Response to the Hubtamo Reading

Erkki Hubtamo’s, Slots of Fun, Slots of Trouble: An Archaeology of Arcade Gaming, suggests the slot machine has played a role in the evolution of video gaming. He does this by describing how slot machines helped establish the basic principle of entertainment generated by ‘man’s hand meets machine’.
“…the user begins the session by inserting a coin in a sot. The machine gives something in return: a postcard, candy, cigar, a “therapeutic” shock…” (Hubtamo, Pg 7). Hubtamo goes on to argue that this technological concept led to the development of fortune-telling machines, phonograph parlors, gambling machines, pinball machines and eventually gaming arcades. His argument is succinct and makes chronological sense, yet it his concluding point that captured my interest.

Electronic gaming cannot be traced back to any single source. It emerges from a slowly evolving, complex web of manifold cultural threads and nodes. What is clear is that this web began to develop a long time before anything like “digital interactive media” existed (Hubtamo, Pg 16).

In order to conceptualise videogames theory and culture, it frightens me to read that there may not be a holistic and solid theoretical base, set out in stone, for me to contextualise the history of video games from. I feel it always helps me to understand the present by having an understanding of the past. And because this paper is based on the theory and culture of videogames, I strongly feel it is important to have a grasp on the history of videogames as it is history that theory and culture stem from. Acknowledging the past, especially in the field of academia, does I believe help justify current arguments.

Having said that, I must address the vulnerable position I have found myself in having enrolled in FTVMS 328. My experience of video games started at the age of seven when my two sisters and I received our first Play Station. The playground was indeed replaced by the Play Station that year. However the excitement soon fizzled out and by my teens, playing on the Play Station became an annual event at best. Now days, my interaction with videogames is limited to buying X Box games for the boyfriend, entertaining myself on the Wii display at Dick Smith’s while Dad shops around for a new TV, or spending five minutes playing the free games on my new cell phone (are those classed as videogames?) before realising I have not played with the sound settings yet.

My point is, I do not know nothing about videogames, but I do not know much, not yet anyway.

However I feel I have already learnt one crucial thing. As concluded by Hubtamo and many more I am sure, the history of video gaming in not linear in character. In fact it is complex and multifaceted. Like in many fields of academia, the origins to which the current status of video gaming comes from can be viewed from multiple perspectives: social, cultural, economic, political or technological. And I believe that although one perspective may play a larger role in the development of videogames, it is only by acknowledging all, that a factual and justifiable area of study, in this case videogames: theory and culture, can be established and understood.