Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife by Raiford Guins (review)

In Game After, Raiford Guins sets out to evaluate the place of videogames as historical objects from a museum preservation and material culture perspective. Guins’ reexamination of the afterlife of videogames provides a new contextualization of arcade machines and game consoles as relics of an earlier gaming era. Furthermore, it invigorates the field of game studies with the professional historicity it has been lacking. The book’s braiding of public history and traditional scholarship produces a down-to-earth odyssey of discovery and reflection, as Guins leads the reader through the various archives, museums, collections, and professional workshops where preservationists and engineers collaborate to keep failing electronic parts and time-worn wooden cabinets from reaching true death. Barring the occasional obscure reference, Guins writes with an authoritative voice, juxtaposing literary and historical theory with real-world examples, rarely forcing the reader to question his conclusions. Guins is quick to note in his introduction that the current state of game studies is somewhat lacking from a historiographical perspective, and although his book is specific in its scope, it provides a solid example of how to include useful historiographical methods (most importantly, material culture) with game studies while keeping it readable.

Guins does not focus on understanding old videogames as they were in the time of their origin, as if put in a time capsule. Instead, he emphasizes their post-death state: when an arcade game machine stopped being popular or when Atari cartridges are found more often in a landfill than in secondhand stores, for example. In other words, Guins writes “about the historical life cycles of video games and the diverse ways we experience them today” (p. 4). The various preservation efforts he interrogates shed a new light on the popularity of emulators and the current trends of retro-gaming. The significance of Guins’ approach lies in the imminent material death of decades old videogames and the unique requirements needed to maintain old gaming hardware. These requirements become more obvious with each chapter, as Guins makes his way through a plethora of recent preservation endeavors, exemplifying the nonuniform and place-specific needs and practices of preservation-restoration efforts. Where certain museums accept the hardware death of their exhibition, augmenting visitor experience with modern emulation programs, restoration specialists (such as the Vintage Arcade Superstore) possess large collections of disassembled parts from broken machines repurposed to repair and restore arcade games for the personal collector (see Chapters 1 and 6).

As a result of the book’s scope, its chapters seem disconnected at times, as Guins jumps from museums to arcades to discussions of box art. Of particular interest to public historians and museum studies scholars, the first chapter discusses the place of videogames in museums. Guins compares the different approaches of several videogames exhibition practices of museums, such as the Strong Museum of Play’s International Center for the History of Electronic Games and the Computer History Museum. He elaborates on the difficulties of achieving a balance between providing visitors with a tactile experience, while preserving consoles and arcades from further wear. Chapter 2 delves into the archival collection of videogames, where Guins discusses the difficulties of videogame archiving. Although the chapter’s theoretical framework is important as a general argument about the place of archives in academe, it has the secondary usefulness of listing several key videogame archives in the United States. The third chapter is a lengthy and in-depth survey of recent arcade projects, illustrating the various ways museums and enthusiasts re-create the feel of the arcade in a combination of nostalgia and history. In Chapter 4, he analyzes the design and marketing choices put into the creation of Atari games box art. This analysis illustrates the usefulness of material culture studies in understanding marketing trends in the game industry and the creation of brand recognition. Guins revisits the mythical Atari Alamogordo landfill in the fifth chapter. Here, Guins not only focuses on the landfill legend, but he also delves into the archeological...