MAGFest 2020: The Uncredited - A Lost History of Labor in Games

We can all name someone who designed a game or founded a company. How much do we know about everyone else involved--not the folks who made games, but the ones who sold them, serviced them, or troubleshooted them? This talk will showcase the rise of the American computer game industry from the point of view of three women who worked in sales, customer service, and technical support at Sierra On-Line. From the video game crash to the mainstreaming of the PC to the dot com bubble of the 90s, this talk will expand our sense of "who counts" in games.

Panelist:
Laine Nooney is an Assistant Professor of Media and Information Industries in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where she specializes in the history of American personal computing and computer gaming. She’s been featured in popular venues such as The Atlantic, The Internet History Podcast, The Next Billion Seconds, NPR, and Gizmodo, and has spoken about the past, present, and future of the game industry at forums like Indiecade, GDC, and the World Economic Forum. She is a founding editor of ROMchip, the first open access, scholarly journal of video game history, and organizes the leading annual conference for historians of computing as part of her work with the Special Interest Group in Computing, Information, and Society (SIGCIS).