This book brings together essays on game history and historiography that reflect on the significance of locality. Game history did not unfold uniformly and the particularities of space and place matter, yet most digital game and software histories are silent with respect to geography. Topics covered include: hyper-local games; temporal anomalies in platform arrival and obsolescence; national videogame workforces; player memories of the places of gameplay; comparative reception studies of a platform; the erasure of cultural markers; the localization of games; and perspectives on the future development of local game history.
Chapters 1 and 12 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
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1 Introduction: Game History and the Local |
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1 | (16) |
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2 Adventures in Everyday Spaces: Hyperlocal Computer Games in 1980s--1990s Czechoslovakia |
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17 | (20) |
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3 "The Last Cassette" and the Local Chronology of 8-Bit Video Games in Poland |
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37 | (20) |
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4 The Swedish Game Development History: The Founders and the Social Structure |
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57 | (22) |
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5 A Place for a Nintendo? Discourse on Locale and Players' Topobiographical Identity in the Late 1980s and the Early 1990s |
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79 | (22) |
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6 On Footwork: Finding the Local in American Video Game History |
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101 | (22) |
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7 Around the World with the Sorcerer of Exidy |
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123 | (18) |
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8 Cracking Technocultural Memory: Scenes and Stories of Origin in the PlayStation Portable Forensic Imaginary |
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141 | (18) |
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9 Indie Games of No Nation: The Transnational Indie Imaginary and the Occlusion of National Markers |
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159 | (18) |
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10 Video Games Have Never Been Global: Resituating Video Game Localization History |
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177 | (22) |
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11 "Welcoming All Gods and Embracing All Places": Computer Games As Constitutively Transcendent of the Local |
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199 | (22) |
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12 Heterodoxy in Game History: Towards More `Connected Histories' |
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221 | (14) |
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| Index |
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235 | |
Melanie Swalwell is Professor of Digital Media Heritage at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. She is the author of Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality (2021), and co-editor of Fans and Videogames: Histories, Fandom, Archives (2017) and The Pleasures of Computer Gaming (2008).
