New issue of ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories is now up! This special issue tackles the concepts of maintenance and repair in video games, considered in a variety of historical & geographical contexts. Huge thanks to our awesome SI editors Logan Brown, Marina Fontolan & Alexander Mirowski, we're very excited about this one.
(I'm on the editorial team at ROMchip, we're always looking for submissions & please hit me up if you're interesting in writing for us)
Excerpting from "All the Time, Forever Maintenance, Repair, and the Broken World of Video Games," the very very excellent editors' intro:
"Video games break down. A lot. Sometimes it even seems like they break down more often than they work. We all know the feeling. Maybe your X-Box red rings right as you’re approaching the final boss.1 Maybe you bought Cyberpunk 2077 on launch day and spent your evening starting and restarting the program, trying to sidestep the game-breaking glitches long enough to get a proper glimpse of Night City.2 Or maybe your problem isn’t obviously technical at all; maybe you gave up on your favorite online game thanks to its broken, toxic community and insufficient moderation tools. No matter what it was, it was probably attended by feelings of frustration, dismay, and even shock at this moment of irruption in which the agreed-upon sociotechnical order—one governed by seamlessness, convenience, and invisibility—suddenly cracks, revealing the vast complexity of this web of people and machines that we call video games. Usually, the disruption subsides, and the game resumes. Somebody somewhere has performed some arcane ritual, restoring the system to order. But who fixes the system and how is immediately forgotten—if the player even gave that repairer a passing thought."
#videogames #repair #rejuvenator #darksouls cc Laine Nooney
https://lnkd.in/eKP28gTR
Never gonna give you up. Never gonna let you down. Never gonna run around and desert you.
3moLooking forward to this 🤩