Abstract:

This thesis examines early videogames in relation to a number of current and emerging topics in videogame aesthetics.

The introduction outlines the approach to videogame history the thesis follows. It offers a periodisation of early games as those played during the period when arcades were the focus of videogame production and consumption. It puts the study in the context of Jenkins’ call for a ‘popular aesthetics’.

The first chapter gives the theoretical underpinnings of the thesis’s critical approach to videogames. The thesis compares games to other media as a result of criticisms of medium specificity in philosophical aesthetics and considerations of media convergence. It offers Manovich’s concepts of information design and information behaviour as the basis of a comparative approach. The thesis generalises from particular experiences of play, and it draws on prior critical practice in justifying this approach. The thesis analyses audiovisual aspects of videogame play, and it synthesises a model of gamic mise-en-scene for this purpose.

The second chapter looks at the parallel origins of media art and early videogames in the context of videogame archaeology. It locates the emergence of artworks by Nam June Paik and the earliest videogames in relation to changing discourses and definitions of artistic practice and the technological utopianism of 1960s culture. It considers the quick adoption of home game technologies and the early success of arcade play which arise from prominent approaches to media history.

The third chapter approaches narrative and fiction in videogames. It tracks the history of narrative and fiction as concepts in videogame studies, pays extended attention to Juul’s concept of fictional worlds, and develops this in the light of Jenkins’ and Manovich’s ‘architectural’ approaches to videogames. It shows, through close textual analyses of two early games, that rather than being epiphenomena of rule structures, players’ imperatives are embedded and revealed as aspects of fictional worlds constructed through audiovisual design.

The fourth chapter stages an encounter between the space shooter and emerging conversations around genre in videogame studies. It shows that genre is a multidimensional phenomenon, and that videogames genres can be understood in relation to a broader cultural context. Specifically arguing that the space shooter is a brand of science fiction, it shows that these games refract the genre in a new way, and can be seen as a reflection on the emergence of videogames as an ‘uncanny’ technology of real-time interaction.