Drawing on game theory and interviews that were personally conducted with pinball pioneers—from CEOs of independent and corporate pinball companies to notable designers and historians—this essay argues that pinball machines are not solely collector’s items but complex games that contain original narratives. The narratives in the pinball games are not direct adaptations from the urtext, but rather narratives that arise through gameplay—the player’s use of the pinball to hit the various lights, toys, and ramps that represent the game’s narrative.
This paper aims to create a shorthand for video game history – from video games’ infancy to the current subscription model that is dominating gaming. In this essay, I will apply the practices of historical media scholarship that have helped parse out television history (e.g., TV I, TV II, TV III, and TV IV) and film history (e.g., Cinema 1, 2, and 3.0) to define the various shifts in video game history. Gaming I represents the arcade and home system boom up until the 1983 video game Crash, Gaming II describes the post-Crash console period, and finally, Gaming III materializes due to the arrival of modern video game subscriptions. Rather than constructing an exhaustive account of video game history, this essay means to generate more studies on what video game history can mean in the context of the established academic studies on visual media.
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