Games-related treasures from De Schatkamer

On May 26, the Dutch Institute for Sound and Vision launched

On May 26, the Dutch Institute for Sound and Vision launched De Schatkamer (‘Treasure Room’), a massive archive of the history of public broadcasting. In it we find a wealth of material related to games.

This includes one of the first long documentaries on the topic from 1997. It was part of Laat op de Avond na een Korte Wandeling (‘Late in the Evening after a Short Walk’), a program dedicated to developments in art, culture, tech and new media by public broadcaster VPRO. The documentary, simply titled ‘Games’ focuses on various topics such as the fundamentally new aesthetic experience of games in relation to older media, its rise as an industry, its educational potential and, of course, the rise of moral panics around the medium in relation to violence and addiction. A key interviewee is media theorist Douglas Rushkoff (see below), who had then just released his book Children of Chaos on the culture of what he calls screenagers. Douglas went on to write his PhD dissertation at Utrecht University’s Department of Media and Culture Studies in 2012, titled Monopoly Moneys: The Media Environment of Corporatism and the Player’s Way Out. Others interviewed in the documentary are authors J.C. Herz and Yasmin B. Kafai, and developer Dave Perry.

There’s more to enjoy in De Schatkamer though, such as VPRO Tegenlicht’s 2008’s documentary on war games and virtual reality sims used by the military called Het Oorlogsspel, or their 2017 episode All In The Game which follows Dutch developer Guerilla Games’s creation of the game Horizon Zero Dawn. Going back further in time, we find attention for games (in this case SEGA’s early attempts to create an online subscription service for their Genesis console) in a 1994 episode of Beeldstorm called From McLuhan to Virtual Reality.

Go to De Schatkamer to find more historical games-related media from Dutch public broadcasting history.

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