蜜柚直播

The two University of 蜜柚直播 humanities professors have spent the past two decades quietly assembling what is probably the world鈥檚 largest archive devoted to the study of video games and game culture.

The Learning Games Initiative Research Archive now contains more than a quarter of a million items, including at least 15,000 individual games, 200 game systems and thousands of documents, books, promotional materials and other artifacts from the game industry鈥檚 ever-expanding universe.

The catalog runs the gamut, from a 1948 patent for the earliest 鈥渃athode ray tube amusement device鈥� to the latest Playstation console.

And unlike other university archives where you need 鈥渨hite gloves and a wand with an acid-free cotton ball at the end鈥� to handle the relics, McAllister says everything in this collection is meant to be touched, plugged in and used.

After all, you can鈥檛 read a book without opening it, and you can鈥檛 understand a game without playing it.

鈥淚 mean, what is this?鈥� Ruggill says, plucking a game cartridge from a random shelf. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a piece of plastic and some other petrochemicals and things like that. It only becomes something when you activate it and interact with it.鈥�

鈥淭here is no game without the player,鈥� he says.

Grew up on games

Ruggill is a 蜜柚直播 native who used to fill his pockets with quarters and walk to the video arcade in his 1980s Foothills neighborhood.

McAllister grew up in Chicago playing Pitfall on a friend鈥檚 Atari 2600 and hand-held electronic football during his ride to school.

The two met through their mutual interest in game research and soon recognized something missing from their burgeoning corner of the media studies world.

鈥淚t occurred to us that there was a need in the field to actually make these objects accessible,鈥� McAllister says. 鈥淲e were going to academic conferences (where) people were giving lectures about games, and it would turn out that they had never played the game that they were there lecturing about.鈥�

鈥淭hat鈥檚 like, saying, 鈥楬ey, I鈥檓 going to talk to you about Shakespeare鈥檚 鈥楳acbeth,鈥� but I haven鈥檛 actually read it,鈥欌�� Ruggill adds.

It wasn鈥檛 laziness on the part of those lecturers. At the time, McAllister says, certain game systems and titles were almost impossible to find in working order, outside of private collections.

Today if a researcher needs to hook up and play a 1977 Telematch Panoramic Pong console from Argentina, the Learning Games Initiative can make that happen.

Or if a graduate student wants to squeeze off a few harmless shots from a 1972 Magavox Odyssey rifle, the first weapon interface ever sold for a home video game system, the archive has one already locked and loaded.

The collection prides itself on being open to all game researchers, no matter their ages or institutional affiliations.

Most requests come from university scholars and professional researchers, but Ruggill says they鈥檝e also worked on educational projects with elementary school classes and met with clubs for senior citizens 鈥渨ho are interested in better understanding what their grandkids are doing.鈥�

Attitudes evolve

Roughly one fifth of the collection is housed in a few cluttered rooms on the top floor of an outdated, three-story building at the eastern edge of the UA campus.

The rest is kept in storage and in small satellite archives at partner institutions in Indiana, Illinois, Massachusetts, Utah, Virginia, Wyoming, Australia and Germany.

鈥淧eriodically, there are talks at the university level of getting a space that鈥檚 the right size for the collection and opening a museum,鈥� McAllister says. 鈥淚t never quite manages to make the top priority list.鈥�

He and Ruggill officially launched their repository of nerddom in 1999 by combining their own personal video game collections into one fledgling library.

They admit they weren鈥檛 always taken seriously at first.

鈥淚t was a very strange experience in a way,鈥� Ruggill says. 鈥淲e had a colleague over in what was then the Department of Media Arts (who) studied pornography, and somehow that was more socially acceptable than games.鈥�

Academic attitudes have evolved significantly since then.

According to Ruggill, the UA now offers three different game-related majors, and research opportunities in the field are nearly endless. Video games can be used to explore questions about psychology, physiology, education, geopolitics, art, business, marketing, engineering, technological advancement and cultural change.

Simply put, 鈥淭here are lots and lots of reasons to have an archive,鈥� Ruggill says.

But browsing through the collection is more than just an academic exercise. A feeling of nostalgia is almost inescapable, even for the men who assembled it.

It鈥檚 one of the most rewarding aspects of what they鈥檝e built, Ruggill says: 鈥渟eeing people be transported by the things here.鈥�

Student interns are invaluable

And there鈥檚 new stuff coming in all the time 鈥� so much of it these days that it鈥檚 hard to keep up, especially with COVID restrictions on staffing.

The archive relies heavily on a team of interns, most of them UA students, to help document new arrivals, repair equipment, update the database, curate exhibits and send out items on loan to other researchers around the world.

Their assistants range in age from 11 to somewhere in their 60s. Multilingual interns are especially helpful when it comes to cataloging items with foreign titles that would otherwise be impossible to file away and find again.

At the moment, though, there are several file drawers filled with fresh artifacts waiting to be processed.

McAllister says 鈥渃asual donations鈥� account for most of the backlog. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not uncommon for us to come into the archive and discover a Hefty bag full of random stuff with no attribution whatsoever. You know, maybe just (a note that says), 鈥楾hought you guys might want this,鈥欌�� he says.

Occasionally, they get a request for an item they don鈥檛 already have, so they will seek it out from a collector or on eBay.

鈥淲e have a tiny little acquisition budget, and if it鈥檚 important enough, we鈥檒l go ahead and acquire it. But that鈥檚 pretty unusual,鈥� McAllister says.

They also try to keep duplicate items on hand so they can fix or replace things that wear out or get broken during use.

They aren鈥檛 terribly picky about submissions, either.

On his way to work last week, Ruggill fished a couple of Playstation games out of his neighbor鈥檚 curbside trash pile and brought them in.

鈥淲e have an indiscriminate approach to collection since we鈥檙e so interested in everything,鈥� he says.

Paid to play

That much is obvious.

On one shelf is a kid-friendly Singer sewing machine that came bundled with a Gameboy, so users could type out words on the screen and have them stitched on fabric. On another shelf is a vibrating device, sold only in Japan, that could turn a popular, music-based shooting game into something more, um, stimulating.

There are boxes of floppy discs that are actually floppy and stacks of cassette tapes that unspool computer games instead of tunes.

High-end Guitar Hero controllers and Rock Band drum kits are tucked away in the sort of instrument cases you might expect to find on a real rock band鈥檚 tour bus.

One entire bookshelf is devoted to nothing but strategy guides, including a few hardbound editions that stretch on for hundreds of pages.

鈥淭hat鈥檚 another fun thing about games: People needing or wanting help,鈥� Ruggill says.

The archive also collects glossy trade advertisements aimed at arcade owners, kits designed to convert old arcade cabinets to newer titles and display cases filled with tokens, collectibles, expired game-themed food and original art, both amateur and professional.

Even some pirated stuff has wound up in the collection.

Ruggill says a filmmaker from China once visited the archive and presented them with the scuffed-up, yellow game cartridge he and his friends used to pass back and forth when they were kids. It contains knockoff versions of 21 popular Japanese games, all still playable.

Not to be outdone, McAllister reaches into a nearby file drawer and pulls out several clones of Nintendo handheld electronic games from the 1980s with Cyrillic writing on them. He says the games were reverse-engineered, then mass-produced by the former Soviet Union, which had no intellectual property agreements with Japan at the time.

Though physical items make up most of the collection, the archive also maintains a server filled with thousands of pieces of software and other digital-only relics.

McAllister and Ruggill could never hope to sample it all, but they still try to carve out some time for games when they鈥檙e not tending to their administrative duties.

In addition to managing the archive, McAllister is the associate dean of research and program innovation in the College of Humanities, while Ruggill is the founding head of the UA鈥檚 Department of Public and Applied Humanities.

Play is part of the job as far as Ruggill is concerned.

鈥淚 do try to game on a regular basis, just not at the level that I could before,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 really hard to talk about the medium if you don鈥檛 participate in it.鈥�