto cathode-ray screens, but today, digital gaming is big business. Its annual revenues rival those of the cinema box office in most industrialized countries, its video-game consoles receive the same attention and acclaim in the media as do more traditional consumer-electronics items, and its individual games are critically reviewed in the manner of literature, music, and films. The exhibition Game On examines the rapid evolution of digital gaming from a niche activity to a mainstream phenomenon over the last five decades, a story that ought to be of more than passing interest to historians of twentieth-century technology. For as Martin Campbell-Kelly and others have argued convincingly, any history of modern computing that purports to be thorough must include the hard- and software of interactive games.1 On the other hand, Game On demonstrates that the technology of computing is but part of the larger story of the sociotechnical realm of digital gaming. Game On debuted at the Barbican Art Gallery in London in 2002. Since then it has toured the globe, appearing in museums in Scotland, Netherlands, Finland, Israel, and the United States before returning to the United Kingdom at the Science Museum, London, in October 2006. In 2007 and 2008 it will appear in Thailand and Australia. It consists of thirteen sections, the first of which explores the precommercial roots of modern gaming as well as the public-venue machines that first popularized the notion of the "video game." The second section is a series of video-game platforms of the sort that [End Page 582] brought gaming into the home during the 1970s and 1980s. Critically, the emphasis here lies not with the development of video games for general-purpose home computers, but rather with the diverse, game-only consoles that were available during those years. These sections aim to present what we might call a rough genealogy of the video-game machine. Sections three through seven examine gaming through the lens of cultural studies, detailing the present-day types or "families" of games, the sound effects used in them, the relationship between gaming and the modern cinema, and the culture of gaming in the United States, Europe, and Japan. In sections eight and nine, the exhibition adopts a more historical perspective, examining the evolution of two key types of digital games, those designed for children and those designed to allow more than one person to play at once ("multiplayer games"). Sections ten through thirteen dissect the creative process of contemporary game production, from character design and multimedia storyboarding to marketing and sales. Here the visitor is treated to an in-depth examination of the technologies and programming skills that make the modern video game possible. Of particular interest is section thirteen, which details the historical interplay between state-of-the-art gaming hardware and state-of-the-art gaming software. When Game On moved to the Science Museum, its curators decided to add a bit of contextual flair. They commissioned artist Jon Burgerman,2 for example, to produce a wall-painting time line that places key moments in the development of video gaming within their proper historical context. They also added three so-called debate walls, large panels presenting a number of hotly debated issues related to the history of gaming in an accessible manner. These supplementary elements help to better establish the connections between the gaming artifacts on display and their respective sociocultural contexts. Burgerman's time line therefore places a drawing of the PDP-1 microcomputer—the machine on which the first video game, "Spacewar," ran at MIT in 1962—alongside references to Moore's Law, the first VCR, the Beatles, Andy Warhol, Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove...