Unrepresented and Under-represented Video Game History

Résumé

We present history as narrative to examine cause and effect, action and consequence, and the way these shape the subject of that history. Without these, what is the point of history? The desire for narrative structure influences research; one looks for connections between events, influences, motivations, shared origins, diverging alternatives, and closure to round off with. The dangers, of course, are that we see past things differently when we retroactively identify them as precursors, see concurrent events as competing or complementary instead of coincidence, see outcomes as endpoints, and find progressions where none exist. When narrative is given center stage, the result is often more journalistic than scholarly, and less useful even though it may be more memorable.