Preserving Situated Practices

The 1980ies marked the arrival of the home-computer. Computing systems became affordable and got marketed to private consumers, through state-supported programs and new economic opportunities (Haddon 1988; Williams 1976). Early models, such as the ZX Spectrum or Texas Instrument TI-99/4A quickly became popular in Europe and opened the door for digital computing to enter the home. This period also marks the advent of homebrew video game culture and newly emerging programming practices, onto which this proposal concentrates (Alberts and Oldenziel 2014). Recent studies in video game history have expanded beyond the traditional US-Japanese focus, revealing the significance of local video game cultures in regions such as the UK, Australia, France, and Czechoslovakia (Kirkpatrick 2015; Wade 2016; Swalwell 2021; Blanchet 2020; Švelch 2018). Efforts to preserve local video game cultures are now critical due to the risks posed by obsolete technology and data rot, with various strategies focusing on maintaining the games’ context (Pfister 2023; Guay-Bélanger 2022) and the technology required to run them (Aycock 2016). Here, the role of source code is highlighted in critical code studies, emphasizing its value not just as functional machine instructions but as socio-historically contextual artefacts that can offer insights into cultural semiotics (Marino 2020; Berry 2015; Willumsen 2016). To do justice to code’s contextuality, we need to consider it as the result of a situated practice (Haraway 1988). Tracing thick actor-networks (Latour 2007; Dumit 2014; Guay-Bélanger 2022; Presner 2014) is proposed as a contextualizing preservation strategy for programming practices. As part of a larger effort to research and preserve Swiss video game history, this proposal reports on an ongoing case study on homebrew video game development in the early 1980ies. The case study’s games were written for the TI-99/4A and the Commodore 64 and saved on audio cassettes and 5.25” floppy disks. The paper outlines the proposed strategy through oral history interviews with developers, close reading of source material of programming knowledge as well as design documents, critical readings of the games’ source code itself, and lastly, the preservation process. Context is crucial in enabling the preservation of these ephemeral programming practices of early digital video game history.