Welcome to the Center for History of Video Games and Critical Play's Blog. This space is dedicated to publishing work that encourages gamers, scholars and students to consider how video and other games offer unique ways of looking at history and history pedagogy, the interpretation of games, game play, and the impact of games on culture. In doing so we hope to create a space where we engage in an academic conversations that focus on representations of history and historical narrative in both World and American histories through a variety of video and tabletop games. The work here will investigate the assumptions that guide such representations of history and analyze the extent to which the medium of history-themed video games can bring new questions and perspectives to academic history and history education.

January 12, 2025

District 6: The trouble with games in Long Beach, CA

January 12, 2025/ Jeffrey Lawler

The rise of arcades in the late 1970s coincided with efforts to revitalize decaying amusement and shopping centers, rising crime, and increasing diversity in Long Beach, California. Situated at the southeastern end of Los Angeles County, the city of Long Beach had a long history of being home to midwestern transplants and their concomitant conservative values. The vestige of this past can be seen, even as the city began to diversify in the 1960s, in the city’s approach and attitude to policing, arcades and redevelopment.

As city leaders discussed possible uses for these new spaces, their arguments became increasingly rooted in maintaining a sense of homogeneity for their community with prophylactic laws and ordinances to regulate gaming spaces to protect specific neighborhoods. A white, suburban ideology placed literal and figurative guardrails around the community while regulating and coddling white youth. As David Lassiter notes, “The Suburban solution,” to delinquency -- “[was] premised on the social control of middle-class teenagers through constant parental and community surveillance.”[1]Thus, the placement of the arcades within an established but evolving leisure economy within the city was complicated by perceptions suburban and urban youth, how the arcades would be used and by whom, and the neighborhood impact by those from outside the community.

March 08, 2021

Arcades Limited: The Southland and Spatial Evaders

March 08, 2021/ Jeffrey Lawler

My presentation, if anything, is a work in progress and at some level a proposition for further investigation. The core mapping and definitional elements are malleable and open to suggestion. Yet the core understanding and spatial relations between class, ethnicity, and access to gaming spaces appear, for the moment, to be strongly suggestive. The principal ideas were inspired by a variety of works, including Abigail Norris’ “Mapping Memphis” that examined the spatial connections of a black owned mortuary and the surrounding community in Memphis, Tennessee. Similar digital history projects map communities that are under-represented and help visualize economic and social connections and how historical spaces are often problematized by conscious and unconscious bias and racism. At its core, the project looks to investigate the relationship between game spaces and ethnic neighborhoods, particularly in black communities in Los Angeles County. I’m primarily concerned with the differentiated game and recreational spaces such as arcades, access to those game spaces, and their creation, lack of creation, or differential creation in relation to historical economic racism throughout Los Angeles. And while similar recreative spatial divides may have played out in other metropolitan areas throughout the nation, it is the Los Angeles area that, as I will argue, felt a specific impact rooted in recreational racism. Critical questions that I would like to address with more research, but will only be able to touch on here include --Where did communities of color and economically depressed youths go to play games? How and what attention did they attract by the local and larger community? What types of games did they play and were they differentiated from the more suburban arcades? What types of spaces were these games placed in and how did they reflect the local community and its separation from economic investment? Ultimately, this project will map the placement, access, and community discourse around video game arcades and smaller spaces such as liquor stores, fast food restaurants, and recreation spaces that also housed games.

February 22, 2020

The Historical Environment as Aged Icon (in Red Dead Redemption 2)

February 22, 2020/ Jeffrey Lawler

As far back as Roosevelt or Owen Wister and his novel of western grit and masculinity, The Virginian, the West has been charged with an evocative sense: as a virtue, as place, as image. What we see in games such as RDR2 is how the aged veneer of the built environment and various objects authenticates the centrality of the past as not just being ‘long ago,’ but as continuously old: they were never new because they were from long ago. The use of buildings in videogames in such a way conforms and confirms how many people locate and think of the past as an aged icon. New is now; old was then. The objects that appear old are construed as old. The use of an aged icon within the built environment locates the past as distant while at the same time decreases the authenticity of the actual item. The distance here then is to differentiate us from an older era; however, it also equates the past with age in itself. A marker not known to those who would have existed within that world as objects would present as new and not timelessly old.

For purposes of time, this paper will primarily engage with the built environment within RDR2, a game situated within an era, the late 19th century American West, that is at its supposed end, and by the nature of that definition, old and dying. The marketing department at Rockstar must love the turn of the clock as much as most love to decadize and periodize history as ending with a 0 or two: To quote an early trailer for the game: “America 1899, the end of the Wild West era…” While only 30 or so odd years are meant to contain the era smothered between the Civil War and 19 double aught, that 30 years of reach is done and dusted with the impending rampage of civilization in 1900 according to the game, and the structures that maintain and contain the ideas and meaning of the ‘old West’ and the imagined past, what I refer to as aged icons, are shown as having aged themselves – they are falling apart, dilapidated, or contain the death and destruction of an era that is presumed to have had little order or control over the social and political affairs of its society or the coming civilized world. (Lee) It is this presentation of the historical artifact as built environment, and how these games choose to re-present that past locked in with how they choose to construct the built environment that is the focus of my paper today.

March 21, 2019

"Parents Should Read the Box," Sega and the Advent of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board

March 21, 2019/ Center for the History of Video Games and Critical Play/ Sean Smith

This blog post is a very small part of a much larger project that attempts to historicize and contextualize the origins of violent misogyny and toxic masculinity in video games culture. If video gaming’s masculinity was born in the arcades of the late 1970s and early 1980s, as others Like Carly Kocurek [1] and Shira Chess [2] have suggested, this project argues that it was honed and hardened by the home console market, especially by Sega of America in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, when the home video console shifted from the living room into private domestic spaces and as game companies began aggressive marketing campaigns that ultimately helped to define an ideal masculinity and a path to rebellion that was attractive to both young white men and suburban teenage boys. An identity which has had a lasting legacy and becomes uniquely tied to the contemporary identity of many white male “gamers.”

October 08, 2018

The Hall of Historic (Anti) Heroes

October 08, 2018/ Center for the History of Video Games and Critical Play/ Jeffrey Lawler

The use of historic figures in popular culture and video games runs a wide gamut. Sometimes they are employed to create an atmosphere of authenticity, Assassin Creed series, at other times they are employed for odd counterfactual commentary on the American condition, see Bioshock. This current exploration looks at the use of some seminal anti-heroes in Call of Juarez: Gunslinger published by Ubisoft in 2013 for all major platforms. In this version of the Call of Juarez series, the central figure, Silas Greaves, relives his past exploits in a saloon in Abeliene, KS in 1910. His small audience is keenly interested in his life as a bounty hunter and his connections and friendships to real individuals from the late 19th century American West.

September 28, 2018

The Hall of Historic Heroes

September 28, 2018/ california state university long beach/ Sean Smith

Welcome to The Hall of Historic Heroes, the first edition of what we hope will become a weekly feature on our blog. In these posts we’ll briefly explore American exceptionalism as it appears in video games (both past and present) and/or in video game advertisements or box art.

September 26, 2018

Playing Without Quarters: Women and the Domestication of the Home Video Console

September 26, 2018/ CSULB Center for the History of Video Games and Critical Play/ Sean Smith

The popular image of nerdy male gamer was born in the heyday of the coin operated arcade, where men ostensibly dominated all aspects of arcade gaming culture and the arcade became a haven for a new form of masculinity. While Family Fun Centers and family-friendly arcades like Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theater attempted to soften the hyper masculine image of the video game arcade, women remained a minority in cultural representations of these environments. If they were found in arcades, popular culture held that it was as arm candy to the local quarter jockey or a girlfriend cheerleader who watched from the sidelines as her boyfriend rescued the damsel from that damn dirty ape Donkey Kong. There was seemingly no place for women to actively engage in this new phenomenon, thus creating the stereotypical male gamer image and the image of the arcade as a purely masculine space.

May 09, 2018

Red Dead Redemption II Trailer III or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the western myth

May 09, 2018/ CSULB Center for the History of Video Games and Critical Play/ Jeffrey Lawler

Last week, Rockstar Games revealed the third trailer for the long anticipated and oft delayed “Red Dead Redemption 2.” Many in the game press and community were impressed with the visual impact of the trailer and the stunning graphics of the various cut scenes that the trailer highlights, noting the attention to detail and cinema like qualities – qualities that also revel in the mythic images and Hollywood tropes that plague this style of game, making players complicit in the reinforcement of Turnerverian ideals. The game’s trailer does what countless other westerns, both contemporary and those dating back to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, do: they stage a West that blends both history and myth together in a way that for the player/observer legitimates Manifest Destiny, elevates violence as a marker of masculinity, celebrates the triumph of civilization over savagery, and equates both with the extension of freedom over untamed frontier. And like the creators of the westerns that came before, Red Dead’s developers see no hypocrisy in lamenting the passing of this era and the emasculation of white men at the hands of the same civilizing processes they celebrate. In the trailer, Rockstar both celebrates the mythic West that purportedly redefined masculinity and brought civilization and modernity to the frontier while simultaneously mourning its passing.

April 15, 2018

[Caricature by Design] Illustration and Representation of Historical Actors in Tabletop Games.

April 15, 2018/ California State University, Long Beach/ Jeffrey Lawler

In a recent gaming session playing Freedom: The Underground Railroad with our students, we were struck by the the choice of imagery used on the box and instruction art, and the illustrations on the playing pieces, cards, and game board used to convey the story of slavery and the Underground Railroad. What began as a sketch for a larger project, soon became very involved, taking many turns. Ultimately, we decided to sit on the ideas to give us more time to construct a more thorough and cohesive argument. We also plan to flesh out some of these ideas with our inaugural podcast, which is planned in the next few weeks. What follows is a portion of the original introduction and some of the key questions that we are mostly concerned with. We welcome comments and criticism.

April 08, 2018

Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Video Games

April 08, 2018/ CSU Long Beach/ Sean Smith

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London will be hosting an exhibition and residency that focuses on video games and game design from the early 2000s. According to their website, the show will feature, "from concept art to moving footage, prototypes, character design sketches, and interactive installations." As the article points out this exhibition joins a growing interest in video games as a form of art worthy of a museum's attention (the Smithsonian and MoMa have hosted similar exhibitions in the past few years).

Read more at https://www.wallpaper.com/art/victoria-and-albert-museum-video-games-exhibition#Z4gw7EhwXxXkHbyz.99

April 04, 2018

Interesting Discussion of Race and the Civil Rights Movement in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus

April 04, 2018/ Sean Smith

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Recently, one of our favorite history and video games podcasts explored the portrayal of race and the role of the American Civil Rights movement in Bethesda Softworks Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. Rather than take on the obvious themes of the game Bob Whitaker, John Harney and Robert Green engage in a compelling conversation about the African American experience and how it's represented in this counterfactual history of America. It's a great conversation that raises some interesting topics and we think it's important to support work like this. Listen to it here or visit their Youtube page.

March 02, 2018

Pawns of Manifest Destiny: Native-American Agency and Visibility in History Based Tabletop Games.

March 02, 2018/ California State University, Long Beach Center for the History of Videogames and Critical Play/ Sean Smith

This piece is written as a follow up to the first three meetings of the Center’s History Games Club and serves as a critical reflection on our experiences playing with and observing student interactions with several history-based tabletop games.

This post explores the representations and in-game use of Native Americans in three separate games: 1775: Rebellion; Discoveries: The Journals of Lewis and Clark; and, Bang! The Dice Game. While each game explores a different era with different mechanics, they all employ Native American characters as part of the gameplay. Most of this “inclusion” is to forward a particular narrative that reinforces or strengthens the Anglo protagonist(s) position. The purpose of this examination is not to engage in the totality of Native American representation, but to analyze the ways that the structure and mechanics of each game reinforce mythic identities in juxtaposition with a lack of purposeful agency for Native characters. The three games vary significantly in their organization and structure; however, they each employ Native Americans as passive and often aggressive. When there is an action for the Native characters in the games, it is initiated by or in service of the other player characters who are invariably Anglo. The representation of Native Americans on a variety of the gaming components (cards, dice, chits) utilize mythic and stereotypical imagery. The gaming narrative and interaction between player characters and the non-player Native American characters creates coded exchanges between game players about the mythic Native American, which furthers the marginalization of that group. The marginalization is closely coupled with the Native Americans lack of agency within each game and reinforced in the use or usefulness of those characters in the game.

February 11, 2018

Masculinity and Video Games

February 11, 2018/ California State University, Long Beach/ Jeffrey Lawler

This paper was presented at the Southwest Popular / American Cultural Association conference in Albuquerque, NM on February 7, 2018.

The use and reuse of the epic and mythic West has been iterated in many forms throughout the years. This portrayed West, however, as Daniel R. Maher writes “is the copy of a copy of a fiction.” [1] The “copy of a copy of a fiction” goes back to the middle 19th century, but it was always an invention – an invention that sought to reorder and reorganize how society understood and imagined itself. Dime novels in the mid-19th century used Davy Crockett to encapsulate the individual and the West; Buffalo Bill and his Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World brought the “adventures” of Western settlement and war to large arenas in the East in the late 19th century; Films, beginning with The Great Train Robbery in 1903, and later T.V. in the 1950s began to infuse the tropes of a gendered, ordered, and necessarily controlled West; Film and T.V. copied the copies of the fiction and presented a mythic representation of the “Old West,” further enhancing the idea of a lawless West needing order. Video / arcade games have more recently incorporated, or layered, a new copy of the mythic West with its concomitant masculinity and violence into this newest medium. As video / arcade games rose in relevance and popularity in the 1970s, they borrowed heavily from the well of established western myths. Early versions of these video games included titles such as Gun Fight, Boot Hill, and High Noon. While rather simple in form and action, they contained the essential copied forms of earlier mediums. As video game technology improved, the gaming platforms provided a different and more immersive experience for gamers. And while the incorporation of the Western narrative has become more complex in many of these games, they all maintain a connection to the violence and the individual cowboy of western myth – the copy of a copy ad nauseam. Many of these more recent games have garnered a strong following and some critical acclaim, including GUN, Call of Juarez, Red Dead Redemption, Lead and Gold, and Six-Guns.

January 31, 2018

Playing with the Past: Can Video Games Teach History?

January 31, 2018/ Sean Smith

As most of us know the past three decades have seen an important evolution in video games and video gaming, taking them from a niche market and nerd culture oddity to an omnipresent form of mass media that has equaled and, in some cases, surpassed the film industry in popularity and global earnings. Many of the most popular games are set in historical eras, engage in historical narrative, or actively immerse players as historical figures. For many college-aged students, their first experience with history-based video games came through classroom experiences playing video games like "The Oregon Trail," a game based on the mass migration of thousands of Americans westward in the 1840s. First published in 1974 by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC), it is still being played today and its popularity led to many other historically driven video games such as "The Yukon Trail," "Freedom!" and later "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego." Anyone who has spent any time in a history classroom, and many who have not, will know that these games have had a lasting impact on students' historical understanding and have shaped their understanding of those historical eras.

January 02, 2018

An Interesting Conversation About Retro Games.

January 02, 2018/ Sean Smith

There is an interesting conversation on the subreddit r/askreddit today about which games provide the best introduction to classic gaming. The top comments so far mention the following games:

Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic
Star Fox 64
Super Mario 64
Super Mario Bros.
Super Mario Bros. 2
Super Mario Bros. 3
Mario Kart 64
The Oregon Trail
Portal 1
Portal 2
Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn
Chrono Trigger
Ages of Empires 2
Roller Coaster Tycoon
Runescape 2
Twisted Metal
Need for Speed Underground 2
Diablo 2
StarCraft
The Curse of Monkey Island
Maniac Mansion
Day of the Tentacle
Sam and Max
Metal Gear Solid
Ocarina of Time
Goldeneye
Spyro the Dragon
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2

It is obvious that many commenters are speaking from a place of pure nostalgia and no real thought has been given to the meaning of the term "classic games." So many of the games in the list are relatively new games that for someone like me who has been gaming since the days of the Atari VCS haven't stood the test of time long enough to qualify as a "classic." But what does that even mean? In "Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon" edited by Henry Lowood, Melanie Swalwell offers an entire chapter dedicated to unpacking the term classic gaming/games, suggesting that the term is often offered without any critical intent. She writes that claiming a game a classic is "ultimately to make a judgment about its cultural status, value, or meanings." She further problematizes the definition by asking, "who gets to decide what constitutes an authentic and sanctioned canon of classic games and, by implication, the classic gaming experience?" Is it as J.C. Herz argues that gaming firsts should be privileged? Or is it some sense of timelessness that ranks a game in the pantheon? Can, as these redditors suggest, a game like Portal (2007) or Portal 2 (2011) be considered a classic? There is no simple answer and I'm not sure there will ever be a common canon of classic games. What is classic to an American audience won't translate well to other areas around the world. What is classic to someone who grew up in the 70s or 80s will be different from those who grew up in the 90s or 00s. Where do we draw that line? What constitutes a classic game?

Writing

CSULB Center for the History of Video Games and Critical Play