And unlike other university archives where you
need “white gloves and a wand with an acid-
free cotton ball at the end” to handle the relics,
McAllister says everything in this collection is
meant to be touched, plugged in and used.
After all, you can’t read a book without opening
it, and you can’t understand a game without
playing it.
“I mean, what is this?” Ruggill says, plucking a
game cartridge from a random shelf. “It’s a piece
of plastic and some other petrochemicals and
things like that. It only becomes something
when you activate it and interact with it.”
Ruggill is a Tucson native who used to ill his
pockets with quarters and walk to the video
arcade in his 1980s Foothills neighborhood.
McAllister grew up in Chicago playing Pitfall on
a friend’s Atari 2600 and hand-held electronic
football during his ride to school.
The two met through their mutual interest in
game research and soon recognized something
missing from their burgeoning corner of the
media studies world.
“It occurred to us that there was a need in the
ield to actually make these objects accessible,”
McAllister says. “We were going to academic
conferences (where) people were giving lectures
about games, and it would turn out that they
had never played the game that they were there
lecturing about.”
“That’s like, saying, ‘Hey, I’m going to talk to you
about Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth,’ but I haven’t
actually read it,’” Ruggill adds.
It wasn’t laziness on the part of those
lecturers. At the time, McAllister says,