Archaeology of interactivity: The pop-up book as the forerunner of video games

Abstract

This paper focuses on a scarcely explored field: the cultural background of the video game. Notwithstanding the relationship to traditional games, sports and board games, digital and even mechanical technologies which are shown as direct forerunners (computers or pinball games), the video game responds to a long tradition that has its roots in popular 18th- and 19th-century performances. Its birth as a medium with a great capacity for cultural hybridisation has a parallel with the pop-up book. The traditional book developed as a means to combine new forms of entertainment such as the panorama, the phantasmagoria, puppet shows and automatons, the peep show, dioramas and the optical illusions of zoetropes or magic lanterns. The new technique of paper engineering, which emulated the mechanics of the automaton, broke the immobility of the image and allowed for the first animations of characters associated with a story and the construction of a three-dimensional explorable space. For the first time, the reader was involved in the narrative process, interacting with the moving parts and composing a world of fiction based on their activity and on the new relationships between text and image, unlike those in illustrated books. Also for the first time, it created a fun artefact different from the traditional toy, in a process very similar to the one that would give rise to electronic games one hundred years later. The evolution of both resources led to similar development solutions in terms of animation techniques, creation of the point of view and the relationship between narration and interaction. This paper ultimately reveals the permanent link between video games and the legacy of 19th-century entertainment, and how this influence feeds into the idea of performance via virtual reality.