Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

That is indeed an interesting talk by Ian. Thanks for pointing us to it.

I know this isn't the main topic of your post, but I wanted to respond to this since it's something I've been thinking about lately. I think most people might agree that the 2nd console generation (Atari VCS et al) might fit this definition, especially since it seems to be a focal point for retrogaming enthusiasm. But when I start trying to state why that's the case, I have a hard time.

On the one hand, sure, games like Qix or Breakout are on the surface pretty abstract, and it kind of makes sense that the iconic representation of characters, the bright colors and sharp contrast, and (to plug my own research interest) the geometric typography have a lasting aesthetic appeal. But on the other hand, it's not entirely clear that that's a fair characterization of these games. That is, if you look at the arcade flyers, instuctrion manuals, ads in comics, etc., it seems to be the case that many of the games we would now call "abstract" were trying to be representative. Breakout, for example, has something to do with an astronaut. The fact that these games fail to attain anything like photorealism might be less an aesthetic choice and more an aesthetic limitation.

So if our idea of these games as abstract and iconic is a reflective construction, at what point are we able to perform this retroactivity?

All that is just a complicated way of asking, "how old does something have to be for us to experience nostalgia for it?"

It seems logical in a sort of common sense way to say that games, and probably any other artifact of culture, follows a kind of "hipness" curve where the new stuff is hip, the really old stuff is hip, and everything in between is basically not hip. So as you move backward in time, games gradually lose their hipness until sometime pre-playstation they start regaining hipness until the late 70s are right back up there on the hipness scale.

Anyway, I do have an argument for why the late 70s and early 80s are so important for studying games today, but it's too big for this comment.

Maybe it doesn't need an argument; maybe we just need to keep on "living as people."