Type
Text
Type
Dissertation
Advisor
Guins, Raiford | Diedrcih, Lisa | Patterson, Zabet | Galloway, Alexander.
Date
2014-12-01
Keywords
Modern history | personal computing, Roberta Williams, Sierra On-Line, video game history, videogames, video games
Department
Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies.
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/77213
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
This dissertation is a critique of contemporary video game historiography, executed through a cultural history of the home entertainment microcomputer software company Sierra On-Line (1980-1998) and its husband-and-wife co-founders, Ken and Roberta Williams. Sierra On-Line developed from a cottage industry business managed from the Williams' kitchen table to an international top-five entertainment software publisher, yet the past fifteen years of historical writing on video games have left the company in relative obscurity. This project advances theoretical methods from media archaeology and critical materialism to construct a history of Sierra On-Line that runs against the grain of broader narratives in video game history. This dissertation offers three case studies on Sierra On-Line, titled " On Origin," " On Industry," and " On Gender." Each chapters plies a history not only counter to, but in excess of, the traditionally understood relationship between this company and the larger constellation of video game history. " On Origin" turns itself to the murky world of " beginnings," assessing the specter of the origin story in video game history. In place of an origin story, I trace an emergence, attending to technological and domestic disparities that become obscured in the effort to write a smooth, progressivist account of how Sierra On-Line came into being around the development of the Williams' first game, Mystery House. " On Industry" deconstructs how video game history imagines the industry as a monolithic entity, one often abstracted from any particular geographic context. This chapter explores the video game industry in three slices: the profoundly local arrangements of the small mountain towns Sierra was located in; the regional West Coast microcomputer hardware and software scene; and the national conception of the 1984 Video Game " Crash." " On Gender" takes Sierra's lead designer, Roberta Williams, as both its subject and object: her games, her design practices, and, above all, how she has been formatted to fit within video game history. As the first female computer game designer in the United States, historians struggle to make sense of Roberta Williams within the male-dominated arena of game history, typically shoehorning her into " pioneer" narratives and singling her out on a pedestal. Through a case study of Williams, this chapter explores how gender is a structuring silence within video game history. Thus, each chapter complicates the authority of video game historiography's common frameworks, while also providing a model for how we might buttress alternative histories about our technological lives. This dissertation concludes with a lateral move about a figure largely left out of historiographic reflection: that of the gamer. Through personal narrative and research anecdotes, I explore both how we remember and what we forget of our " gamer" cultures, and suggest that the figure of the gamer is actually what holds video game history in thrall. This, I will contend, is the contribution Sierra On-Line is uniquely poised to make: showing us a video game history with no gamer at all. | 233 pages
Recommended Citation
Nooney, Erica Alaine, "Sierra On-Line and the Archaeology of Video Game History" (2014). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 3044.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/3044