The Schwules Museum in Berlin has opened their Rainbow Arcade, an exhibit which will explore the “queer history of video games”:

For the first time in the world, the queer history of video games will be explored in a major exhibition: RAINBOW ARCADE at Schwules Museum features a wide variety of exhibits spanning over 30 years of media history, including 12 playable titles, concept drawings, modifications written by fans themselves and documentations of online communities. RAINBOW ARCADE will be taking stock of contemporary pop cultural questions of representation, stereotypical and discriminatory narratives in entertainment media, and our cultural memory. For the first time, research by the LGBTQ Game Archive will be presented in a museum.

Visitors to the museum will be able to play several examples of gaming’s queer history, including GameGrumps’s Dream Daddy, Midboss’s 2064: Read Only Memories, Anna Anthropy’s Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars, and more.

The Rainbow Arcade exhibit is curated by Sarah Rudolph (herzteile.org), Jan Schnorrenberg (Schwules Museum), and Dr. Adrienne Shaw (Temple University, LGBTQ Video Game Archive), and it’ll be open to the public through May 13, 2019.

This article is from the first edition of The Video Game Librarian website I published between 2008 and 2010. It was originally written on September 30, 2010.

Will Wright, the creative genius behind SimCity, The Sims and Spore has donated a collection of his personal papers to the International Center for the History of Electronic Games in Rochester, New York.

Wright’s contribution comes in the form of nine graph paper notebooks filled with drawings, hand-written notations and inventive doodles that he kept during the development of SimCity 2000, SimCopter, The Sims and Spore. According to the ICHEG, “[the notebooks] reveal his philosophies and methods of game design.”

“Games do not spring out of the minds of game designers full grown, like Athena from the head of Zeus,” says ICHEG director Jon-Paul Dyson. “These papers document the creative process behind some of the most important games of our time. They have transformed our society, and we are pleased to preserve this record of how Wright created them.”

Says Wright, “I’m proud to help support the International Center for the History of Electronic Games. They are preserving an important part of our culture that is frequently overlooked by society yet has a fundamental influence on who we are. I know of no other institution that is covering this topic as comprehensively as they are.”

The notebooks will be part of an exhibit the center plans to launch on November 20 known as “eGameRevolution.” Organizers said that the 5,000-square-foot exhibit “will follow the history of video games from pioneer Ralph Baer’s first Brown Box games to today’s high tech Xbox 360.”

Wright’s papers join a collection of games, consoles, handhelds and related materials that currently numbers over 22,000 pieces, making it one of the largest game archives in the world.

This article is from the first edition of The Video Game Librarian website I published between 2008 and 2010. It was originally written on March 18, 2009.

The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY has announced the establishment of the National Center for the History of Electronic Games (NCHEG). The NCHEG will be “dedicated to collecting, preserving, and interpreting electronic games and game forms for future generations.”

According to the announcement, the NCHEG is the home of “one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of electronic game platforms and games in the United States” numbering nearly nearly 15,000 items. In addition to games, it will also carry game-related stuff such as packaging, advertising, publications, electronic-game-inspired consumer products, literary and popular inspirations of electronic-games imagery, historical records, personal and business papers, and other associated artifacts.

Among the items the NCHEG has collected include every major home video game console released since 1972 (that’s the Magnavox Odyssey to the Nintendo Wii for those keeping track) and more than 10,000 individual games. There is also over 100 handheld systems, children’s educational games and a collection of electronic toys like Simon.

Researchers can view all of the items in the NCHEG’s collection while others will be on display in the museum itself. Some of these games will even be available for the public to play.

The NCHEG is looking for donations of games and other game-related materials. If you’re interested in donating materials, please contact Jon-Paul C. Dyson (jpdyson AT museumofplay DOT org) or Eric Wheeler (ewheeler AT museumofplay DOT org). More information can also be found at their website, NCHEG.org.

This article is from the first edition of The Video Game Librarian website I published between 2008 and 2010. It was originally written on November 22, 2008.

The University of Michigan Computer and Video Game Archive held their Grand Opening Event on November 17, thus ending the “Preview Opening” it had been in since late September. Librarian David Carter posted a bunch of pictures of the event over at his blog, Eaten by a Grue.

Congratulations to all those that helped make this very cool library space happen.

To learn more about how the Archive was started and what day-to-day operations are like, be sure to check out my recent interview with Carter.

This article is from the first edition of The Video Game Librarian website I published between 2008 and 2010. It was originally written on October 24, 2008.

Now this is a great idea. The Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom has started the National Videogame Archive…

[T]he Archive is working to preserve, analyse and display the products of the global videogame industry by placing games in their historical, social, political, and cultural contexts. This means treating videogames as more than inert, digital code: at the heart of the National Videogames Archive is the determination to document the full life of games, from protoypes and early sketches, through box-art, advertising and media coverage, to mods, fanart and community activities.

The archive will attempt to preserve video gaming’s rich history, especially the earliest so they are not forever lost like some early examples of film, TV and rock & roll.

And on that note, they’ve started another site, Save the Videogame, that is taking nominations from gamers on just what titles deserve saving. Of course, the correct answer is “all of them”, but I’d imagine space constraints prevent that.

Who knows, maybe they’ll even settle the debate over whether “video game” is supposed to be one word or two (but really, it’s supposed to be two words).

This article is from the first edition of The Video Game Librarian website I published between 2008 and 2010. It was originally written on September 23, 2008.

Dave Carter, a librarian at the University of Michigan and the writer behind the Eaten by a Grue blog, wants everyone to know that the school’s Computer and Video Game Archive is now open to the public. One might say it’s currently in beta testing, as Carter refers to the current operating schedule as the “Preview Opening,” and the official “Grand Opening” will happen sometime in November.

But for now, the Archive is open during weekday afternoons and offers a ton of gaming opportunities as seen in the pictures attached to Carter’s post.

Keep up the good work Dave.

This article is from the first edition of The Video Game Librarian website I published between 2008 and 2010. It was originally written on September 9, 2008.

A few days ago, a link at Kotaku lead me to the Stanford University How They Got Game blog. In turn, that site showed me the way to Stanford’s Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection of video games.

How They Got Game is a research blog detailing the history and cultural impact of video games while the Cabrinety Collection is a list of the hundreds of games they have in their collection. Both blogs are an interesting look at how librarians are attempting to preserve some of the more unique pieces of video game history.

The Kotaku article focused on a blog post discussing products licensed by Nintendo in the 80s including paper plates, a backpack and Nintendo Cereal System (which, by the way, was delicious to my seven year old self). In “Errant Nintendo Licensing“, Stanford’s Eric Kaltman also examined how Mario and Link, Nintendo’s flagship mascots, were rendered by different artists for these products.

A part of me is actually amazed that someone was able to find this stuff in good condition after 20 years.