GBArchive

The GBArchive is a series of videos that addresses the fundamental lacuna in the documentation of differential systems of videogame hardware. These videos record not only the narrative of the game as it occurs on the hardware’s screen but also the platform’s materiality and the player’s physical engagement with the object. To highlight how these encounters are necessarily mediated by myriad social and cultural factors, I have overlaid the videos with descriptions of the objects and of my own experience engaging with them. My aim is not to archive the game itself—as evidenced by the fact that I only played the straightforward, two-minute prologue of Super Mario Advance 2, but rather to preserve the crucial intersection between embodied experience and technology.

The ability to view the same level of the same game on various platforms reveals broader connections between the object, the act of gaming, and its infrastructure. In conversation with Jonathan Sterne’s work on Pierre Bourdieu, this project necessarily grapples with the concept of habitus and its bi-directional relationship with video game hardware. At the outset of his article titled “Bourdieu, Technique and Technology,” Jonathan Sterne notes that the first step in researching technology must be to perform what Bourdieu calls an “‘epistemological break’ with the ‘common sense’ of technology."¹ By divesting ourselves of a priori knowledge of the object, we are free to “construct” or reconstruct the object without merely describing it in its own terms. To understand a given video game platform—here, the Game Boy Advance—we must understand its exchanges with other platforms, especially its own afterlives through emulation and modding.

Sterne notes that, unlike Norbert Elias and Marcel Mauss, who see habitus as stratified based on temporal period, Bourdieu sees this practical knowledge as being stratified across a society.² Habitus mediates structural social relations and objectified forms of socio-economic agency. It is not knowledge in the abstract sense, but rather embodied knowledge—the way we pick up the video game console, hold it, the force with which we press the buttons, the aesthetic preferences that govern which games we pick up. As I note in my video on the MyBoy emulator, the experience of playing a GBA game on a touch screen will be radically different for someone who has been typing on and using a smartphone for years than it is for someone used to a flip phone or no phone at all. It is a common-sense approach to say that video game controllers are intuitive. They’re not. Using the WiiMote and nunchuck is a profoundly awkward experience for someone familiar with handheld consoles. Moreover, controllers are typically not designed for left-handed people. As a right-handed person familiar with the default right-handed video game controls, it’s strange to play on a computer where the default configuration is the only one among all the platforms where directional input is performed with the right hand and actions with the left.

Emulators—sanctioned or otherwise—are inextricably linked to the production and circulation of the original object. After producing videos of seven different platforms, I would go as far as to say that a comparison of the emulators is essential to a thorough construction of the object. For residual media like the GBA, emulation is often the only way we can play its games. My most exciting discovery throughout the documentation project is that the physics of the Super Mario Advance 2 cartridge differ from those of the ROM file. In my Game Boy Advance video, I show a side-by-side recording of Mario attempting to jump for the same coin on the Game Boy Advance using the cartridge and on the Wii using the ROM. In the case of the former, Mario cannot reach the coin—he must use the platform to obtain it. In the case of the latter, he reaches the coin simply by jumping, which trivialises much of the skill the player must necessarily possess to collect these points. The game is not simply different because it must be played on a different platform using different mechanics in a different social context, it is a fundamentally different game. The example of the coin helps convey that what we choose to archive matters. Of course, there is no value judgement in this comparison—the version of Super Mario Advance 2 on the Wii is no better or worse than the cartridge game, but it does differ.

Moreover, what we might initially think of as the original also differs from the 2001 original—for the purposes of producing the video, I recorded the screen of my Game Boy Advance on an Android smartphone, which had not even been thought up sixteen years ago. It is impossible to recreate the circumstances of a game’s original release, despite nostalgic sentiments suggesting otherwise. The cartridge and console I own are mechanically reproduced objects that, if the production system works as intended, are identical to thousands of others. Whether an ‘original’ exists somewhere in the bowels of a Nintendo warehouse is irrelevant for all but the most devout collectors—and, even then, remains a highly contentious and problematic construction of the object. Rather than focusing on an auratic Schrödinger’s console, I argue that a more productive approach is to consider a comparison between various software or hardware emulators that allow us to access a network of differential systems. We must divest ourselves of the hierarchy that privileges ‘original’ games at the exclusion of the affordances of their emulators and instead consider how the system of differences between platforms and their emulations are structured by bodies and power.

The increasing obsolescence of the Game Boy Advance throughout its lifetime, when placed against more ergonomic, cost-efficient, sustainable alternatives, provides an occasion for thinking through video game infrastructure. In “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” Susan Leigh Star argues that “the normally invisible quality of infrastructure becomes invisible when it breaks,”³ and this claim is equally true when technology is replaced by a newer model. Such is the case with video game hardware, where developers are invested in the practice of creative destruction. In “Marvel and the Form of Motion Comics,” Darren Wershler and Kalervo A. Sinervo note that “in the very process of creating a new version of itself, it’s [i.e. Marvel’s] economic structure never ceases to destroy itself from within."⁴ The manufacturers of video game hardware are likewise invested in metaphorically—and literally, when considering the increasing trend of planned obsolescence—destroying earlier platforms to incite players to purchase their newest platform. A comparative analysis of the platforms through a video archive illuminates incremental shifts in design, target audience, cost, accessibility, and so on more than if we were to study the Game Boy Advance as an isolated object.

Notes

¹ Jonathan Sterne, “Bourdieu, Technique and Technology,” Cultural Studies, vol. 17, no. 3/4, 2003, pp.367-389, 369.

² Ibid., 370.

³ Susan Leigh Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 43, 1999, pp. 377-391, 382

⁴ Darren Wershler and Kalervo A. Sinervo, “Marvel and the Form of Motion Comics,” Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and A Comics Universe, edited by Matt Yockey, University of Texas Press, 2017, pp. 187-206, 188.