Past Event! Note: this event has already taken place.
| When: | Friday, September 23rd, 2016 |
| Time: | 3:00 pm — 4:30 pm |
| Location: | Loeb Building, A720 |
| Audience: | Anyone |
| Cost: | Free |
| Contact: | Ira Wagman, Ira.Wagman@carleton.ca, 613-520-2600 x.2639 |
Featuring Dr. Michael Newman
About the talk
During their decade of emergence – from 1972, when Pong was introduced, to the height of Pac-Man Fever in 1982 – the new medium of video games was understood in contradictory ways. Would video games embody middle-class legitimacy or reflect the lingering disrepute of pinball arcades? Were they a new, participatory use for television or an intensification of television’s power? Would they foster family togetherness or allow boys to escape from domesticity? Would they make the new home computer a tool for education or a potentially wasteful toy?
In this talk, Dr. Michael Newman charts the emergence of video games in America from ball-and-paddle games to hits like Space Invaders and Pac-Man, describing their relationship to other amusements and technologies and showing how they came to be identified with the middle class, youth, and masculinity.
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Dr. Michael Newman is associate professor of Media Studies and chair of the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Dr. Newman is the author of Indie: An American Film Culture (Columbia U Press, 2011) and Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium (Columbia U Press, 2014). He is also the co-author (with Elana Levine) of Legitimizing Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (Routledge, 2014).