Abstract
AbstractThis article aims to demonstrate that the introduction of highscores resulted in a distinct way of playing videogames that also provides a useful figure to understand socioeconomic developments of the 1980s. Using the theoretical concept of media practice it describes how highscoring has emerged from the infrastructural prerequisites of arcade gaming. The article will furthermore demonstrate that elements of highscoring can also be found in other social domains such as fitness and the financial economy where during the 1980s computer technology increasingly was employed. The article hence aims at delineating highscoring as a media practice that gives us a framework to look at similar developments in other social domains during the same time and is as such part of the genealogy of gamification.
Highlights
The existence of custom-made arcade games may strike the casual observer as a counterintuitive fact of Soviet daily life
This article suggests that if we look at how videogames were played after the possibility to reach a highscore was introduced in the late 1970s, we might discern a distinct way of playing
Highscoring might be interpreted as a media practice that provided contemporaries with discursive and practical knowledge to cope with understand and accept the introduction of computer technology into various social domains
Summary
The existence of custom-made arcade games may strike the casual observer as a counterintuitive fact of Soviet daily life. A quick look through the virtual exhibition of the Museum of Soviet Arcade machines in Moscow and St. Petersburg where a collection of these arcade game machines is on display reveals some apparent differences between arcade cabinets in a Western and Japanese context and their Soviet counterparts (Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines, 2010). The most apparent of these differences concerns visual appearance and technological prerequisites. Less obvious but certainly not less decisive is the absence of a typical feature of Western arcade games: a highscore list
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