Lineages: Historicising the Videogame

This paper argues that game studies must historicise the videogame by situating it within cultural and material contexts, rather than only asking what the videogame essentially is. Drawing on Fredric Jameson's injunction to "always historicize," the author contends that debates over the medium's origins, whether rooted in play, configurative practice, or the remediation of audiovisual forms, can be reframed productively by asking when the videogame emerged and through which lineages it should be understood. The paper's central aim is to propose a theoretical framework for this historicising work by examining methods used by media historians in other fields.

The framework rests on Thomas Elsaesser's argument in "The New Film History as Media Archaeology" that the history of image and sound technologies is better understood as a set of "family relations" than as a single family tree, with technologies belonging together without being causally or teleologically linked. The author extends this approach through the work of scholars including Gilberto Bruno, Anne Friedberg, Angela Ndalianis, and Siegfried Zielinski, whose studies of visual culture, spectatorship, and media archaeology inform the proposed model. The paper's contribution lies in applying these perspectives to position the videogame within a shared network of image and sound technologies.

The paper is a conceptual and theoretical intervention rather than an empirical study, so it does not present survey data, statistics, or a defined sample. Its scope is therefore defined by the range of theoretical traditions it draws upon, spanning film history, media archaeology, and critical theory, instead of by a specific geographic region, time period, or industry segment. The stated conclusion is that locating the videogame within these family relations has significant theoretical implications for how image and sound technologies are understood, though the paper's full elaboration of those implications is presented in its later sections.