Slow Play Strategies: Digital Games Walkthroughs and the Perpetual Upgrade Economy

Abstract

From the PDP-1 in the 1960s to the seventh generation consoles of the last few years, digital gaming is marked by continual development. The notion of the perpetual upgrade economy will be introduced as one of the key modes through which digital gaming is organised and promoted to consumers. The concepts of perpetual innovation (see Kline, Dyer-Witheford, de Peuter; 2003) and upgrade culture (Dovey and Kennedy, 2006) point to the emphasis on the continual alteration and upgrading of products, the generation of new commodities with ever-shortening life spans, and the design drive to permanently explore new capacities of each new generation of technologies.

In contrast, the overwhelmingly dominant industry focus on new releases and player practices of discarding digital games technologies in favour of successors, have been reconsidered in terms of recovery and subcultural memories (Ashton, 2008) and archives and preservation, supersession and obsolescence (Newman, 2009). In this paper, practices of walkthrough archiving are explored to consider how the industry logic of progression, speed and updgrade are disrupted and diverged from. Walkthroughs provide both a document of the game as designed and a record of investigations into the vagaries and imperfections of its implementation. This paper will consider three elements of walkthrough practices in terms slow media.