This article offers a social history of funfairs and arcades in mid-20th-century urban England. Critiquing existing histories of games for often neglecting players and the specific locales in which games are played, it draws on both new cinema history and cultural studies’ conception of “radical contextualism” to outline what the article describes as a game’s ludosity. Ludosity, the article proposes, is the condition or quality of game partcipation as shaped by a range of agents, institutions, and contexts. Utilizing mass observation records, it offers a detailed analysis of the ways in which social interactions influenced ludic experiences of pinball tables and crane machines and posits that games history needs to center players in order to fully conceptualize games in history.
BurkeP. (2008). What is cultural history?London, England: Polity.
6.
BrookerW.JermynD. (Eds.). (2003). The audience studies reader. London, England: Routledge.
7.
BrutonE. M. (2012). Beyond Marconi: The roles of the admiralty, the post office, and the institution of electrical engineers in the invention and development of wireless communication up to 1908 (Unpublished PhD thesis). University of Leeds, UK.
ConsalvoM. (2009). There is no magic circle. Games and Culture, 4, 408–417.
10.
CrawfordG. (2011). Video gamers. London, England: Routledge.
11.
CroftonJ. (1939, March 2). Two thousand million pennies a year on pin-tables. Daily Mail. p. 10.
12.
DeterdingS. (2018). Alibis for adult play: A Goffmanian account of escaping embarrassment in adult play. Games and Culture, 13, 260–279.
13.
DownsC. (2011). Two fat ladies at the seaside: Gambling in working class holidays 1920–1970. In SnapeR.SmithD. (Eds.), Recording Leisure Lives: Holidays and Tourism in 20th Century Britain (pp. 51–73). Colchester: Leisure Studies Association.
14.
ErnstW. (2011). Media archaeography: Method and machine versus history and narrative of media. In HuhtamoE.ParikkaJ. (Eds.), Media archaeology. approaches, applications, and implications (pp. 239–255). Berkeley: University of California Press.
15.
Fun fairs turn away the child gamblers. (1942, Friday, April 10). Daily Mail, p. 3.
16.
GazzardA. (2014). The intertextual arcade: Tracing histories of arcade clones in 1980s Britain. Reconstruction, 14, 3.
17.
GazzardA. (2016). Between pixels and play: The role of the photograph in videogame nostalgias. Photography and Culture, 9, 151–162.
18.
GiddingsS. (2009). Events and collusions: A glossary for the microethnography of video game play. Games and Culture, 4, 144–157.
19.
GitelmanL. (2006). Always already new: Media, history, and the data of culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
20.
GoffmanE. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
21.
GuinsR. (2004). “Intruder alert! intruder alert!” Video games in space. Journal of Visual Culture, 3, 195–211.
22.
GuinsR. (2014). Game after: A cultural study of video game afterlife. Cambridge: MIT Press.
23.
GrossbergL. (1997). Bringing it all back home: Essays on cultural studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
24.
HallS. (1980). Cultural studies: Two paradigms. Media, Culture & Society, 2, 57–72.
25.
HarperT. (2013). The culture of digital fighting games: Performance and practice. London, England: Routledge.
26.
HarrisN. (1981). Humbug: The art of P.T. Barnum. Chicago, IL: Chicago UP.
27.
HumphreysA. (1953, November30). Pin-table ban on under 18s. Daily Mail, p. 3.
28.
HoulbrookM. (2016). Prince of tricksters: The incredible true story of Netley Lucas, gentleman crook. Chicago, IL: Chicago UP.
29.
HornA. (2009). Juke box Britain: Americanisation and youth culture, 1945–60. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press.
30.
HorrallA. (2001). Popular culture in London c. 1890-1918: The transformation of entertainment. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press.
31.
HubbleN. (2006). Mass-observation and everyday life. Houndmills-Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
32.
HuhtamoE. (2005). Slots of fun, slots of trouble: An archaeology of arcade gaming. In RaessensJ.GoldsteinJ. (Eds.), Handbook of computer game studies (pp. 3–22). Cambridge: MIT Press.
33.
HuhtamoE. (2016). Amusement arcade. In LowoodH.GuinsR. (Eds.), Debugging game history. A critical lexicon (pp. 21–28). Cambridge: MIT Press.
34.
JakobssonM. (2007, September). Playing with the rules: Social and cultural aspects of game rules in a console game club. DiGRA Conference. Retrieved fromhttp://www.digra.org/dl/db/07311.01363.pdf
35.
JancovichM.FaireF.StubbingsS. (2003). The place of the audience. London, England: BFI.
36.
JoyceP. (2010). What is the social in social history?Past and Present, 206, 213–248.
37.
JuulJ. (2008). The magic circle and the puzzle piece. Conference Proceedings of the Philosophy of Computer Games (pp. 56–67). Potsdam, Germany: Potsdam University Press.
38.
KaneJ. (2013). The architecture of pleasure: British amusement parks 1900–1939. Farnham, England: Ashgate.
39.
KerrA. (2006). The business and culture of digital games: Gamework and gameplay. London: Sage.
40.
KirkpatrickG. (2013). Computer games and the social imaginary. Cambridge, England: Polity.
41.
KirkpatrickG. (2015). The formation of gaming culture: UK gaming magazines, 1981-1995. London, England: Palgrave.
42.
KocurekC. A. (2012). Coin-drop capitalism: Economic lessons from the video game arcade. In WolfM. J. P. (Ed.), Before the crash: Early video game history (pp. 189–208). Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
43.
KocurekC. A. (2015). Coin-operated Americans: Rebooting boyhood at the video game arcade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
44.
LinH.SunC. T. (2011). The role of onlookers in arcade gaming: Frame analysis of public behaviours. Convergence, 17, 125–137.
45.
LitherlandB. (2018). Wrestling in Britain: Sporting entertainments, celebrities and audiences. London, England: Routledge.
46.
London gang leader murdered: Fight over “rackets” rule. (1939). Daily Mail, November 13, p. 1.
47.
MalabyT. M. (2007). Beyond play: A new approach to games. Games and Culture, 2, 95–113.
48.
MaltbyR. (2011). New cinema histories. In MaltbyR.BiltereystD.MeersP. (Eds.), Explorations in new cinema history: Approaches and case studies (pp. 3–40). London, England: John Wiley.
49.
MaltbyR.BiltereystD.MeersP. (Eds.). (2011). Explorations in new cinema history: Approaches and case studies. London, England: John Wiley.
50.
MarvinC. (1988). When old technologies were new: Thinking about electric communication in the late nineteenth century. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
51.
McKibbinR. (1998). Classes and cultures: England 1918-1951. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
52.
MiersD. (2003). Gaming machines in Great Britain: A century of change. Gaming Law Review, 7, 131–147.
53.
MontolaM. (2012). Social constructionism and ludology: Implications for the study of games. Simulation & Gaming, 43, 300–320.
54.
MontfortN.BogostI. (2009). Racing the beam: The Atari video computer system. Cambridge: MIT Press.
55.
NasawD. (1993). Going out: The rise and fall of public amusements. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
56.
NewmanJ. (2012). Best before: Videogames, supersession and obsolescence. London, England: Routledge.
57.
NewmanM. Z. (2017). Atari Age: The emergence of video games in America. Cambridge: MIT Press.
58.
NooneyL. (2013). A pedestal, a table, a love letter: Archaeologies of gender in videogame history. Game Studies, 13. Retrieved fromhttp://gamestudies.org/1302/articles/nooney.
59.
ÖrnebringH. (2007). Writing the history of television audiences: The coronation in the mass-observation Archive. In WheatleyH. (Ed.), Re-viewing television history: Critical issues in television history (pp. 170–183). London: IB Tauris.
60.
Rhodian cigarettes advertisement. (1940, August 17). Daily Mail, p. 5.
61.
RichardsJ.SheridanD. (Eds.). (1987). Mass-observation at the movies. London, England: Routledge.
StenrosJ. (2014). In defence of a magic circle: the social, mental and cultural boundaries of play. Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association, 1, 147–185.
69.
SuitsB. (2014). The grasshopper: Games, life and Utopia. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.
70.
TaylorT. L. (2009). The assemblage of play. Games and Culture, 4, 331–339.
71.
The fun fair craze. (1938, December 18). The Guardian, p. 8.
72.
TherrienC. (2012). Video games caught up in history: Accessibility, teleological distortion, and other methodological issues. In WolfM. J. P. (Ed.), Before the crash: Early video game history (pp. 9–29). Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
73.
ThompsonE. P. (1966). History from below. Times Literary Supplement, 7, 279–280.
74.
ThorhaugeA. M. (2013). The rules of the game—The rules of the player. Games and Culture, 8, 371–391.
75.
WadeA. (2016). Playback: A genealogy of 1980s British videogames. London, England: Bloomsbury Publishing, USA.
76.
WadeA.WebberN. (2016). A future for game histories?Cogent Arts & Humanities, 3, 1–11.
77.
YoungI. M. (1990). Throwing like a girl. Bloomington: Indiana Press.
