Observing the Coming of Age of Video Game Graphics: Exploring the historical development of video game graphics through distant viewing, hermeneutics and image clustering

Abstract

The 1980s marked the arrival of microcomputers in our homes, as well as the advent of homebrew video game development (Swalwell, 2021). Next to working with the technological constraints of these early computers, many developers also had to figure out how their games needed to look and work like. What emerged was its own unique type of screen-based media (Arsenault et al., 2015; Fizek, 2022), different from movies or software interfaces. Being an essential part of digital history and formative to how we understand and consume video games and other digital media today, there is a need for studying this lesser researched area. The question arises on how we can analyse this historic development beyond singular case studies. I approached the early history of video game images through distant viewing, a computational method for analysing visual patterns across large image datasets. For this inquiry, I created the Video Games History Screenshot dataset and visualised the games’ images along their similarity. I then analysed these visualisations as well as clusters of screenshots by their relation to the games’ publication year, contents and formal aspects of the images. Results indicate this process as a viable approach to study video game history at large, although the need for a fine-tuned visualisation process arises. Sharing only conceptual familiarity with other software interfaces, the visual diversity of video games makes the clustering process difficult to control. Further, the analysis shows an intricate entanglement of video game design with computing history, as well as the influx of pop-cultural references.

Keywords

• digital games
• distant viewing
• video game studies
• video game graphics
• history of technology
• image clustering