What do videogames want? Preserving, playing and not playing digital games and gameplay

Videogames are disappearing. At a time when there are more gaming platforms and titles available than ever before, it might seem strange to claim that videogames are disappearing. And yet, despite their apparent abundance, the processes of material and digital deterioration render hardware and software unusable as hard drives fail, discs become unreadable, activation servers are re-allocated and newly released systems offer limited compatibility with existing libraries of games and peripherals. Adding to this, journalistic, retail and marketing practices fuel a marketplace of perpetual innovation that rationalises and justifies the rapidity of supersession and obsolescence. As such, videogames are, without doubt, disappearing and the continued – and accelerating – loss of this material denies future generations access to their cultural heritage and robs the next generation of developers historical reference material to draw on. As Henry Lowood (2009) pointed out more than a decade ago, we need to take action ‘before it’s too late’. Building on ideas initially explored in Best Before (2012) and developed through the Game Over (2018) and Time Extend! (2020) White Papers, this paper outlines a range of different approaches to preserving, interpreting and exhibiting videogames. The paper offers an overview and critique of existing approaches and revisits some of the methodological and conceptual presuppositions that underpin game preservation and even the academic discipline of game studies as a whole. Returning to first principles, the paper asks ‘What Do Videogames Want?’. This deceptively simple question appears similarly straightforward to answer. Surely, videogames want to be played? The idea that videogames have to be played to be understood seems almost self-evident. In fact, as this paper demonstrates, we might even say that videogames need to be played and that, without the constitutive acts of play and performance, there is no game

Ulster Kitchen Comedy: ‘a faithful if unpleasant picture of the national fragments’

This chapter focuses on the genre of Kitchen Comedy in early-twentieth-century Ulster, and how this genre provided at once a source of popular entertainment and a forum for dramatising social anxieties and tensions. It first considers the origin of Kitchen Comedy in the activities of the Irish Literary Theatre and its importance to Irish theatre tradition before moving on to examine the development of the form by the most well-known and successful of the early-twentieth-century Ulster playwrights George Shiels and Joseph Tomelty. The plays of these writers defied the expectations of both the Irish and the British theatrical establishments, but they were nevertheless popular throughout Ireland and repeatedly produced on the major stages of both Belfast and Dublin. The chapter seeks to restore these writers to the historical record. It argues that Ulster Kitchen Comedy provides a striking example of the potential of popular stage performance to interact with social mores, challenge orthodoxies and re-frame established cultural narratives

Our nation, their nation: Premchand, Satyajit Ray and the Indian state

In the 1950s and the 1960s, Satyajit Ray made a series of feature films about life in rural and urban Bengal in eastern India. Made in Ray’s native language Bengali, these films were nuanced and mostly realist narratives imbued with social consciousness but without political rhetoric. These films were also marked by Ray’s steady refusal to include direct political statements in his films in the manner of contemporary directors in Indian arthouse film. In the 1970s, in a significant departure from his own practice, Ray directed two films outside his familiar linguistic and cultural trope. Shatranj ke Khiladi (The Chess Players, 1977) a trilingual film in Hindi-Urdu-English was a costume drama about the early years of Britain’s Indian empire set in the northern Indian city of Lucknow. Four years later, Ray directed his second film in Hindi, for India’s state run television broadcaster Doordarshan. Sadgati (The Deliverance, 1981), a narrative about casteism and social exploitation, was set in central India. Both films were adaptations of Hindi short stories by Premchand. This essay argues that Ray’s choice of Premchand’s work was political, and a vehicle for creating a new, direct cinematic idiom that was unlike his previous body of work which was marked by its nuanced treatment of subject matter. This new cinematic idiom signalled a change in both style and content, and resulted in films that were characterised by an unambiguous anti-establishment polemic. It also argues that Ray’s choice of Premchand’s work not only resulted in a material transformation of his own film language, but redefined his leadership of India’s ‘parallel cinema’ movement

Evidence into Action, Ep 21: primary science [podcast]

In this instalment of the Education Endowment Foundation's podcast, host Alex Quigley is joined by co-host Grace Cocker (EEF Content Specialist for maths) and expert guests including: Sarah Earle (Reader in Education, Bath Spa University), Ben Rogers (Director of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Paradigm Trust), and Mikaela Moore (Director of Primary Science, Delta Academy Trust). They discuss high-quality science teaching that fosters progress and children’s interest in science