Games | MUSEUM FATIGUE

Not Playing Ping Pong Playing Ping Pong

November 27, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

“The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth it is the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there…” —Jean Baudrillard (1988: 166). Yesterday a student forwarded an image to me that she found on […]

Categories: Games, Photography, Representation • Tags: analog games, Jean Baudrillard, ping pong, simulacra, simulations, skeuomorph, video games

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Post-Apocalyptic Déjà Vu in Gary, Indiana

July 22, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

During our drive through Gary, Indiana we pulled over in front of the dilapidated and boarded up remains of what had once been a supermarket. Standing in the fractured, concrete-and-weed parking lot, facing the building, with its faded paint and busted-out window frames, the strongest sense of déjà vu hit me. I had been there before. I knew what the inside of the store looked like with its dark rows of rusted, toppled shelves and trash-covered floors. When I was thirsty, hadn’t […]

Categories: End of Times, Games, Memory, Urban, Zombie • Tags: deja vu, Fallout 3, Gary Indiana, post-apocalyptic, post-industrial, rust belt, Super-Duper Mart

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Candy Crush Saga and the Hänsel and Gretel Economy

July 7, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

[I was going through some old drafts of posts-never-completed this morning and decided to delete the ones I’ll likely never complete. Others, like this one are parts of ideas or beginnings of drafts that never got finished but don’t deserve to be deleted because there is something there worth keeping. So I’ve decided to just post them as-is.] bout six weeks ago I started playing Candy Crush Saga. A few days ago I stopped playing it at Level 147, because after […]

Categories: Anthropology, Consumption, Games, Play, Social Class • Tags: Candy Crush Saga, casual games, economy, Hänsel and Gretel, iPad, pay-as-you-go

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TARDIS Value: Blue Box as Totem and Fetish

June 10, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

There is a lot of Doctor Who going around these days. My teenage self—the closeted geek who stayed up late on Fridays and Saturdays to catch episodes on my local public TV channel—would be very happy to see the show’s resurgent global popularity. I even found an advertisement that used his image on the streets of Beijing a few months back. Of course there is a big difference between Doctor Who of the 1970s and 1980s and the post-2005 reanimated […]

Categories: Anthropology, China, Consumption, Games, Material Culture, Nostalgia, Science Fiction, TV, Value • Tags: Barnes and Noble, Branding, Doctor Who, Evans-Pritchard, Karl Marx, Monopoly, TARDIS, totems, Yahtzee

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Beating Snake and the Memory of Video Games

May 18, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Jesper Juul has posted a fascinating GIF, Tweeted by Brendon Sheffield on his page at the Ludologist. The GIF, “beating-snake,” is instantly recognizable to anyone who has played a variation of the simple game. In my case, I watched with rapt fascination as the game progressed to its conclusion. The GIF promised something that I had never seen—the end of a snake game. After the game ended, however, I realized that while watching it I had been actively recalling memories […]

Categories: Games, Memory, Nostalgia, Play • Tags: snake game

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Hardware and Games

April 26, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

It isn’t much of a stretch to say that the hardware store is a space that is primarily gendered as male—a place where men buy tools and materials for construction. Whether professional or weekend do-it-yourselfers, the stores promise encounters with physical labor—selling things for—designing, building and fixing. They sell hardware. So imagine my surprise when on a visit to my local Menards, I walked past a display selling software—”Value Video Games.” If there is a male that is configured as the inverse […]

Categories: Games, Gender, Labor, Play, Work • Tags: gamer, handyman, hardware, hardware store, Menards, software, video games

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