Over 5,000 miles separate the Finnish Museum of Games (Suomen Pelmuseo) located in Tampere from the National Videogame Museum (NVM) in Frisco, Texas.
Frisco feels new. Shiny and new. Always expanding, always under construction, always trying to ease the commute south to the greater Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area with creature comforts like a downtown revitalization project, new parking garages, a training facility for the Dallas Cowboys and Toyota Stadium home to the MLS side, FC Dallas.
My journey to Tampere from Helsinki proved a little more exciting. To my sheer delight, trains in Finland offer an entire coach for pets! I missed my two Swedish Vallhunds, Abba and Pontus, which prompted me to spend two hours in a coach with seating areas that resemble cots. Dogs stretch out at greater leisure than humans who ride upright while their canine companion sprawl before a window view. Looking down the aisle, I spot dogs lying on the floor, sitting in seats, walking and wagging their tails in the aisle, and snoozing blissfully on their seats. Big dogs. Little dogs. Black dogs. White dogs. None in hats. None driving around in cars. If P.D. Eastman wrote about Finland, the title of his lovely book would be Train, Dog. Train!
Tampere is the regional capital of Pirkanmaa and the area’s cultural center. I swapped a coach full of canines for a museum full of those magical trolls indigenous to Finland, Moomin! My hotel was next door to Tampere’s Moomin Museum. Walking around the city after ages spent in the museum admiring Tove Jansson’s creations, I was somewhat disappointed to learn that the people of Tampere aren’t nicknamed “Little Mys” or “Snufkins” after the inhabitants of Moominvalley. Instead, Tampere’s industrial past earned its residents the nickname, “Manse,” due to the city being dubbed, the “Manchester of the North”. And like the city in the north of England, Tampere has its own version of black pudding known as, mustamakkara. I spied (and avoided) these blood-dark shiny skinned sausage at the Tampereen Kauppahalli. With architectural roots in the late 19th century, it’s the largest market hall in Scandinavia.
One city enjoys an abundance of freshwater lakes; the other resides in “Tornado Alley.” One is regarded as the sauna capital of the world, the other feels like a sauna during long summer months.
Such differences and distance do not however preclude similarities. The Finnish Museum of Games and the National Videogame Museum are, I discovered, museums nested within other museums. They remind me of Matryoshka dolls, or “Russian Dolls,” as they are commonly called. Their charm resides in what the object-in-an-object reveals. An outer shell-like layer is opened and removed. Inside a smaller figure appears. The dolls decrease in size with each layer removed until the tiniest figure in the series cannot be opened. Unveiling ends not in any reduced hierarchy – from important to least important – but in the demonstration of correlated relations, forms, and meanings. Macro and micro scales are displayed as interdependent.
The Finnish Museum of Games lives inside Museokeskus Vapriikki. Located in a former factory building, the museum center is now home to a natural history museum, stone museum, the Finnish Hockey Museum, the Finnish Postal Museum, among other exhibition spaces.
The National Video Game Museum resides within the city of Frisco’s Discovery Center sharing space with TrainTopia, the Museum of the American Railroad; Sci-Tech, a hands-on, interactive science museum; and the Frisco Public Library.
Removing this layer of the Finnish Museum of Games reveals a museum devoted to the history of games within a specific, regional context: game development, industry, and the culture of game play within the Nordic country. Finland, after all, gave the world Angry Birds and Max Payne, and is currently home to over two-hundred game developer studios.
Removing this layer of the National Videogame Museum reveals a museum that offers its visitors a more general, non-regionally specific approach to the history of video games. Although its mission is not “the history of video games in the US,” it flirts with regional context: an appeal to place takes the form of a recreated teenager’s bedroom decorated with sports pendants for the Dallas Cowboys, Texas Rangers and a “Another Student for Reagan-Bush 84” sticker to affirm Texas’s longstanding “Red State” status to visitors—mixing a period of time, place, and politics with play.
Inside both museums, I walk through a variety of different exhibits. Tampere treats visitors to recreated bedroom/living room spaces, displays of games developed in Finland, a magnificent timeline of game consoles that reminds me of a “family tree,” and an arcade space. Displays on Finnish games include title cards, descriptions of the game’s significance in Finnish and English, interactive game play, and audio interviews with developers.
In Frisco, I pass through exhibits devoted to hardware timelines, 3rd party software developers, in-game easter eggs, handhelds and portable games, PC gaming, video games translated into table-top games, an innovative temporary exhibit on representation of North American indigenous groups in games, and an arcade space. Title cards aren’t in Spanish. The museum was founded by three super-collectors of video games, and it shows: display cases are packed with game artifacts, many rare, and many only available to view in Frisco.
Inside the museums, amongst their various exhibits, it felt to me like I bumped up against another layer, one completely unexpected, unassuming, and amazing. Tampere and Friso recreate independent game shops. Each museum stages micro-historical scenes that slip passed the grand history of games, adding specific weight, physical evidence, to transformative events dotting timelines. Written accounts along with museum exhibitions on the history of games are partial to privileging founders, inventors, developers, companies, and, of course, celebrated hard and software titles. The quickest Wikipedia search reveals how easily the past is chopped up into increments of time determined by binary digits (e.g. eras of 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit…). New hardware ushers in emergent eras that structure how the past is valued and how history is often composed. That is, what counts as significant for history. Independent game stores aren’t Microsoft, Nintendo, or Sony. They aren’t the Marios or Master Chiefs of the past…or present. In Tampere and Frisco independent game stores are given relevance. A recreated game shop reduces the scale of game history to the molecular unit of retail sales, the once common point of purchasing a game as a face-to-face social, public experience.
Deep inside the Finnish Museum of Games, when walking past the exhibit for Supreme Snowboarding, the first Finnish game to sell over a million copies, I turn a corner to enter a retro game shop. Nintendo character plushies like Yoshi and Toad, software titles for the Sega Dreamcast, PS2, and N64, Gameboys galore, along with controllers for the N64, Gamecube, PS2, and Dreamcast cram the shop’s shelves from floor to ceiling. Games are displayed in their original packaging. A boxed Microsoft Xbox and Sony PS2 sit like crowning gems atop these stocked shelves. Near the register – yes, there’s even a register in the exhibit – glass display cases contain loose NES cartridges of Metal Gear, Dr. Mario, and Metroid, showcasing the resale market for secondhand games at these shops.
The exhibit is convincing. Maybe too convincing. I found myself wondering, if these items are for sale. The register’s cables connected to a power source, a service bell, and monitor all conspire to trick me that this is more than a recreation, that it’s an actual shop deep within the museum. I’m not alone in this observation. Outi Penninkangas, a researcher at the museum, also finds the exhibit, a little “too authentic” for visitors. Do they try to purchase items in the exhibit?
The Finnish Museum of Games values the space of retail in its documentation of Finnish game history. The examples of titles shared above and below were not developed in Finland, of course. Their inclusion concretely evidences the general popularity of games and game play in Finland. A global industry stocks these retail shelves. While the museum’s mission is to document, collect, exhibit games developed in Finland it doesn’t do so to the exclusion of hardware and software titles popular the world over. Regional emphasis is neither an attempt to exclusively celebrate Finnish game development, nor a push to elevate its status. Rather, the Finnish Museum of Games serves as a conduit channeling Finnish developers into a global economy of games. How Finland has contributed to and shaped the global market and culture of games is the lesson on display.
The retail exhibit also accounts for the social experience of purchasing game-related products. On the one hand, I witness the increased popularity of shops – be it in Tokyo, Riga, Tampere, or your city – that specialize in collectible, out-of-print games. A desire for “former-gen” displaces the immediacy of “next-gen” in these niche markets. On the other hand, I’m also reminded that many places associated with retail sales of entertainment media have shuttered over the last 30 years.
Porno-theaters with their noisy projector and sticky video booths went flaccid.
Video stores degenerated like magnetic tape.
Book shops avoid the shredder thanks to lavender lattes and laptops.
Music stores refrain from playing their final note thanks to the vinyl revival.
The independent game shop is already on the list of antiquated media, passe social spaces. But here, in Tampere, an exhibit in a museum, demonstrates that the history of games – the history of games in Finland – includes the social space of consumption, where players could demo games on a display kiosk for the Dreamcast, discuss new games with shop assistants, visit a shop with friends. It proved a highlight, a destination, a place meaningful in the social and economic ecology of games. This increasing absence Outi identifies as a major emphasis for the museum’s recreation. These were places where people, he explains, “could ‘touch’ games, discuss with [a] shopkeeper, meet other players and for example rent consoles.”
Today “storefronts” no longer mean “bricks and mortar.” Digital distribution be it Steam, Amazon Luna Cloud Gaming, Apple Arcade, or Xbox Game Pass, removes the physical storage medium of an optical disc altogether thus making any visit to a shop superfluous. These shops provided services (e.g. rentals), social community, and tactile experiences with games. Like handling a videocassette box to learn more about a potential rental, I reached for the copy of Rez for Dreamcast as I only ever played the PS2 version. I felt the urge to touch PaRappaTheRapper 2 along with many other titles remembered fondly or never known.
The finite dimensions of the retail shop drew me to these products. Just being surrounded by this stuff stoked the desire to touch as Outi intended. The packaged container is a flattened form on screens today when previewing downloadable titles on Xbox Game Pass. The intimacy of those lumbering packed shelves at arm’s length is foreign to cloud gaming or absurd when browsing a staggering “14,928” titles (the number shown when I last checked) available on the Xbox Store. Such selection is overwhelming, a solitary experience. It’s far from closeness, hardly communal.
The Finnish Museum of Games’ exhibit maintains a social space, like so many public places, that is shrinking. Its real object of history is not necessarily the enormous amount of preserved stuff lining shelves or even the register fooling me but us, the visitors, who pass through this space: a subject enveloped within a once familiar setting recreated to enact social practices. Our presence reenacting the social space brings meaning to the recreation. We are the display.
Frisco’s version of a retail space shoulders an entirely different social. It offers a microlevel experiential scene of the recession that impacted the US game industry in the mid-1980s when billions of dollars were lost. The factors causing the downward spiral are many: market saturation of third-party titles vying for the pacesetter Atari VCS’s cartridge slot, reduced retail prices of game cartridges due to increased competition, shifts away from popular action-oriented arcade ports to more narrative driven games, hardware expansion components that allowed other systems (e.g. Intellivision) to run Atari VCS cartridges, and in the case of Atari Inc. poor business decisions, over production, and challenges to quality control.
Like the factors that contributed to the recession, historical coverage of the so-called “great video game crash of 1983” is encyclopedic. Absent from any account of the recession with its trail of bankruptcies is the microlevel effect: how the crash played out in the space of retail.
Frisco’s recreation is of an independent shop specializing in video game merchandize – not a division in a department store or aisle in a toy store. The checkout desk complete with cash register fronts the shop’s inventory. Behind it, shelves of boxed original game cartridges point to companies producing titles for their hardware (e.g. Atari, Mattel, Coleco). These same shelves also showcase the tide of third-party titles flooding the market in the early 1980s. Shelves and vintage in-store advertisements display products from fly-by-night companies like Apollo, M-Network, Data Age, US Games. A “Store Closing, Everything Must Go” banner hangs beneath a shelf supporting examples of the various competing consoles on the market at the time of the recession: Intellivision, Odyssey 2, Vectrex, ColecoVision, Atari 5200, Arcadia 2001. A retail display case becomes a resource to help visitors gain even more insight into specific factors linked to the crash. Title cards like “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial,” “Can I Return This Game,” and “Emerson Arcadia 2001” attest to quality control issues that stymied the market.
In its testament to the time, one display speaks even louder than the “Store Closing” banner. A run-of-the-mill “Clearance Sale Everything Must Go” sign is affixed to a wire basket. The basket is chock full of games at deeply discounted prices. First-party and third-party games alike rest in the remainder bin. Good games, Atari’s Missile Command, and not-so-good games, UA Ltd’s Cat Trax for the Atari VCS, are tossed into the basket’s pile of disarrayed packages. Vibrant hues of red, yellow, green, blue, orange, purple once designed to get the heart racing flatline here. Like a countdown to industry Armageddon, price tags show the steep discounts: $9.99, $7.99, 99¢. This wire basket testifies that the recession didn’t play favorites. Titles by Atari, Mattel, Activision, Imagic, Parker Brothers, and Vidtec amass like sludge.
For many around at the time and not directly connected to the industry, this wire basket is familiar. Different perspectives on an all too prevalent narrative. Where today we might say, “crash,” yesteryear shouted “cheap games!” Frisco tells not just the common industry centered narrative, but of entrepreneurial ventures (small business ownership of an independent game shop) and the assorted experience of consumers who may have delighted in those .99¢ bargains. What’s to lose when in 1983 you can take a chance on a Pac-Man derivative like Lock ‘n’ Chase for about the same price as an orange sherbet push pop from an ice cream truck?
Tampere and Frisco reduce the scale, remove layers, of the larger histories accounted for at each museum. They zoom in on the microworlds of retail experiences, present an often overlooked node in the game industry network and stage events minor in the historical coverage of games predicated on development and products. Here’s a counter-exhibit to all the ones filled with game products that greet us behind glass at museums, the recreation of a slowly dying space that we ourselves enliven.
Tampere reinvigorates our tactile experiences with game products in a present moment when digital distribution redirects that experience from place to screen. Frisco scales down abstract industry economics to evidence what the recession looked like at the local level of consumption. Neither place appeared out of the ordinary in their heydays. If anything, our visit to the local video game shop was uneventful, habitual, routine, just a familiar part of game culture. Tampere and Frisco dehabituate the habitual treating the recreated game shop as an object lesson to express the loss of social community and physical presence and materially witness economic downtrend. Many layers revealed, many different layers connected.
Tampere returns, restages a social experience as an event, to heighten visitor awareness of the game shop’s disappearance and their once central role in Finland.
Frisco stages the lived experience of the game crash from the ground-level perspective of everyday consumers and small business owners: groups who had the rug pulled out from under them in the mid-1980s. Here the industry crash is played out on the tiled floor of a game shop, on its shelves, and at the bottom of a wire basket
The post Museum Games #2 Staging Microhistory in Tampere & Frisco appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.