Redefining the Console for the Global, Networked Era

Abstract

Gaming cultures and industries emerged in a transnational climate. Early game designers, entrepreneurs, and firms clustered in locations such as Silicon Valley and the greater Boston area that were the beneficiaries of massive amounts of Cold War defense spending that stemmed from US foreign policy imperatives and buttressed the military-industrial-entertainment complex. As a complex creative industry, games emerged as a transnational hybrid of primarily Japanese and US firms with the later growth of firms in the United Kingdom (Consalvo 2006; Izushi and Aoyama 2006). Recently, collections such as Larissa Hjorth and Dean Chan’s Gaming Cultures and Place in Asia-Pacific (2009) and the work of scholars such as Dal Yong Jin (2010) have elaborated new trajectories for the global and local study of the economic and cultural aspects of games. This chapter adds to emerging conversations about the multiple transnational and translocal flows of gaming capital and content by examining debates about what constitutes a console and the implications of cloud-based gaming. I begin this essay by considering how game consoles have created narratives of game history and play that connect linear narratives of obsolescence and technical evolution to particular spaces, constructing particular territories or localities as engaged in past, present, and future play. I then turn to the console and cloud-gaming debates, emphasizing the ways that game technologies and delivery systems construct geographies of play.