I’m gonna pretend Koopa was named after Dr. Koop

Response to Replay Book: Chapters 1-14

Video games’ similarities to other media history struck me first as I began reading Replay: The History of Video Games.  Author Tristan Donovan did not go out of his way to highlight similarities to other media, but the way he describes video games essentially growing from military pursuits stood out immediately.  Furthermore, the early history of video games reminded me more specifically of the early days of radio.  When Donovan discusses all the different people and companies racing to develop better technology and how they copied whoever got a step up made me think of the patent wars between the early developers of radio.  The book never gets into whether people and companies patented any of the technology they developed.  I wondered why none of this came up as I read.  Perhaps there is an obvious legal or technical explanation that I am unaware of.  The other aspect of early video games that reminds me of radio is how the early users and creators were so interested in the actual building of these machines.

Donovan moves on from these early days of college kids fooling around to the challenge of turning video games into a sellable item pretty quickly.  The author writes the book in more of a journalistic and narrative style than a scholarly one.  All of the quotes from the people involved help to give the book a sense of credibility, but I am skeptical of one of the narrative motifs.  I feel that Donovan pits West Coast video game industry folks against East Coast video game industry folks to stage a kind of artist vs. businessman philosophy (71).  Even early on, Donovan juxtaposes the Atari guys—describing them like hippies—against the conservative IBM guys (29-30).  I get the feeling that this book was written specifically for the people of video game culture to celebrate that culture—the culture of geeks, artists, and exploration.  Even though a conservative business philosophy eventually gains control in the video game industry when Kassar takes over for Bushnell at Atari, Donovan clearly frames Kassar as the authority who tried to take the fun out of the production and creative process. The author cites a coin-op engineer who laments going from “kids in a candy store playing with fabulous technologies” to seeing the new focus of the company being on marketing and profits (73).  I am a little less trusting of Donovan’s quotes because of how he uses them to frame this struggle between the cool, fun artistic guys and the profit seeking businessmen.  Sometimes, quotes can be taken as facts instead of perspectives.  I think the author uses this trick to frame the original Atari guys as good guys versus the bad businessmen, and that makes me wonder about how he uses other quotes in the book and whether or not the industry was really as divided on this as it seemed to me while reading.

One of the most interesting aspects of the first half of the book was discovering how video games evolved in different cultures.  The author does not really bring up a U.S. moral panic about video games until Chapter 8 when he describes how an offhand remark by US Surgeon General Dr. Everett Koop led to adults worrying that video games were pushing children “into a life of crime or drug addiction” (95).  I am surprised it took until 1982—according to Donovan—for moral panic from video games to erupt.  It seems like people overreacted to other new media more quickly. What surprised me even more was Japan’s lackadaisical regulation to video game content.  I know that Japan’s culture is more sexually liberal than ours, especially because of more common occurrences of lolicon: attraction to underage girls (Lolita complex); however I was still surprised by all the early Japanese sex video games while reading Chapter 12.  And, I was shocked that it took until a 1986 game that Donovan describes “the goal was to rape teenage girls” to spur the Japanese government to do something about it.  The author provides in a chapter endnote that this deviant desire stems from a former state religion, Shinto, “which has a non-judgmental attitude towards sex” (163).

I wish Donovan would have written more about how different types of gaming were popular in different cultures.  He only briefly touches on what kind of gaming was popular in Great Britain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands (mostly in Chapter 10).  Another thing that Donovan only mentions briefly that intrigued me is how Electronic Arts wanted to market the creators of games and sell them like the movie industry would sell a film by a certain director or auteur, but it failed.  I noticed it in a footnote (151) and wanted to know more.  Perhaps it will come up in class.

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