Video games break down. A lot. Sometimes it even seems like they break down more often than they work. We all know the feeling. Maybe your X-Box red rings right as you’re approaching the final boss.1 Maybe you bought Cyberpunk 2077 on launch day and spent your evening starting and restarting the program, trying to sidestep the game-breaking glitches long enough to get a proper glimpse of Night City.2 Or maybe your problem isn’t obviously technical at all; maybe you gave up on your favorite online game thanks to its broken, toxic community and insufficient moderation tools. No matter what it was, it was probably attended by feelings of frustration, dismay, and even shock at this moment of irruption in which the agreed-upon sociotechnical order—one governed by seamlessness, convenience, and invisibility—suddenly cracks, revealing the vast complexity of this web of people and machines that we call video games. Usually, the disruption subsides, and the game resumes. Somebody somewhere has performed some arcane ritual, restoring the system to order. But who fixes the system and how is immediately forgotten—if the player even gave that repairer a passing thought.
To date, game history has shown little interest in game maintenance and repair, even though games stay as functional as they do only through maintenance and repair practices. One of the many pernicious inheritances that game history received from its (somewhat unfairly maligned) “chronicle era” of game history is a focus on moments of great invention and innovation.3 These early histories taught us the names of gaming’s so-called great men, and that greatness was almost solely the purview of games’ creatives, engineers, businessmen, or some combination of the three. The rise of informed, historiographically rigorous academic game history in roughly the past ten years has helped shift historical attention away from those great men and toward players, fan laborers, and the below-the-line workers who do most of the labor in and around games. But even those studies, rich and valuable as they are, have tended to focus more on those actors’ own moments of invention and innovation (game modifications—mods—being an evergreen example) rather than the often dull, thankless work of maintenance and repair.4
The time is right for a change; game studies must contend critically and directly with maintenance and repair. The field does a disservice to scholars and members of the video game community alike as long as it continues to succumb to these practices’ perceived mundanity and opacity. When we started work on this special issue, we considered maintenance and repair in their most traditional forms: maintenance as a set of strategies aimed at keeping a game running and repair as a set of practices aimed at fixing games when they break down. However, it became readily apparent that these moments of breakdown not only often change the ontological status of seemingly stable categories like game and player but also the concept of broken itself, as the mutual relations between ludic systems’ various social and technical actors are exposed.5 In this special issue, we hope to problematize what maintenance and repair mean in the history of games and to provoke further work on how fixing things might relate to labor, power, innovation, and the status quo. Though we hold to these practical definitions out of strict necessity, they do not encompass all the many phenomena that relate to brokenness, maintenance, and repair. Maintenance and repair work is vibrant, complex, and necessary; studies of this work should be the same. We have thus selected a set of materials that we feel represent a broad range of historiographical approaches to maintenance and repair.
Though alien to game history, the theoretical depth of maintenance and repair themes can be seen in the recent flurry of interest in maintenance and repair scholarship coming out of science and technology studies (STS). STS scholars have “turned to maintenance,” as Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel’s influential article puts it, as a means of sidestepping the dogmatic focus on invention and innovation that characterizes so many popular accounts of science and technology.6 Instead of beginning with the assumption that things simply work until some outside force causes them to fail, maintenance and repair allow us to reorient our perspectives around what Steve Jackson has called “broken world thinking,” which “asks what happens when we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points in thinking through the nature, use, and effects of information technology and new media.”7 When we stop taking functionality for granted, a vast sociotechnical agglomeration of things—humans and nonhumans alike—becomes demystified. Their configurations and shapes lose their air of naturalness and suddenly expose the negotiations and choices that held them together.8 It becomes evident that these agglomerations—actor networks, in good STS terms—are not statically functional. Rather, functionality is something that must be achieved and reachieved, accomplished and reaccomplished all the time, forever.9
In practical terms, we can say that it takes legions of largely unpaid and underpaid laborers to hold the video games actor network(s) together, and this is not a new phenomenon. During the heyday of video game arcades, for instance, operators spent most of their time fixing arcade machines that had been beaten, abused, and even robbed by their clientele.10 When video game consoles rose to prominence, they brought new maintenance and repair problems with them, and consumer-oriented repair services began to proliferate. This introduced consumers to the handyman persona of Nintendo’s Mario, embodied in the millions of repair-service booklets that accompanied Nintendo’s products. The rise of networked gaming introduced even more points of failure and new professions to address them, such as the server administrator and the community manager. To misappropriate Paul Virilio’s most famous line, the invention of any gaming technology is the invention of a new kind of sociotechnical failure-in-waiting, one that calls for a new kind of laborer to prevent that failure. Yet we know little of these jobs, these points of failure, or their implications for video games, the game industry, and digital culture the world over.
Maintenance and repair can also attune scholarship to other themes of enormous significance to games. The study of maintenance and repair can open doors to new kinds of political questions. Is maintenance always the maintenance of a status quo? How do maintenance and repair relate to normalization? And how do regimes of maintenance and repair differ from place to place, culture to culture?11 They also beg new historical questions about the status and reproduction of embodied knowledge. Maintenance and repair are heavily embodied skills that must be learned through practice and repetition and, as such, can be difficult to formalize.12 What implications does that hold for the study of arcade repair professionals’ disappearing skills or the forbiddingly arcane maps of circuit diagrams that once populated gaming’s trade press? Maintenance and repair also point to ecological questions around games’ infamous disposability and the potential for more durable, eco-friendly design which, in turn, beg for feminist and queer analyses of games as objects of care.13
For readers of ROMchip, of course, the most pressing questions are probably historiographical. After all, if maintenance and repair practices are devoted to preserving continuity over time, and history is the story of change over time, how can one write a compelling history of maintenance and repair?14 One answer comes from David Edgerton’s landmark The Shock of the Old. For him, the proper approach to technology is not the analysis of invention and innovation, but the study of “technology-in-use,” which looks at how different social segments use, reuse, and reproduce technologies in their lived experiences, according to local definitions of significance.15 Technology-in-use asks historians to attend to processes of imitation as well as innovation, and the local alongside the global. As historians of games grow increasingly interested in translocal flows of video games and what Melanie Swalwell has called “connected histories” arising between cultures, technology-in-use provides a vital way of thinking about how games are maintained and repaired in and between contexts across the globe.16
If, as most historians know, history is always really about the present, then even a cursory glance through recent technological developments should reveal how urgent a turn toward maintenance is. In rural America, progressive lawyers ally with tech-savvy farmers and college students against the likes of Apple to uphold users’ “right to repair.”17 Years of legal neglect have ensured that the preservation of video games—and indeed, of all digital media—remains largely in the hands of small bands of rogue vernacular archivists, whose reparative projects are small enough to avoid serious reprisal.18 The advent of always-on internet connections and streaming media has radically dissolved the bounds of media objects, allowing companies to change media narratives in real time in order to fix offensive games, films, and videos. Underneath all of these massive, planetary-scale systems courses, the deceptively essential world of open source software, whose small, tired class of maintainers devotes blood, sweat, and tears to keeping some of the internet’s most fundamental—and most thankless— projects up and running.19 Indeed, the maintenance and repair of digital objects has become a flashpoint for the contest of the very soul of twenty-first century digital society, and digital games its “ideal commodity” embodying “the most powerful economic, technological, social, and cultural forces at work.”20
As game historians, the contributors to this issue are in a uniquely powerful position to “rethink maintenance and repair,” thereby demonstrating the vital, timely significance of this still-young field to the world at large.21 Several of the pieces included in this issue, particularly Kieran Nolan on the repair constellation, Scott Stilphen on CRT Rejuvenators, and the interviews we conducted with Lauren Thorpe and Peter “Durante” Thoman, cast light on how the often-invisible work of maintenance and repair has been done, and how maintenance and repair practices have, in turn, shaped gaming’s material culture. Others, like Alex Custodio and Daniel Volmar, have revealed how these ostensibly neutral practices are always bound up with questions of culture, capital, and power by examining how maintenance and repair have been mustered to protect enthusiasts’ perceptions of expertise and to communicate that expertise with peers in the domains of Gameboy Advance backlighting and PC upgrading, respectively. Dongwon Jo’s history of repairmen at Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon market instead foregrounds maintenance and repair’s centrality to international flows of arcade machines and capital, and the ways in which these repairmen helped shape the international games industry. Souvik Mukherjee and Maria Garda, Niklas Nylund, and Jaakko Suominen, in turn, show how maintenance and repair are bound up with the mediation of history itself by turning to the cultural politics of game patching, and game restoration and preservation.
Running through all of these pieces, however, is a single, overriding theme: game history has ignored maintenance and repair for too long. Maintenance and repair professionals work tirelessly to keep our systems running and our games playable; it’s high time they got their due. The contributions to this special issue provide solid footing from which to launch these explorations. Game history is growing, and all growth requires meticulous attention; let’s make sure it gets the historiographical tune-up it needs.
Footnotes
1. ^ “Microsoft’ s $1 Billion Red Ring of Death,” Forbes, July 5, 2007, https://www.forbes.com/2007/07/05/msft-xbox-charge-tech-media-cx_rr_0705techmsft.html?sh=15f610af60a6.
2. ^ Jason Schreier, “Inside Cyberpunk 2077’s Disastrous Rollout,” Bloomberg, January 16, 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-16/cyberpunk-2077-what-caused-the-video-game-s-disastrous-rollout#xj4y7vzkg.
3. ^ Erkki Huhtamo named enthusiast histories uncritically produced by fans’ “chronicles,” a term which Jaakko Suominen has expanded under the name enthusiast histories. Erkki Huhtamo, “Slots of Fun, Slots of Trouble: An Archaeology of Arcade Gaming,” in Handbook of Computer Game Studies, ed. Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 1–21; and Jaakko Suominen, “How to Present the History of Digital Games: Enthusiast, Emancipatory, Genealogical, and Pathological Approaches,” Games and Culture 12, no. 6 (2017): 544–62.
4. ^ There are a handful of notable exceptions in which maintenance and repair practices are centered and forefronted. See Dongwon Jo, “ʻBursting Circuit Boards’: Infrastructures and Technical Practices of Copying in Early Korean Video Game Industry,” Game Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 1; and Laine Nooney, “The Uncredited: Work, Women, and the Making of the US Computer Game Industry,” Feminist Media Histories 6, no. 1 (2020): 119–46.
5. ^ The most striking recent example is Aaron Trammell’s Repairing Play, which aims to repair the white, western, patriarchal assumptions underpinning most of the field’s theories of play. Trammell, Repairing Play: A Black Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023). For other examples of categorical breakdown and repair, see Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Raiford Guins, Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014); Bo Ruberg, “No Fun: The Queer Potential of Video Games That Annoy, Anger, Disappoint, Sadden, and Hurt,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 2, no. 2 (2015): 108–24; and TreaAndrea M. Russworm, “Computational Blackness: The Procedural Logics of Race, Game, and Cinema, or How Spike Lee's Livin’ Da Dream Productively ‘Broke’ a Popular Video Game,” Black Camera 10, no. 1 (2018): 193–212.
6. ^ Andrew L. Russell and Lee Vinsel, “After Innovation, Turn to Maintenance,” Technology and Culture 59, no. 1 (May 1, 2018): 1–25, https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2018.0004. [1] Steven J. Jackson, “Rethinking Repair,” in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 221.
7. ^ Steven J. Jackson, “Rethinking Repair,” in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 221.
8. ^ Trevor Pinch and Wiebe E. Bijker, “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts, or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other,” in The Social Construction of Technological Systems, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas Parke Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 17–50.
9. ^ Paula Jarzabkowski and Trevor Pinch, “Sociomateriality Is ‘the New Black’: Accomplishing Repurposing, Reinscripting and Repairing in Context,” M@n@gement 16, no. 5 (December 1, 2013): 579.
10. ^ This is best illustrated by the infamous Stubben test. As a final test before release, Atari would have six foot five engineer Dave Stubben attempt to destroy the machine with his bare hands. As Steven L. Kent claims, “few games ever survived.” Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001), 136.
11. ^ Consider for example the premium placed on repair in places with less disposable cultures, such as Cuba. See Brian Crecente’s excellent journalistic work on game repair in Cuba: Brian Crecente, “Cuba's Traveling Game Console Repairman,” Polygon, May 15, 2017, https://www.polygon.com/features/2017/5/15/15628750/cuba-traveling-repairman.
12. ^ Christopher R. Henke and Benjamin Sims, Repairing Infrastructures: The Maintenance of Materiality and Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), 29–54.
13. ^ See Maria Puig de La Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Francisco Martínez, “Waste Is Not the End for an Anthropology of Care, Maintenance and Repair,” Social Anthropology 25, no. 3 (2017): 346–50; and Shannon Mattern, “Maintenance and Care,” Places Journal (November 2018), https://placesjournal.org/article/maintenance-and-care/?msclkid=7ef26afed03911eca225af3c1d3b52f0.
14. ^ Russell and Vinsel, “After Innovation.”
15. ^ David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900, 2nd ed. (London: Profile Books, 2019), 39, xxi–xxv.
16. ^ Melanie Swalwell, “Heterodoxy in Game History: Towards More ‘Connected Histories,’” in Game History and the Local (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2021).
17. ^ Kari Paul, “Why Right to Repair Matters—According to a Farmer, a Medical Worker, a Computer Store Owner,” Guardian, August 2, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/aug/02/why-right-to-repair-matters-according-to-a-farmer-a-medical-worker-a-computer-store-owner.
18. ^ The work of informal preservationists in maintaining game history is well documented. See Nathan Altice, I Am Error: The Nintendo Family Computer/Entertainment System Platform (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 289–324; Benjamin Barbier, “Video Games and Heritage: Amateur Preservation?,” Hybrid: Revue des arts et médiations humaines 1 (2014); Jon Ippolito, “Trusting Amateurs with Our Future,” in A Companion to Digital Art, ed. Christiane Paul (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 537–52; Marçal Mora-Cantallops and Ignacio Bergillos, “Fan Preservation of ‘Flopped’ Games and Systems: The Case of the Virtual Boy in Spain,” Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (2018): 213–29; and James Newman, “ Illegal Deposit: Game Preservation and/as Software Piracy,” Convergence 19, no. 1 (2013): 45–61.
19. ^ Nadia Eghbal, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software (San Francisco, CA: Stripe Press, 2020).
20. ^ Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig De Peuter, Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Press-MQUP, 2003), 74.
21. ^ Jackson, “Rethinking Repair.”