[SIGCIS-Members] NEXT FRIDAY: ROMchip Presents: José Zagal on Seeing Red: Nintendo's Virtual Boy

[Laine Nooney]

Join us Friday, November 1, as *ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories *hosts
games researcher José P. Zagal for a talk about *Seeing Red: Nintendo's
Virtual Boy*, co-authored with Benj Edwards*.* The event will be at 3PM EST
on the ROMchip Twitch channel <https://www.twitch.tv/romchipjournal>. Sign
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RSVP Here
<https://www.tickettailor.com/events/romchipajournalofgamehistories/1386247>.
Tickets serve as calendar reminders for the event. Head to
https://www.twitch.tv/romchipjournal join the talk on Nov 1.

*About the Book*
*The curious history, technology, and cultural context of Nintendo's
short-lived stereoscopic gaming console, the Virtual Boy.*

With glowing red stereoscopic 3D graphics, the Virtual Boy cast a prophetic
hue: Shortly after its release in 1995, Nintendo's balance sheet for the
product was "in the red" as well. Of all the innovative long shots the game
industry has witnessed over the years, perhaps the most infamous and least
understood was the Virtual Boy. Why the Virtual Boy failed, and where it
succeeded, are questions that video game experts José Zagal and Benj
Edwards explore in *Seeing Red*, but even more interesting to the authors
is what the platform actually was: what it promised, how it worked, and
where it fit into the story of gaming.

Nintendo released the Virtual Boy as a standalone table-top device in
1995—and quickly discontinued it after lackluster sales and a lukewarm
critical reception. In *Seeing Red,* Zagal and Edwards examine the device's
technical capabilities, its games, and the cultural context in the US in
the 1990s when Nintendo developed and released the unusual console. The
Virtual Boy, in their account, built upon and extended an often-forgotten
historical tradition of immersive layered dioramas going back 100 years
that was largely unexplored in video games at the time. The authors also
show how the platform's library of games conveyed a distinct visual
aesthetic style that has not been significantly explored since the Virtual
Boy's release, having been superseded by polygonal 3D graphics. The
platform's meaning, they contend, lies as much in its design and technical
capabilities and affordances as it does in an audience's perception of
those capabilities.

Offering rare insight into how we think about video game platforms, *Seeing
Red* illustrates where perception and context come, quite literally, into
play.


*About the Authors*José P. Zagal is Professor at the University of Utah's
Entertainment Arts & Engineering program. He is the author of *Ludoliteracy*,
coeditor of *The Videogame Ethics Reader*, and Editor-in-Chief of *Transactions
of the Digital Games Research Association*. Zagal has been honored as a
DiGRA Distinguished Scholar and a Fellow of the Higher Education Video Game
Alliance for his contributions to games research.

Benj Edwards is a tech historian and journalist. He is currently the AI and
Machine Learning reporter for Ars Technica and a tech journalist for *The
Atlantic, Wired, Macworld*, *PC World*, *Fast Company*, and other
publications. Edwards is also the Editor-in-Chief of *Vintage Computing and
Gaming*, a contributor to the *Retronauts* podcast, and creator of *The
Culture of Tech* podcast.


*About ROMchip**ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories
<https://www.romchip.org/>* is a free, online scholarly journal for game
history. *ROMchip *develops, edits, and publishes ad-free, open access game
history research for a range of audiences. It supports any discipline of
work enlivening the history of games in local and global contexts, and
embraces diversity in how game history is studied, documented, collected,
preserved, and practiced. *ROM**c**hip* is a donation-based organization
fiscally sponsored by The Hack Foundation
<https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/> (d.b.a. Hack Club), a 501(c)(3)
nonprofit (EIN: 81-2908499).
Laine Nooney <http://www.lainenooney.com/>

Associate Professor |  MCC <http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/mcc/> @ NYU
<http://www.nyu.edu/>  | they/them
Managing Editor  |  ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories
<https://romchip.org/index.php/romchip-journal>  |  Join our Newsletter
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