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Videogame history is not just a history of one successful
technology replacing the next. It is also a history of platforms
and communities that never quite made it; that struggled to make
their voices heard; that aggravated against the conventions of the
day; and that never enjoyed the commercial success or recognition
of their major counterparts. In Minor Platforms in Videogame
History, Benjamin Nicoll argues that 'minor' videogame histories
are anything but insignificant. Through an analysis of
transitional, decolonial, imaginary, residual, and minor videogame
platforms, Nicoll highlights moments of difference and
discontinuity in videogame history. From the domestication of
vector graphics in the early years of videogame consoles to the
'cloning' of Japanese computer games in South Korea in the 1980s,
this book explores case studies that challenge taken-for-granted
approaches to videogames, platforms, and their histories.
Videogames were once made with a vast range of tools and
technologies, but in recent years a small number of commercially
available 'game engines' have reached an unprecedented level of
dominance in the global videogame industry. In particular, the
Unity game engine has penetrated all scales of videogame
development, from the large studio to the hobbyist bedroom, such
that over half of all new videogames are reportedly being made with
Unity. This book provides an urgently needed critical analysis of
Unity as 'cultural software' that facilitates particular production
workflows, design methodologies, and software literacies. Building
on long-standing methods in media and cultural studies, and drawing
on interviews with a range of videogame developers, Benjamin Nicoll
and Brendan Keogh argue that Unity deploys a discourse of
democratization to draw users into its 'circuits of cultural
software'. For scholars of media production, software culture, and
platform studies, this book provides a framework and language to
better articulate the increasingly dominant role of software tools
in cultural production. For videogame developers, educators, and
students, it provides critical and historical grounding for a tool
that is widely used yet rarely analysed from a cultural angle.
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