Who writes video game history? We have movie historians and music historians that contextualize the artforms and genres of those mediums. Yet for Vidya we have a combination of companies, random forum posts and shitty YouTubers who write history for Vidya
>>12892392Wikis. Wikis and people who copy from them and pretend not to in order to seem more pop-cultured or whatever. Next question, fox.
The video game history foundation
>>12892392>Yet for Vidya we have a combination of companies, random forum posts and shitty YouTubers who write history for Vidyanone of those are any worse than any kind of "historian"
>>12892392>Who writes video game history?furries and troons. next question?
>>12892392Like with other professions there are college professors who write on this. They publish books and papers. Than there is the odd passionate person who also publishes books and papers after gathering primary sources. Again it's very much like other disciplines.It's just that gamers are the absolute bottom of the barrel. I doubt most of you even know what a primary source is or why it's important.
After a cursory search on Amazon this is the only decent-looking reasonably comprehensive scholarly general history of video games I could find (almost everything else is either pop histories for idiots or AI slop), though only the first volume seems to be out so far.
>>12892392>video game history?there's a /vr/ magazine published by brits who write 10 page articles about Jet Set Willy. im sure the brits love that!
>>12892392Good, I hope they catch that godd*mn p*do.
No one cared about game history until relatively recently, everyone thought of vidya as inferior toys as even toy history is more respected and taken seriously. No one actually researches it besides random nerds on the internet.
>Who writes video game history? We have movie historians and music historians that contextualize the artforms and genres of those mediumsUniversities offer video game history classes as part of a fine arts degree. Quite a few people now have PhDs in video game history. They become professors and teach others. They are over a half century old now so thry are starting to be taken seriously by academics.
>>12892512This book is the Holy Bible of console game history.
>>12892550I hate that I understand this reference.
>>12892416This unironically, they collate resources as best they can do you can study them to identify facts and through-lines.Plenty of published magazines and stuff from official companies websites where the big names have articles and interviews.They're often behind a language barrier if it's the Japanese studios you care about.
>>12892573>>12892651Pretty much these. Serious study of video game history is a thing now, but it took a while because, unlike movies and especially music, it's a very recent form of entertainment, and moreover one born as part of our modern mass consumerist society, so it took decades for the medium to be taken seriously as more than just electronic children's toys.
>>12892392>Who writes video game history?The one that love to manipulate it.
>>12892392>Who writes video game history?It was written by a small number of fat retard fanboys on gamefaqs
>>12892392>Who writes video game history?dumbasses, as near as i can tell
>>12892392>Who writes video game history?not this board's collective of retards>>12893293worse. a lot of them are poorly educated and ignorant morons that have no idea how any of the technology works. they proclaim themselves as experts because they know of games - they don't know how they work, don't know how the technology works, don't know anything about game development and have no interest in asking any technical questions. It's such an embarrassing scene that we're going to have things lost to time because retarded journalists and authors couldn't be bothered asking the right questions. Imagine being an automotive journalists and not giving a fuck about what engine is in a car, like it's unimportant. that's game historians for you.
>>12893293>>12893308Obviously this is true of trashy pop histories, such as those written by certain [in]famous "journalists", but that doesn't mean there isn't any real scholarship: you just need to know where and how to find it, e.g. >>12892512 , which is quite comprehensive, spending over 600 pages on the 70s and early 80s alone, the first three chapters of which cover the early development of game theory and computer science, chess AIs made for IBM computers, military simulations from the beginning of the Cold War, and proto-video games like Bertie the Brain and Tennis for Two, going over the development of the technology and much of the technical details in each case, before even getting to what's usually considered the first video game, Spacewar! Actual, detailed scholarship like this might be a niche interest in comparison, but there's no need to be so pessimistic about video game history, as there will always be serious people deeply interested in it.
>>12893392>but that doesn't mean there isn't any real scholarshipI've read thousands of articles written by talentless hacks that truly believe there's "scholarship" in their work but it's usually quite obvious those people doing the interviewing and research know absolutely nothing about the topic they proclaim they are experts at, and appear to be only interested in (game). they have no interest in documenting history or anything of the sort. they don't have the attention spans or technical knowledge to continue a conversation longer than 5 seconds.
>>12893401Are we talking about academic journals or popular magazines and websites/blogs? It's inevitable that pop entertainment media is going to be full of idiots, as pop entertainment (especially video games) is mainly made for idiots.
