Henry Lowood

• PhD, University of California, Berkeley
• Curator, History of Science & Technology; Film & Media Collections at Stanford University

Critical games studies often consider games as systems rather than texts. As useful as this idea of the game as a system may be, it is not obvious how to deploy it for historical studies of games. It is true enough that all games are systems of one sort or another, and always have been. The question begging to be asked is, how and why have these sy...

This article introduces an original documentation and archiving tool, CloudPad, that integrates ‘cloud computing’ into the annotation and synchronisation of mixed media resources. Through CloudPad users are able to view a documentation, edit a version of it, and record their own comments in response to it. Whether users may have created and/or expe...

The interactive, immersive and performative aspects of digital games and virtual worlds take the challenges faced by media archivists, curators and historians beyond software preservation to problems that demand new documentation and preservation strategies. The social and performative aspects of online worlds are forcing repositories to develop ne...

Library of Congress, UIeRA#2008-01111-00-00 published or submitted for publication not peer reviewed

This book, like the May 2008 conference in World of Warcraft, ends with projections toward what the future might hold for virtual worlds. Every chapter thus far has included speculations about future directions, even while standing on data from the past. This last chapter, like the final session of the conference on which it is based, incorporates...

The earliest digital games emerged out of laboratories and research centers in the 1960s and 1970s. The intertwined histories of Nolan Bushnell's Computer Space and Pong illustrate the transition from these "university games" to accessible entertainment and educational games as well as the complicated historical relationship among the arcade, compu...

[I]t is probable, but not proven, that play at video games accustoms the player to the kind of activity that computers also require. One must sit down in front of a computer-like object and manage it in much the same way by levers and controls that a computer is managed. As in the case of the computer, there is immediate feedback for right and wron...

On 7 October 2004, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin held a press conference at the Frankfurt Book Fair to reveal their company's new service, called Google Print. Since the beginning of the new millennium, Google's corporate website has described the company's mission as "to organize the world's information" and make it "universally acces...

Player-created game movies have been an outlet for creative expression by World of Warcraft (WoW) players since the beta version of the game. The proliferation of players, clans, Web sites, and community forums for creating, consuming, and commenting on WoW movies is remarkable. Linking multiplayer game communities and the making of animated movies...

In his paper, Henry Lowood provides an in-depth historical overview of machinima — animated films created using FPS (first person shooter) videogames such as Quake. He traces the evolution of this work from the early ‘speedrunning’ movies created to document exceptional gameplay through to the first pioneering works of narrative machinima such as D...

This article compares the growth of history of science as a discipline to the situation faced by game studies today. What can researchers learn from the elevation of the history of science to an established discipline and profession that might help scholars understand the situation of game studies? And why are game studies today being talked about...

Technology and Culture 43 Supplement (2002) 1-4 The following compilation is the thirty-seventh annual bibliography of current publications in the history of technology. Previous bibliographies in this series have appeared in Technology and Culture since 1964. The reader is also referred to the fifth publication of the SHOT Monograph Series, Eugene...

Technology and Culture 42.2 (2001) 392-394 In Sorting Things Out, Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star shed new light on a variety of classification systems and practices. The thrust of this eclectic and wide-ranging study is twofold: (1) classification is a ubiquitous human activity; and (2) the ramifications of classification both as part of the...

Technology and Culture 40 Supplement (1999) 1-4 The following compilation is the thirty-fifth annual bibliography of current publications in the history of technology. Previous bibliographies in this series have appeared in Technology and Culture since 1964. The reader is also referred to the fifth publication of the SHOT Monograph Series, Eugene...

The scientific and technical periodicals of the 17th and 18th centuries are a primary source for the study of one of the most interesting periods in our intellectual history. The author has collected and collated titles and information regarding them from a large number of sources to construct an alphabetical list of 1,851 periodicals, including th...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 1987. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 401-404). Microfilm. s

The historical preservation of interactive software raises a number of issues. In this paper, the focus will be on the particular difficulties presented by computer games, videogames and, to a lesser extent, interactive simulations. Lowood will present the vantage points of both the historian of these media and the curator of collections, first wit...

Libraries . . . while to adults the Internet primarily means the world wide web, for children it means email, chat, games—and here they are already content producers. Too often neglected, except as a source of risk, these communication and entertainment-focused activities, by contrast with the information-focused uses at the centre of public and po...