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By this I mean a more intimate account composed of a long heritage of games deliberately concerned with the artistic, political and personal. There is a lesser-known history of the games themselves. But we should call this what it is: it’s not a struggle between “art” and “games,” it’s a struggle between “art” and “commerce.” art,” which was for a brief period stoked by Roger Ebert’s claims that “ games can never be art,” has always been a sham that was willed into existence and accepted as fact by critics, academics, industrialists, and gamers themselves. The videogame industry has eagerly adopted the narrative of building a better machine and of selling a better product. The changes that followed-developments like Jerry Lawson’s brilliant removable cartridges, which allowed games to be sold separately and individually from the consoles that ran them (prior to this, games were hard-coded into consoles and cabinets), and the less-brilliant Bit Wars, marked by petty marketing and consumer battles over the relative processing power of competing consoles-are understood through the lens of tech-progressivism.Īll of this foregrounds the growth of multimillion dollar franchises and legacy IPs owned more or less exclusively by a corporate oligopoly with an iron grip on both the culture and the market. This is a history which prioritizes technological advancement, from computer gaming’s rise as the product of quiet dissent among the engineers of military computers at MIT ( Spacewar!, created by MIT engineers in 1962, is often regarded as the first iconic computer game), 1 to the clinking of arcade machines and the ensuing success of the home console, which allowed publishers to cut out the middleman and sell their products directly to consumers. If videogames can be said to possess an “official history,” it is predicated primarily on the advancement of technology, the shifting of markets, and the consolidation of multinational corporations. Imagine if I knew then what I know now.” -Deus Ex Machina, Automata, 1984 Imagine if it was all nothing more than some electronic game. “Imagine if we could begin our little life all over again.