ICHEG Interview – Part 4

Introduction

Back in 2012, I was fortunate enough to interview International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) Director Jon-Paul C. Dyson, PhD. At that time, well less than half the interview was actually published, leaving a lot of wonderful insights and information on the cutting room floor. I hope to rectify that with this multi-part post, whereby the interview will be published in its entirety.

ICHEG’s mission to collect, preserve, study and interpret video games, other electronic games and related materials remains as important today as it did back then. With the goal to “examine the ways in which electronic games are changing how people play, learn, and connect with each other, including across boundaries of culture and geography”, I cannot recommend enough going to check them out.

In Part 4 of this multi-part series, we discuss how ICHEG celebrates and preserves game makers.

Makers of Worlds

Historical Context of Homebrew Games

(Game-Route) Have ‘Homebrew’ games ever been, or might they be, accepted into the Center’s collection?

(J.P. Dyson) Yes, they would be.  And I think that they are part of a longer history of gaming and game development.  To me what’s interesting about the history of video game development is that it seems to me that we’re sort of in a ‘Back to the Future’ mode in some ways.  Whereas if you look at the early years of the development of computer games, first on mainframes in the 60’s and into the 70’s, and then with the rise of the Personal Computer, you saw that there was relatively little separation between the developer and the user.

In terms of: you got games, you bought games, sometimes you copied games; especially in the early years there was a lot of copying of games, which is why you have all of this DRM stuff now, but you quickly realized that if you were any good at programming and had the confidence, you could often create a game that was as good or almost as good as the games you could buy commercially.  And that’s how so many developers got started.  “Oh, I can create a Dungeons and Dragons game on the computer”.  And you could hack games.  The code was right there. 

I remember playing games and you’d go and hack it to give yourself, I remember playing a game called Tomeguard, which was an early sort of dungeon crawl game, and you’d go into the code and modify it, and all of a sudden you were getting tons of treasure, that sort of thing.  Or you made the monster a purple dinosaur instead of an orc.  So there’s been the hacking/homebrew ethos from the very beginning. 

But then when you get into, I feel the 90’s especially, when the consoles were really so dominant in so many ways, with CD Roms, there was often a real separation between what the average user could do, versus what these AAA titles were.  It was hard to imagine going on and creating a PlayStation game if you were just a kid somewhere.  And so you had this real separation.  In recent years with the internet and more tools to create games, there’s been this, whether it’s hacking games or creating games in Flash or anything else, you don’t need to invent all of the tools….

Evolution of Game Development Accessibility

(Game-Route) Or tools such as XNA….

(J.P. Dyson) Microsoft has been very good at that, about reaching out to that.  So what you have is this almost return to the early years.  Where there’s not so much separation between the mass produced games and the games that people can create themselves.  So you see the whole rise of independent games.  A game like Minecraft for instance.  20 years ago there wouldn’t have been a distribution network.  You had Doom and the whole shareware thing going on, but generally a distribution network was much harder to get into.  Now for example with Microsoft’s support of that, or just the whole independent gaming movement in general, you can create a game that’s very popular. 

So, I guess the short answer is that we feel the user modification of games is part of a long history of video games.  It’s not necessarily something that’s just new.  And whether that’s new games or going back and modding an old original Game Boy or something like that, that sort of homebrew/hacking ethos has been part of gaming from the very beginning, and I think often been an important surge to the development of new games.  And so, yes, that would be a legitimate part of what we collect, and I think an important part of the whole story.

Gaming Luminaries and their Artifacts

(Game-Route) What gaming ‘luminaries’ are represented within ICHEG’s collections?  What artifacts represent these individuals?

(J.P. Dyson) So things like the notebooks of Will Wright, Ken and Roberta Williams have donated things like a lot of Roberta Williams’ design notes for games, for the Sierra games.  Dan Button, also known as Dan Button Berry later in life, we have Dan Button poems and that sort of thing, personal items.  Ralph Baer, we have a great collection of stuff related to his later career, developing electronic toys, including Simon, and as I mentioned downstairs, things like that light anti-tank weapon that was one of the first examples of military application of video games.  And there are collections from companies like Westwood, for instance. 

And we haven’t announced this one, Joel Billings who was the founder of SSI, has donated materials.  We’re often working with people too to get them to donate materials.  And again, that’s about a long-term relationship with people.  Because people are busy, sometimes they don’t have materials but sometimes they do have materials but again people are just incredibly busy, so even the time to pack it up is difficult.  So a lot of time when you go out and pack things up for people it helps.  So there are a number of things like that in the works. 

Desired Collections and Future Acquisitions

(Game-Route) Are there, just as a video game fan and historian, any collections that you could think of that you’d like to get here at the Center?

(J.P. Dyson) Yea.  You know, the games themselves are the easiest things to get.  It’s more the things that either reflects the creation or the business of the games themselves.  So things like the collection of games magazines that we received from a donation from this guy Kevin Gifford.  That was something that I really wanted to get, because I felt that it was really important for telling the history of games.  More of the personal design papers I think from key figures. 

A couple of other areas: 1, more stuff representing Japanese gaming experience I think is really key.  In general, build our international collection much more.  Again, we have that, but we tend to have the end products, the games themselves, as opposed to the design documents or other things.  And then one thing that I’m very interested in is, which is not something that’s at the top of the radar for most gamers, but development of gaming in the 60’s and 70’s on mainframe computer systems. 

Because what you see is laying down a lot of the foundations for the type of games like simulation games or sports games.  What people were doing was tackling a lot of the problems of how do you create this sort of game in a computer form.  So even though they’re often doing it in text base versions, you’re still making those decisions such as ‘What is the nature of a simulation?’.  ‘Is it about getting the strategy right?’.  ‘Is it a skills-based thing?’. 

So, more things from game developers themselves are key.  More international representation.  And then some of the early history, which is often buried in newsletters and often obscure places.

(Game-Route) The early history seems as if it may be the most scattered, that really early stuff.

(J.P. Dyson) Yea.

Please check-out the rest of this 6-part interview:

• Interview Part 1 – Mission, Beginnings & Role
• Interview Part 2 – Game Preservation Process
• Interview Part 3 – Community Partership
• Interview Part 4 – Game Maker Spotlight
• Interview Part 5 – Museum Resources
• Interview Part 6 – Preservation & Education