Publié par Historians often conduct their work in two phases: studying the documents to retrace the facts, and then organizing these facts and events into a narrative. Since many of us have a direct, lived experience with video games, sometimes our lived experiences do not accord with the grand historical narrative. We may reason that our experience was a minority or chance happening, and that the “real” history of games is this other well-documented reality instead. This is dangerous, and it means there is a lot of undocumented grassroots video game history laying out there in our minds, and that we need to incorporate this into our historiographical methods. My own experience writing a counter-history of Nintendo through its Super NES years prompted this: if the Super NES was so great, then why did many of my friends go for the Sega Genesis? Why did some of them leave video games altogether? Why did the PlayStation conquer all their hearts, and why weren’t any games coming out for the Nintendo 64? This essay goes over four challenges for video game historiography: where are the documents? What are we documenting? How are we documenting? What is left undocumented?
ARSENAULT, Dominic (2017). “Documentation, Periodization, Regionalization, and Marginalization : Four Challenges for Video Game Historiography”, publication en ligne mitoyenne First-Person Scholar, 29 novembre 2017. https://www.firstpersonscholar.com/documentation-periodization-regionalization-and-marginalization/
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