Abstract
Screenshots are one of the most ubiquitous visual forms of the twenty-first century. Each day billions of screenshots are created on smart phones and personal computers to document the mundane and spectacular interactions of users with their computational machines. Perhaps the most publicly visible use for screenshots today is as proof of action with or through a computer—that is, as evidence of interaction. We use screenshots to document the microworld of the computer as a space of personal identification and individual expression. In this article I argue that this practice has its origins in the video game cultures of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this period, game publishers and magazines used screenshots to document the visual appearance of games for advertisements and publications. However, quite quickly users began to document and photograph their own experiences of play through photographs of personal achievements such as high scores and end screens. Game companies like Activision and magazines like Nintendo Power encouraged this practice, offering rewards and publishing scores to foster participation. These vernacular practices marked a shift in how users related to computational systems—not merely as tools but as expressive environments where actions were documented and identified with. Over time, these practices evolved into a broader visual culture of play, encompassing screen selfies, player portraits, and early cultures of competitive play such as speedrunning. Far from trivial ephemera, these images indexed the rise of a new computational personhood, where users saw themselves reflected in their screen interactions. In situating this history within this broader discourse, I suggest that unprofessional, everyday practices of gaming and its visual documentation reveal the social and personal dimensions of digital life. Screenshots become not only technical artifacts but also records of self, community, and computational experience.
As video games entered the home in the 1970s, players had direct and interactive access to computational systems that operated around structures of success and failure measured through the quantification of action. These games accommodated a range of potential outcomes, often using numerical evaluation via internal quantification systems such as high scores to determine successful play. While by no means a dominant or universal practice at this time, players would often photograph their television screens to capture high scores, end screens, and other moments of successful play both as personal mementos and through the encouragement of game distributors and popular magazines, who would publish the names and scores of successful applicants along with articles and how-to guides explaining tips and techniques for capturing screen images with a point-and-shoot camera. To be sure, this was a minor practice of fans and enthusiasts and by no means a universal culture of participation. Nonetheless, in examining the vernacular techniques that players used to capture evidence of expert play alongside images that situate players in front of or with their screens in moments of play and interaction, we begin to see a shift in our relationship to the computational systems we broadly inhabit. More than an articulation of a simple tool for predetermined ends, these early screenshot cultures demonstrate an identification with computational action as evidence of skill and performance. In this small vernacular practice of screen documentation, we see the origins of a transformation in our relationship to computation as a whole, in which the computer becomes a world through which we can perform actions to be documented and shared—a relationship that has become central to all manner of computational cultures today.
Critically, this is not a history of games, nor of the hardware that ran them. It is likewise not a history of game players per se, as either the constructed category we might now call gamers or in the expanded sense of a more inclusive picture of these early communities of play. Rather, it is a history of a cultural practice that surrounds games and intersects with vernacular and professional cultures of photography—a history that, like many vernacular histories, reveals cultures of use that sit outside standard histories of commercialization and innovation. Still, this history is more than subcultural. In looking at the minor practice of high-score photography, we find an archive of play that can be understood as a predecessor to the speedrunning, walk-through, and Let’s Play videos that are a significant feature of the visual culture of contemporary video games. Indeed, screenshots are so essential to contemporary digital-game culture that the act of taking a screenshot can be accomplished with the simple push of a button on any modern game console. Yet despite screenshots and screen recording becoming a near-universal technology for the production and circulation of game culture today, almost no scholarly work exists on the history of this practice as it emerged alongside the visual culture of early gaming in this period. To be sure, the use of screen photography for artistic ends, such as in machinima or in-game photography, has been of scholarly interest for more than twenty years.1 Likewise, significant work has been done on early game culture using the archives of game magazines and advertisements in which these screenshots may be found.2 But the screenshot itself as a technical and theoretical phenomenon has escaped investigation. Therefore, my hope is to interrogate the origins of these techniques as they emerged alongside the culture of digital games and their commercialization in the 1970s and 1980s, suggesting that this moment is significant not only because it offers new techniques for the photographic remediation of digital games but also because it marks the beginning of a fundamental transformation in our relationship to our screens and to computers as a whole. These early screenshots index the moment in which a picture of a computer screen ceases to be an image of a computer and becomes an image of the person who took it, and along with this shift emerge new forms of computational personhood mediated by the screen image as a site of identification and action.
Screens Shot
The term screenshot first appeared at the start of the 1980s, largely in the context of early personal computer (PC) and video game culture.3 Here, screenshots are quite literally photographs of cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitors running video games or other software, usually photographed for the purpose of creating high-resolution advertising images for magazines and other publications.4 Video game advertisements in this period relied heavily on illustrations that rendered the relatively simple graphics of these systems as high-quality drawn images.5 These images were intended to convey and sell the game’s themes and as such were rarely indicative of the game’s appearance itself since the graphics of these games were comparatively simple. The illustrations helped define and extend the game’s diegesis or narrative along with the contextual information provided by game boxes, manuals, and other artwork. In general, most game advertisements were dominated by large photographic or illustrated images accompanied by a small, decontextualized screenshot used to illustrate the game’s graphics (see fig. 1).6 Over time this changed, as graphical improvements became a selling point for new games. By the 1990s, game magazines frequently used large-format screenshots in advertising, guides, and other material meant to explicitly show a game’s appearance and functionality, with illustrations taking on the supplemental role once granted to screenshots. Meant to serve as stand-ins for the larger work, these images document the appearance of the game in the abstract so that players knew what they were purchasing, a synecdochic relationship typical of all modern screenshots, which imply the complexity of a dynamic media environment through a single slice of its visual output.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Advertisement scan for the Screenshooter screen photography rig
Figure 3
Advertisement scan for the Polaroid CU-5 screen photography rig
To produce these early screenshots for documentation purposes, publishers would often outsource production to secondary companies that would be provided with the software prior to release.7 Likewise, game magazines and reviewers would often produce their own screenshots for use in publication. In this period, a wide range of camera rigs and other technologies existed to assist in the production of these images. However, nearly all methods required a light-tight hood that could be affixed to or draped over the screen of the computer and a long-exposure camera that could capture the screen without the interference of scan-line distortion that would appear if the shutter was not opened for long enough. Several commercial products were available specifically for this purpose, from the third-party Screenshooter hood and rig that could be affixed to any SLR camera—including the Polaroid CU-5, released in 1964 and designed specifically for close-up and macro photography with a CRT hood accessory purchased separately (see figs. 2 and 3).8 Photos produced in this way could be of high enough quality that they seamlessly erased the face of the screen to capture only the content it displayed, although this required expert knowledge of proper settings for exposure and development. In an article on screenshot photography published in Run magazine in September 1986, the author suggests investing in a tripod with a center brace along with an SLR camera and using Kodak Ektachrome 100 film printed to slides to preserve accurate color.9 At minimum screenshots required a dark room or camera hood to limit glare, an exposure slower than the refresh rate of a CRT, and the ability to manipulate screen images so that there was no in-game movement during the long exposure of the shot—a particular challenge for anyone looking to avoid pause screens and capture a game in medias res. Yet even with these techniques, analog screenshots are often distinguished by faint traces of the screen surface itself, be it in the slight curved distortion of the CRT visible at the edges of the picture, or even in the fingerprints and smudges sometimes visible on the screen’s surface (see figs. 4 and 5). While contemporary digital screenshots serve as an exact replica of the screen’s visual output down to individual bitmap data and dimension, these early images sit just above or on top of the screen, as much interface as index.
Figure 4
Game screenshot of Paperboy (1985) showing CRT distortion (Jaz Rignall, “Back When Screenshots Really Were Screenshots,” VG247, February 1, 2017, https://www.vg247.com/back-when-screenshots-really-were-screen-shots)
Figure 5
Game screenshot of Impossible Mission (1986) showing screen fingerprints (Jaz Rignall, “Back When Screenshots Really Were Screenshots,” VG247, February 1, 2017, https://www.vg247.com/back-when-screenshots-really-were-screen-shots)
These professional screenshots do not document any particular use but rather an ideal or idealized use, supplemented by images that heighten this ideal. They correspond with particular norms, often seeking to disappear the screen by shooting in conditions that strategically erase it. Likewise, for many publications a good screenshot is one that captures the phosphorescent effect of the CRT that blurs its pixels together, producing the appearance of continuity and depth often lost when retro games are ported to modern interfaces.10 The desire here is to erase the world so that the game appears largely unmediated by the work of photography. However, once games were put in the hands of players, vernacular cultures of play and performance emerged and along with new visual forms.
Evidence of Action
Until this moment, screenshots were principally used to document screen images. While that documentation might illustrate a particular function or use, the gesture was one of capture, storage, preservation, or translation: a fixing of the screen image in another medium so that it could be viewed outside the context in which it was initially rendered. However, in this same period and alongside this use, we begin to see the emergence of a distinct vernacular application for screen photography in the early culture of digital games, wherein players would photograph their computer screens to document high scores and other accomplishments as evidence of elite or successful play. In contrast with earlier applications, this move into the domestic realm marks an important shift in which the screenshot records individual interaction or use: evidence of the self. While in previous forms of screen documentation the gesture was one of capturing or reproducing an existing condition, such as the generic appearance of a game for use in advertising, the event captured here is evidence of personal interaction.11 These images document not the macroworld of the player, but the microworld of the game, and more importantly they demonstrate a particular form of interaction with that game. They are evidence of successful performance or proof of actions taken, even as those actions themselves cannot be shown. In this they form an origin point for a much broader cultural practice today, whereby the screenshot indexes not merely the existence of a thing but rather serves as evidence that something was done with a computer.12
The thing done, in this case, was a high score, record time, or other indicator of successful or elite play in the early video game cultures of the 1980s. Of course, the use of high scores as a marker of successful play predates this moment by many years, such that this practice can be viewed as an extension of the culture of competitive play that emerged in the 1970s and described by Carly Kocurek in Coin-Operated Americans, in which players would compete for the highest score on a given cabinet at their local arcade. These scoreboards were built into the game software itself and were limited to the specific machine on which they were displayed.13 In this context high scores were an internal system that could be used to measure and demarcate player skill, allowing for asynchronous and local competition in a way that was quantifiable and discrete.14 As video games entered the home, they brought with them this culture of competitive play but without the means to document or share high scores. For this, players turned to photography to capture and share their accomplishments.
While this convention likely emerged from individual practices of photographing the screen as a personal memento of achievement, it was quickly encouraged by game companies and magazine publishers as a way of promoting the early home-game market. The earliest and perhaps most famous example of this practice was developed by the game company Activision, who published target scores and accomplishments for many of their games beginning with the Atari 2600 and encouraged players to try and meet these goals. If a player was successful, they could photograph their screen and mail the accompanying image to the company. For their efforts they would receive a game-specific iron-on patch that could be affixed to a jean jacket or school backpack—one of the earliest examples of a game achievement like those found in almost all contemporary video games released for major consoles. They would also become members of the so-called club for that game and potentially featured in the Activisions magazine alongside a photo and brief bio.15 The club also tracked world-record holders and included screenshots of each game, though notably did not publish the actual world-record photos submitted by players, which no doubt varied in quality and clarity.
Similar campaigns were subsequently popularized by gaming magazines like Nintendo Power, which encouraged its readers throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s to document their high scores to be included in a list of NES Achievers published monthly in the back of the magazine.16 For many players these would have been the first screenshots they had ever taken, and they would have had no knowledge of how to properly photograph a screen image in this way. To train players in how to capture their screens, both Activision and Nintendo included instructions in their newsletters, with Activision noting in its early issues that many players had reached out asking for tips and techniques to produce clear screenshots of their high scores.17 At Nintendo the assumed need for instruction was so great that every NES Achievers article included instructions on proper screenshot method, often documented by cartoons illustrating camera setup and technique (see fig. 6). These newsletters, articles, and high scores offer a glimpse into a particular aspect of the video game and computing culture of the 1980s and bring into stark relief the distinction between high-score photography and earlier modes of screen documentation discussed above. The value of these images was less their photographic qualities than their ability to capture and reproduce information that indexed player interaction. While basic medium-specific affordances and adaptations had to be accounted for, such as avoiding flash and ensuring an exposure long enough to capture at least one full refresh of the television’s scanlines, the images did not need to be as clear and representative as the advertising and other professional screenshots discussed above. The photos themselves would seem incidental to this process, so much so that they were not reproduced by these companies, who published only the score they document and biographical information provided by the player. Indeed, these images, like many contemporary screenshots, were disposable. They were intended to serve a specific purpose and would not necessarily be kept or remembered after they were taken. While Activision patches have become expensive collectors’ items on eBay, often selling for over a hundred dollars each, it is rare to find high-score photographs in circulation.
Figure 6
NES Achievers page of Nintendo Power , published for much of the 1980s and early 1990s. Note the instructions on how to take a screenshot on the bottom right ( Nintendo Power , no. 2 [Sept.–Oct. 1988]: 98–99)
To date I have found only one such screenshot, which I purchased off eBay in 2018 along with photocopies of the congratulatory letter sent back to the player on receipt of the screenshot documentation (see fig. 7).18 The photograph is presumably a duplicate, or a second photo taken in sequence, perhaps to guard against the many difficulties of screen photography described above. The image shows little more than the score itself, with the lower half of the image faded or blacked out, presumably due to the player/photographer using a shutter speed too fast to capture a full refresh of the CRT. Despite this, the score is clearly visible and exceeds the minimum of 40,000 for entry into the Arctic Architects club of high-score holders.19 The circulation of these items on eBay speaks to a culture of nostalgia for these early games and related paraphernalia. Nonetheless, I wish to avoid the fandom and nostalgia that often clouds historical analyses of early game culture. Likewise, I do not wish to overdetermine these images and practices in a historical chronology of origins and so-called firsts. Instead, what interests me here is the way these images mark a change in the work that screenshots do and thus index a transformation in our relationship to computational technologies that feeds directly into contemporary screenshot cultures, in which the images we take of our screens are in many ways images of ourselves.
Figure 7
High score photograph submission for Activision’s Frostbite for the Atari 2600 (Image courtesy of the author)
What a Score Is For
But what exactly does a screenshot capture? What forms of life are made visible in the documentation of our interaction with computational screens, and what cultures of use arise from or are premised on the ability to share the often-intimate ways we use computational technologies? Prior to this period, screenshots documented a wide range of technical and cultural practices, be it the scientific practices of early computer-graphics research or the domestic contexts of early television culture. As described above, one of the surprising aspects of high-score photography is that the vast majority of images in this genre have been lost or destroyed; given that the image itself was not the object of value since once a score had been affirmed, there was no need to preserve the screenshot that proved it. Instead, what we have documented are the scores themselves. Together they form a specific archive of play for this early period of video game culture, and yet the form of play they document is not entirely clear.
On their surface it would seem these early game screenshots capture player skill and elite forms of play that could be marked or proven with a clearly photographed high score, but on closer examination it would seem these screenshots capture cultures of use that are highly non-normative and call into question the very idea of measurable or quantifiable skill in play. If we examine a classic game like Super Mario Bros. (1985), the NES Achievers page for the game consists exclusively of players who have achieved the maximum score allowed by the game: 9,999,950 points.20 This number is ridiculous, particularly to anyone who has played Super Mario Bros. and perhaps doesn’t even recall that the game had a scoring system to begin with. Score in Super Mario Bros. functions as a vestigial component from arcade play, specifically, the original Donkey Kong arcade game where score was used to determine player ranking, which has almost nothing to do with the narrative goals of Super Mario Bros. While score serves as a feedback mechanism that rewards certain forms of play such as chaining together enemy kills and collecting coins, the idea that maximizing score to this extreme demonstrates player skill seems incorrect.21 Yet if these scores and their corresponding screenshots do not transparently demonstrate skill, what exactly do they capture about the culture of early gaming? While we cannot know with absolute certainty, it seems likely that for most players these scores index a form of non-normative play whereby players exploit a game glitch to gain infinite lives and use those lives to play levels over and over until they reach the maximum score. This mode of play employs point farming as a kind of metagame within Super Mario Bros. that operates largely outside the game as a consciously designed system.22 While these scores might not tell us about who the best players of a particular game are, they do mark a community of practice invested in these strange and surprising forms of play. In this they offer an important historical precedent for the culture of speedruns and Let’s Play videos in which game performance is documented, measured, and shared.23 They also offer traces of player cultures in which glitches and other hacks would circulate, such that someone could learn from a friend or classmate about the specific staircase at the end of level 3-1 where a properly timed jump on a koopa shell could produce infinite lives, allowing them to score attack their way into the pages of the NES Achievers.24
While these scores and the images that document them may not always be evidence of who the best players of a particular game may be, they nonetheless serve as evidence of performance and interaction. They mark cultures of use both elite and idiosyncratic, and they represent a shift in our relationship to computational media toward new modes of identification with what appears on our screens. This small and vernacular practice is highly nonprofessional and nonarchival, but it nonetheless informs an archive of play. Indeed, it is one of the few archives of these interactions that exists, even as the photographs that document that interaction have long since disappeared.
Self Presentation
This example of early screenshot use may seem strange or niche, but in dwelling on the specific case, we begin to see the importance of screen documentation in capturing forms of use that are otherwise missing from the history of games. Likewise, in these marginal histories we can see the seeds of practices that will become increasingly prominent as the screenshot grows in popular use in digital culture more broadly. This is certainly true of video game culture, in which the screenshot has become the default technology for capturing and sharing achievements and other moments of meaningful interaction. Yet a photo can only tell us so much about the world it inhabits, as most screenshots restrict their vision to that which can be seen within the frame of a screen.25 Missing from these photos are the people for whom they are meaningful, the domestic context in which they are taken, and the cultures of play for which they are made. If, however, we zoom out, a new picture of the world begins to emerge.
Over time the practice of game documentation changed, and with the release of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in the early 1990s, Nintendo Power moved away from the high-score leaderboard format of NES Achievers.26 In its place we find the growth of player profiles and other personalized accounts of play, illustrated not with screenshots but with what we might anachronistically describe as “screen selfies.” Here players pose in front of their television screens and consoles not only to capture a moment of play but to place themselves within the frame of the experience of play, personalizing the act and its contexts (see figs. 8 and 9).27 A common trope in these images is the documentation of the end screen of a game, marking completion while positioning the player—and oftentimes siblings, friends, and other witnesses—in the frame of their accomplishment. These images connect more directly with the history of television photography described by Lynn Spigel in TV Snapshots, which explores this image genre “as creative acts and textual forms that bear traces of everyday life with tv.”28 However, unlike Spigel’s domestic milieu, in which it is the presence of television much more than the images displayed on it that forms the backdrop for the cultures of mid-century domesticity she describes, these images capture an explicit relationship between the subject being photographed and the content that the television displays. Yes, this is a presentation of the self in the context of gaming, but importantly it is a self that identifies with those specific actions that produced the screen image we see. The implicit sentiment of these photographs is “I did this,” even as we are also granted access to a broader set of contextual information that helps to produce an archive of domesticity during this period. In this sense it is an extension of the sentiment of high-score photography, which may also be read as a photograph of the players themselves, in that it captures those modes of identification whereby the high score becomes a metonym for the person who achieved it.
Figure 8
“Screen Selfie” documenting game completion ( Nintendo Power 32 [January 1992]: 6)
Figure 9
“Screen Selfie” documenting game completion (Leah Tiscione [@LeahTiscione], “The end of Super Mario Bros 2,” X, January 30, 2021, https://x.com/LeahTiscione/status/1355615720638320640/photo/1) (Image courtesy of Leah Tiscione)
Player photographs of this sort were not new. As far back as the Activision club newsletter, player portraits were included along with high scores, submitted by the players themselves along with brief biographical information. These early images form a portrait of players at a particular historical moment, and perhaps unsurprisingly, nearly all players featured by Activision in their newsletter are white boys and men.29 Women appear sporadically and often tangentially as the sisters and mothers of players in family features, while people of color are almost entirely absent or absented from the gaming cultures these magazines both reflected and produced.30 By the early 1990s this gap in representation had begun to close, and the players that appear in Nintendo Power more clearly reflect the society in which video games were lived and played.
Likewise, there appears to be a move away from simple quantification and toward an expanded context for these images that is increasingly domestic and personal. While the boys club of Activision bios was limited to age, photo, hometown, and high score, in this period we begin to see images not only of gamers but of gamers in the context of gaming. I will not attempt to argue that this shift somehow proves a demonstrable change in the culture of gaming itself, but I do think it loosely indexes an ongoing transformation in who has access to games and thereby identifies with the act of play. At minimum it marks a rhetorical shift in how the figure of the gamer and the scene of gaming is pictured in both the literal and figurative sense.31 Zooming out slightly from the image of the screen and its dimly radiant high score, we find a scene of gaming’s contexts that includes siblings, family photos, holiday decorations, and the ubiquity of orange-stained nineties-era woodgrain media furniture.32 Many of these images would seem to push back against the industry’s conception of the gamer as a young white boy or teenager, centering children of color, young girls, mothers and children, and sibling spectators as part of the broader milieu of games and gaming, not as the achievement of an individual player but as the social activity of a culture of play.33 In this they are reminiscent of what Spigel describes as “TV portraits” of families and household things; however, unlike those images, in which the television indexes a broader domestic and socioeconomic context in its novelty and pride of place, here what is displayed on the TV matters most in its relationship to those who document it. Indeed, at times these images are devoid of human figures altogether, with the TV serving as a surface on which a scene of domesticity is arranged in the absence of human figures. Here again there is a meaningful shift whereby the television and the information it displays is made central, and the domestic context it captures is incidental to the photograph and the intentions of its photographer (see figs. 10 and 11). While for TV snapshots, the television presents a context for life lived alongside the emergent medium, for video game screenshots, life comes to be lived within the world of the screen, and it is the results of that life and its actions that photography is deployed to capture. In this sense screenshots perform an archival function, documenting not only the culture of games described above but the culture of gamers understood as a broad category in a moment of transformation.
Figure 10
End game screen photograph taken on completion of Contra (1987) (hey_suburbia, “I took a photo of my TV when I beat Contra in 1987,” 2020, Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/ha5fz3/i_took_a_photo_of_my_tv_when_i_beat_contra_in_1987/) (Image courtesy of hey_suburbia)
Figure 11
End game screen photograph taken on completion of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! (1987) (kenman, “Here's mine after TKO’g Tyson on 3 knockdowns,” reply to hey_suburbia, 2020, https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/ha5fz3/comment/fv1olfy) (Image courtesy of kenman)
Self Presentation
Much as with snapshot photography, screenshots offer us a vernacular history, one of many “abject photographies” for which no appropriate history has been written.34 Yet unlike other theories of the vernacular, there is no explicit visual referent here that serves as its foil, as art photography does for the snapshot. Instead, much as the vernacular may be viewed as an everyday and informal contrast to modernism, cosmopolitanism, or other formalist structures, the vernacular culture of the screenshot reveals the practice of living with computers in contrast with the culture of computation imagined by the corporations that produce them.35
Professional screenshots are still manufactured by publishers for use in advertising a game in the abstract, removed from the particular play and experience of any extant player. However, they cannot serve as an archive of play in the same way that player screenshots do and are in every sense a minor practice when compared to the sheer volume of screenshots taken by players of their own experience of play. Elsewhere I have described this form of unprofessional practice that refuses interpellation to the norms of designed use as a “vernacular computing,” a practice that names the many idiosyncratic ways we use our computational devices that are particular and individual, and which do not have an ideal or idealized design or function.36 Although this includes the subcultural practices of speedrunning and score attacks noted above, vernacular computing need not correspond with elite or expert use and play. Screenshots document equally the spectacular and the mundane, and while we might use them as evidence of historical significance, their value is precisely their disposable quality that rarely signifies beyond the context of the person who produced them. Screenshots allow us to document and identify peripheral cultures of use that may feel minor or insignificant but which accrue into cultural forms and expressions that might otherwise be lost. Screenshots are, in this sense, unexceptional objects, such that they can frustrate our desire for a single, ideal object of analysis. Perhaps for this reason, reading a screenshot in the same way as we would a film, game, or work of art can feel inappropriate or strange.
Nonetheless, screenshots have been quite important for the production and preservation of digital culture, particularly game and media objects made on software and hardware that inevitably fall out of circulation, are no longer supported by their publisher or manufacturer, and ultimately cease to function. This is particularly true for work that depends on the broader technical environment in which it was produced, such as work requiring a particular version of HTML or a specific release of Flash to be viewed as the artist intended. While preservation efforts by digital art and culture organizations work to make this history accessible on contemporary machines, screenshots often serve as the only documentation of a digital media or art object in its original state, albeit disarticulated from the dynamic media environment in which it was produced.37 There are countless examples of such work, but in this context the art of Suzanne Treister is exemplary. In the early 1990s, Treister produced a series of photographic works titled “Fictional Videogame Stills,” made with an Amiga personal computer running the Deluxe Paint II software (see figs. 12–14). The works followed from a series of paintings that Treister had produced in the late 1980s, deploying the aesthetic and iconography of early video game culture in a different medium, its contrast heightened by the appropriation of forms. These “Fictional Videogame Stills” pushed the concept further, producing images on the pixelated CRT of the Amiga’s screen that look very much like they could have come from a then-contemporary video game.38 As Treister notes, “I photographed these early Amiga works straight from the screen, the effect of the photographs perfectly reproducing the highly pixilated, raised needlepoint effect of the Amiga screen image. Conceptually this means of presentation was appropriate in that it made it seem like I had gone into a videogame arcade and photographed the games there, lending authenticity to the fictions.”39 The photos were printed as twenty-by-twenty-four-inch cibachromes mounted on aluminum and shown at the Edward Totah Gallery in London in 1992. Treister notes that she chose to photograph the images both to match the aesthetic of the games that served as their inspiration, and because “there was no other way to output them that I knew of apart from through a very primitive daisy wheel printer where they appeared as washed out dots.”40 Photography thus served as the ideal medium for preservation and documentation, albeit of an imagined game world that could not be played. The images have been shown many times over the past thirty years in curated shows on digital art and video games, but it is telling that the files used to produce the images are no longer executable. Not only are the Amiga computer and software largely inaccessible, but as Treister notes, “the floppy discs I had stored the works on became corrupted a few years later” such that the photographs and subsequent high-resolution scans of the photographs are the only form the artwork now takes. Despite its function as an art object to be viewed in a gallery space, Treister’s work speaks to the value of the screenshot as a historical practice, even if we must also acknowledge them as deeply impoverished objects devoid of much of the technical context of their production. Indeed, vernacular culture is often the last to be preserved and the most difficult to recognize as important or meaningful in its own time and context. For this reason, screenshots seem like a valuable archive even if we acknowledge their limitations.
Figure 12
Suzanne Treister “Not Enough Memory,” Fictional Videogame Stills (1991–1992), http://www.suzannetreister.net/Ampages/Amenu.html (Image courtesy of Suzanne Treister)
Figure 13
Suzanne Treister “Fate Worse Than Death,” Fictional Videogame Stills (1991–1992), http://www.suzannetreister.net/Ampages/Amenu.html (Image courtesy of Suzanne Treister)
Figure 14
Suzanne Treister “Identify the Murder Weapon,” Fictional Videogame Stills (1991-1992), http://www.suzannetreister.net/Ampages/Amenu.html (Image courtesy of Suzanne Treister)
Screenshot or It Didn't Happen
This phrase should be familiar to anyone who spent too much time online at the turn of the millennium, or perhaps its more explicitly photographic counterpart: “Pics or it didn’t happen.” The phrase appears to originate on web forums and image boards in the early decades of the 2000s and is most associated with digital games, where players bragging about actions performed in-game would be asked for screenshots to prove the legitimacy of their claims.41 The screenshot here serves a distinct function in a culture of performative play, but it is also clearly a product of the ability—relatively new or at least newly accessible at the time—to capture and share events in a game in this way: as a screenshot. Looking through my own photo library, the oldest screenshot I can find was taken around 2006, and it shows my World of Warcraft raiding guild posing in front of Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros, the massive weapon of the final boss of the Molten Core raid dungeon, and all that remains when his flaming body disintegrates after defeat (see fig. 15). My guild had just cleared Molten Core for the first time after months of attempts, and so we commemorated the event by facing the same direction, turning off the game’s user-interface elements and taking a screenshot of the guild posing all together as one would on a family vacation to the Grand Canyon, marking copresence with a spectacle or event, but one that also marked a significant accomplishment that we each took personal part in. It was a common genre of image in World of Warcraft, usually done by elite raiding guilds to commemorate a world first kill of a final raid boss for a new dungeon.42 Our guild was not elite, just a group of strangers well behind the curve but nonetheless proud of our accomplishment.
Figure 15
A screenshot of the author’s World of Warcraft raiding guild on defeating Ragnaros, the final boss of the Molten Core raid dungeon, ca. 2006 (Image courtesy of the author)
Some twenty-five years after the high-score photography with which we began, this image marks the persistence of the screenshot and its unique function in digital game culture. It serves here as an archive of the self, a commemoration of performance, and documentation of interaction within a virtual world. In many ways it is all that remains of this particular moment, this software iteration, this collection of players, and my experience of this moment in the history of computing, and of games.43 Yet this gesture, relatively novel and subcultural at this moment in time, has since expanded to become a near-ubiquitous function of contemporary game software and hardware, from the diegetic smartphone photography of Uncharted: The Lost Legacy (2017) to the dedicated screenshot button on the Nintendo Switch and the elaborate photo mode of recent Spiderman games. Today many modern consoles automatically capture a significant buffer of image and video as we play, displaying images and clips when a particular event is triggered, and allowing players to review up to an hour of gameplay retroactively to extract a moment or sequence after the fact.44 So ingrained is the desire to capture and preserve our game worlds that our consoles now do it for us.
This is one story of the history of video game screenshots: a transformation from a culture of vernacular documentation into a now-ubiquitous function on all contemporary game platforms, compelling us to capture and share the way we play. Yet this practice, at its origins, is much more significant if taken within the broader context of screenshot histories. Early high-score photography is one of the first moments in which users photographed their screens not simply to document the images that appeared on them, but to document a part of themselves they identified in the images they saw. In a moment that sees the simultaneous growth of personal computing and interactive games, we find a form of computational personhood that is identified with and in the screen image. While this may not be the first moment this form of identification was felt, its growth into a broad subcultural practice through high-score photography suggests a much larger shift that has only expanded in the subsequent decades. Today our screenshots no longer feel like photos of a computer, but rather images of our lives as they are lived through and with computation. Games play an essential role in this transformation, and in doing so they document and archive cultures of use that would otherwise be lost. To hold out these images as significant at once recaptures these cultures of gaming while also attending to the ways they have transformed our sense of self as and with technology.
Footnotes
1. ^ The earliest scholarship on in-game photography and machinima begins in the first decade of the 2000s, and it remains the principal focus of scholarship on screen photography today. On in-game photography, see Cindy Poremba, “Point and Shoot: Remediating Photography in Gamespace,” Games and Culture 2, no. 1 (2007): 49–58; Winfried Gerling, “Photography in the Digital: Screenshot and In-Game Photography,” Photographies 11, no. 2–3 (2018): 149–67; Sebastian Möring and Marco De Mutiis, “Camera Ludica: Reflections on Photography in Video Games,” in Intermedia Games–Games Inter Media: Video Games and Intermediality, ed. Michael Fuchs and Jeff Thoss (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 69–94; Seth Giddings, “Drawing Without Light: Simulated Photography in Videogames,” in The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, 2nd ed., ed. Martin Lister (Routledge, 2013), 41–55; and Winfried Gerling, Sebastian Möring, and Marco De Mutiis, eds., Screen Images: In-Game Photography, Screenshot, Screencast (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2023), https://www.kulturverlag-kadmos.de/site/assets/files/3955/screen_images_leseprobe.pdf. On machinima, see Henry Lowood and Michael Nitsche, eds., The Machinima Reader (MIT Press, 2011); Jenna Ng, ed., Understanding Machinima: Essays on Filmmaking in Virtual Worlds (Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2013); Matteo Bittanti, ed., Machinima: Dal videogioco alla videoarte, Mimesis Eterotopie 418 (Mimesis, 2017); and Tracy G. Harwood and Ben Grussi, Pioneers in Machinima: The Grassroots of Virtual Production (Vernon Press, 2021).
2. ^ Michael Z. Newman makes a case for popular newspapers and magazines as the archive of early game history in Atari Age, noting that these materials allow for a cultural history of games and their reception. Laine Nooney likewise notes the importance of such materials in their work on the Apple II, allowing for a lens through which the commercial and business history of computing and games in this period can be seen as. See Michael Z. Newman, Atari Age: The Emergence of Video Games in America (MIT Press, 2017), 12–14; and Laine Nooney, The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal (University of Chicago Press, 2023), 281–83.
3. ^ Screenshots as a practice are much older than this period, and screen documentation of early computer graphics exists alongside early research from the very beginning of the field in the 1940s. However, the term itself seems to emerge in this moment, and its earliest documented use in print coincides with its use in the cultures of early video games and personal computers. For more on the history of screen documentation, see Jacob Gaboury, Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics (MIT Press, 2021), 55–86.
4. ^ The term and action may be contrasted with screen-print or screen-dump programs, which would output screen text to a computer printer but would not generally preserve the graphical appearance of that text prior to the development of desktop publishing.
5. ^ These images are part of a much larger design history of early game illustration, explored by Raiford Guins in the context of Atari in Atari Design: Impressions on Coin-Operated Video Game Machines (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020). Newman analyzes this discrepancy between game graphics and cover images, noting that cover images often created narrative scenarios that masculinized games by appealing to traditionally gendered norms. Newman, Atari Age, 102–6.
6. ^ These so-called screenshots were generally not screen photographs in the sense that I describe in this essay. Often, they were images that more closely resemble the game graphics set within a frame that gives the appearance of a television screen, but which are nonetheless illustrations rather than photographs themselves. A clear example can be found in most Activision games released for the Atari 2600 during this period, where the cover image is an illustration of the game’s themes and narrative, and the cartridge label includes an illustrated screenshot that closely approximates the game’s appearance but is not a direct screenshot.
7. ^ Contemporary game screenshots are still the work of professionals, who often deploy complex rendering software to produce modified images for use in promotional material and advertising. See Luke Plunkett, “How an Official Video Game Screenshot Is Made,” Kotaku, May 7, 2018, https://kotaku.com/how-an-official-video-game-screenshot-is-made-1825763337.
8. ^ Similar technologies, such as film recorders, existed for the production of slides for use in professional computer graphics, business presentations such as slideshows, and later for digital-to-analog film transfer. The earliest examples of film recorders include the IBM 740 (1954) or the Stromberg Carlson SC-4020 (1962). See Zabet Patterson, Peripheral Vision: Bell Labs, the SC 4020, and the Origins of Computer Art (MIT Press, 2015). While the afterlife of analog screenshots is the digital screenshot of today, the afterlife of these techniques is the now-ubiquitous PowerPoint presentation, whose origins predate digital computing, but which pass through the screenshot on their way from an analog to a fully digital technology. See Erica Robles-Anderson and Patrik Svensson, “ʻOne Damn Slide After Another’: PowerPoint at Every Occasion for Speech,” Computational Culture 5 (2016).
9. ^ Ervin Bobo, “Focus on Screenshots,” Run, September 1986, 40–45.
10. ^ This has produced a desire for original hardware in game emulation and preservation. See Melanie Swalwell, “Classic Gaming,” in Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon, ed. Henry Lowood and Raiford Guins (MIT Press, 2016); and Melanie Swalwell, “Moving on from the Original Experience: Philosophies of Preservation and Dis/Play in Game History,” Fans and Videogames: Histories, Fandom, Archives, ed. Melanie Swalwell, Helen Stuckey, and Angela Ndalianis (Routledge, 2017), 213–33.
11. ^ This documentary function of screen photography exists well before the advent of video games and traces a much longer history of screens and their cultural uses. The earliest widespread use of screen photography was likely chest photofluorography, also known as abreugraphy, a technique designed to assist in mass screening for tuberculosis developed by the Brazilian doctor Manuel Dias de Abreu in 1936. Screen photography was also a popular practice among television viewers throughout the twentieth century, as analyzed by Lynn Spigel in TV Snapshots, described below. Screenshots take up a surprisingly small part of this history and would seem much less common than photographs in which the television is a backdrop to a scene of domesticity in which it is situated. The most common use for screenshots would seem to be the documentation of significant televised events, such as the moon landing or the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in which the domestic context frames the television as an incidental image, the punctum that gestures toward the broader world in which the television is situated. As I have described elsewhere, screen photography was also widely used in early computer-graphics research to document and extract research from the moment of execution or to render images that could not be viewed on the computer displays of that time. In each of these cases, screen photography documents an external condition, preserving it in an archival gesture in which the photographer sits outside the thing documented or is incidental to it. See Gerling, “Photography in the Digital,” 149–67; Lynn Spigel, TV Snapshots: An Archive of Everyday Life (Duke University Press, 2022); and Gaboury, Image Objects.
12. ^ I recognize here that early game consoles and computers are not identical technologies, though early game culture also took place on microcomputers in this same period. This would have some overlap with the photo cultures I am describing here, supplemented by other forms of paper output such as screen dumps or print functions. Nonetheless, I would argue alongside Newman that game consoles were in many cases the first computing technologies that many users would have had access to, particularly children, and that they shaped our understanding of computing as both interactive and identificatory. See Newman, Atari Age, 126–33.
13. ^ As Kocurek documents in Coin-Operated Americans, video game entrepreneur Walter Day also launched an international scoreboard in 1981 to track high scores and other achievements across arcades to determine who the best players were worldwide. The scoreboard would eventually become the Twin Galaxies website still widely used for high scores and speedrun records. Likewise, national gaming competitions would sometimes allow players to submit qualifying high scores alongside contact information for the manager of the arcade at which the score was made, who could then bear witness. See, for example, the 1983 Video Games Championships run by the UK-based Computer and Video Games Magazine. It is likely that high-score photography of arcade cabinets was a niche cultural practice in the 1970s, but was likely less widespread or formalized than it would become with the encouragement of game publishers in the 1980s. Likewise, arcade machines had built-in systems for documenting and preserving competitive scores, such that photography was not necessary to extract high scores from the domestic context such that they could enter a gaming public sphere. See Carly A. Kocurek, Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 46–49; and “Calling All Arcade Champions,” Computer and Video Games Magazine, April 1983, 10–11, https://archive.org/details/computer-and-video-games-magazine/Computer%20and%20Video%20Games%20018/page/10/mode/2up.
14. ^ As James Newman notes in Playing with Videogames, game magazines played an important role in building a sense of belonging and community for early game cultures, particularly through letters and competitions such as those described below. Newman also describes the important role of high-score competitions and early speedrunning in this context. See James Newman, Playing with Videogames (Routledge, 2008), 29–32 and 123–47.
15. ^ This practice begins in the very first newsletter. See Club News, Activisions 1 (Fall 1981): 2, https://atariage.com/magazines/magazine_page.php?MagazineID=18&CurrentPage=2.
16. ^ The first NES Achievers was published in the first issue of Nintendo Power, July/August 1988, 98–99.
17. ^ “Taking a Picture of the TV Screen,” Activisions 1 (Fall 1981): 3, https://atariage.com/magazines/magazine_page.php?MagazineID=18&CurrentPage=3.
18. ^ Photos, letters, and phone calls to the company were handled by administrative staff who are often named in the newsletter itself. In the first volume of the US Activision newsletter, a woman named Jan Marcella is named as the Customer Relations Representative who keeps in touch with everyone who writes, and indeed the congratulatory letter I purchased is signed by “Frostbite Bailey” care of Jan Marcella, “Game Chairman”; see “Jan Marecella: Your Representative,” Activisions 1 (Fall 1981): 4, https://atariage.com/magazines/magazine_page.php?MagazineID=18&CurrentPage=4. In the UK Helen Cutche is named as the Activision Scorekeeper who receives all high-score photographs. “How to Apply for Master Gamer Status,” Activision Fun Club News, Winter 1982, 4, https://atariage.com/magazines/magazine_page.php?MagazineID=27&CurrentPage=4.
19. ^ For a list of patches and high scores, see “Activision Patch Gallery,” Atari Age, https://www.atariage.com/2600/archives/activision_patches.html.
20. ^ Super Mario Bros. stores the score in binary-coded decimal (BCD) encoding, using 6 bytes, one for each digit—excluding the units, since score granularity does not go below multiples of 50. If you have a score of 123,450, the bytes will be 00 01 02 03 04 05. The first 00 byte is reserved for properly handling millions. If you ever get scores between 1,000,000 and 9,999,950, there will simply be another digit displayed in front of the always visible 0s.
21. ^ It is perhaps for this reason that the primary competitive gameplay mode for Super Mario Bros.—and indeed most vintage and retro games—is speedrunning and not point-farming or score-attack modes. Even when score attack is a primary mode of competitive play, most point-based rankings generally have restrictions preventing the use of exploits such as infinite lives.
22. ^ For a discussion of the cultures of speedrunning, see Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (University of Minnesota Press, 2017); and Patrick LeMieux. “From NES-4021 to moSMB3.wmv: Speedrunning the Serial Interface,” Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 8, no. 1 (2014): 7–31.
23. ^ Screenshots and screencasts are centrally important to contemporary speedrun culture, as they provide evidence in ways that are analogous to these early modes of play. Likewise, both forms of documentation are critical for game walk-throughs and strategy guides, which begin in print before moving to the early web and eventually find proliferation on video-sharing sites such as YouTube.
24. ^ “Super Mario Bros. - World 3-1 Infinite Lives Trick,” posted October 18, 2010, by Speedrunsdotnet, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-cWQFk9bi8 (video no longer available).
25. ^ Archivists and game historians are working to develop new techniques for the documentation and preservation of game states or moments. For example, the Game and Interactive Software Scholarship Toolkit (GISST) is a front-end tool and back-end repository software that accommodates the citation and retrieval of references to computational states and replays, allowing for the citation of specific game states or moments that can be executed in software. See https://gisst.pomona.edu/.
26. ^ Beginning with volume 32 of Nintendo Power in January 1992, the magazine stops publishing NES Achievers and replaces it with a Power Players page with a similar function. Importantly, the Power Players section does not include the standard tutorial on how to take a screenshot, and many of the games simply note that the player “finished” the game with no high score listed, as many games drop high-scoring systems as a vestigial element of early game genres. In January 1993, Power Players is modified again to include specific challenges similar to the Activision Club of the 1970s and 1980s. These challenges are not exclusively score related but include contests to finish within a certain period of time, to use specific modes, and even to get the lowest possible score for games like NES Open Tournament Golf (1987).
27. ^ These Player Profiles also exist in the first year of the magazine’s publication, from 1988 to 1989, but then largely disappear from the publication until the early 1990s. These early profiles are similar to the Activision player bios, with school-picture headshots and biographical narratives in place of screen selfies like the kind described above, though such images are occasionally published by the magazine throughout its run. The shift to screen selfie seems indicative of both a change in the culture of gaming broadly and a shift in how achievement is tracked and understood internally, as many games shed scoring systems altogether, and game accomplishment is measured more in terms of game completion.
28. ^ Spigel, TV Snapshots, 21.
29. ^ Some players appear in nearly every issue, as they continue to break records in particular games. This suggests a relatively small community of player participants and marks this practice as largely subcultural at this time.
30. ^ The lone exception in the two-year run of Activision’s magazine appears to be a group photo of Asian American student winners of the Activision Collegiate Video Game Championship at San Jose State University (“Activision on Campus,” Activisions 3 [Spring 1982]: 5). There is also one letter from a man named Gary Kerr from Circleville, OH, who includes a photo of him and a specially adapted wheelchair rig for his Atari joystick, which allows him to play Activision games (Dear Jan, Activisions 6 [Spring 1983]: 2). It should be noted that female game designers and staff members are featured prominently throughout the magazine’s two-year run.
31. ^ Game studies includes significant work on the figure of the gamer as both a historical construction and a lived social category subject to discursive transformation over time. Scholarship on gender and video games predates game studies as a scholarly field, and more recent scholarship has interrogated women and queer people’s (dis)identification with “gamer” as an identity category in a variety of contexts. See Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins, eds., From “Barbie”® to “Mortal Kombat”: Gender and Computer Games (MIT Press, 2000); Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner, and Jennifer Y. Sun, eds. Beyond “Barbie” and “Mortal Kombat”: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming (MIT Press, 2011); Adrienne Shaw, “Do You Identify as a Gamer? Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Gamer Identity,” New Media & Society 14, no. 1 (2012): 28–44; and Adrienne Shaw, Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
32. ^ In this they feel akin to Lee Friedlander’s 1963 photo essay “The Little Screens,” which depicts television screens broadcasting images of faces and figures into unoccupied rooms in homes and motels across America. Friedlander’s images represent a transformation in the visual and domestic culture of mid-century America as screens become ubiquitous. Yet unlike Friedlander’s images, which are often described as “eerie” because of the absence of the human figure in the domestic, these scenes feel deeply contextualized in the lives of those who took them, perhaps due to the presence of the player in the screen image enacting a mode of identification. See Saul Anton, Lee Friedlander: The Little Screens (MIT Press, 2016).
33. ^ As Newman shows, the gendering of video games in the context of television undergoes several transformations in the first twenty years of the medium. Games were first marketed as family entertainment as part of an effort to avoid the association that pinball and other coin-operated amusements had with gambling and crime. However, in the 1980s the marketing of home consoles shifted distinctly toward masculinized hobbies and entertainment in its themes and representations, leading to the figure of the gamer as a young white boy or man that persists even today. These images, by contrast, offer us images of game use by game players that seem to suggest a much broader and more diverse demographic, particularly by the early 1990s. See Newman, Atari Age, 97–114.
34. ^ Geoffrey Batchen, “Vernacular Photographies,” History of Photography 24, no. 3 (2000): 262. For more on the vernacular in computer history, see Melanie Swalwell, Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality (MIT Press, 2021).
35. ^ We might read the forms of use imagined by these companies as the construction and negotiation of a desire that largely expresses the situated knowledge of tech workers and their cultures.
36. ^ Jacob Gaboury, “On Vernacular Computing,” Art Papers 9 (2015).
37. ^ This is fairly common for born-digital artwork and is sometimes intentional on the part of the artist. One especially prominent example is Keith Obadike’s 2001 net artwork “Blackness for Sale,” in which the artist created an eBay listing advertising the sale of his blackness. The piece is a commentary on the homogenization of blackness as commodity, but it was ultimately removed by eBay after four days, citing “inappropriateness.” The work now exists largely as a single screenshot taken at the time of listing, though the art organization Rhizome has also produced an archival version with machine-readable text. See “Keith Obadike’s Blackness,” eBay, listed by Obadike, August 8, 2001, http://archive.rhizome.org/anthology/blacknetart/ebay.html.
38. ^ The practice of producing fake video game stills is quite common in the game industry, used primarily to amplify the aesthetic of a game so that it appears to be more cinematic, have higher resolution, etc. These images are sometimes called bullshots, a portmanteau of bullshit and screenshot. See Plunkett, “How a Fake Video Game Screenshot Is Made.”
39. ^ Susan Treister, “From Fictional Videogame Stills to Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky, 1991–2005,” in Videogames and Art, eds. Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2007).
40. ^ Treister, “Fictional Videogame Stills,” http://www.suzannetreister.net/Ampages/Amenu.html.
41. ^ While not a scholarly source, the website Know Your Meme suggests that the phrase “Pics or it didn’t happen” originated around 2003, though its original context implies that the phrase was already widely in circulation before then. See Chris Menning and Literally Austin, “Pics or It Didn’t Happen,” accessed May 11, 2025, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pics-or-it-didnt-happen.
42. ^ A simple search for “world first kill world of warcraft” will bring up many examples of this image genre, but a similar image of the same raid boss can be found on the About page of the Battle Pet Roundup World of Warcraft blog here, which also includes the phrase “Screenshot or It Didn’t Happen” in reference to their raid kill and weapon loot. See “About,” Battle Pet Roundup (blog), February 2013, https://battlepetroundup.com/about and https://battlepetroundup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ragskill.jpg.
43. ^ It should be noted that Blizzard has since released WoW Classic, a version of World of Warcraft that reproduces the original release and subsequent updates over a period of years, allowing players to experience the game in something that approximates its original form. I note this not because it contradicts the temporal and technical discreteness of the specific moment my screenshot captures, but rather to demonstrate the complex and competing methods for reproducing game history at work in these massively multiplayer online spaces.
44. ^ These consoles have shifted the temporal and durational quality of these images, as they can not only automatically capture specific moments and be prompted to capture the current moment or sequence as one might expect, but they can also be asked to retroactively save recent gameplay from the last fifteen seconds to one hour. In other words, modern game consoles are always in a state of recording player interaction with a significant buffer, the assumption being that one might retroactively choose to capture past actions without future intent. A similar feature was introduced by Microsoft for Windows 11 in 2024. Called Microsoft Recall, it takes a screenshot of a user's desktop every few seconds and then uses on-device large language models to allow a user to retrieve items and information that had previously been on their screen. The feature was met with significant backlash, with many concerned about the privacy and security issues of such a feature. See “How to Capture Gameplay and Screenshots on PS5 Consoles,” Support, Playstation.com, accessed May 11, 2025, https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/games/capture-ps5-gameplay-screenshots; “Capture Game Clips and Screenshots,” Friends and Support, Xbox.com, accessed May 11, 2025, https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/friends-social-activity/share-socialize/capture-game-clips-and-screenshots; and Imad Khan, “Microsoft’s Copilot Embraces the Power of OpenAI’s New GPT-4o,” CNET, May 20, 2024, https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/microsoft-copilot-embraces-the-power-of-openais-new-gpt-4-o.
Advertisement scan for Yar’s Revenge game software (1982), featuring an illustrated graphic above and smaller screenshot below