Anthropology of Play and Games
~ A seminar series organised by Hazel Andrews (Liverpool John Moores),
Kellynn Wee (UCL) and the RAI~
Tuesday 24 March 2026, 4.00 – 6.00pm GMT
This is an online event. Please register here: (link to be added soon)
PlayCable: Intellivision and the Origins of Online Gaming
Speaker: Tom Boellstorff, University of California, Irvine
Discussant: Paolo Ruffino, King’s College, London
Intellivision, developed by Mattel Electronics (1978–1984), was one of the most important home consoles of the “second generation,” the first videogame systems to use cartridges. In this talk, I draw on what my colleague Braxton Soderman and I term a “transplatform studies” approach to explore PlayCable. As noted at the time, this extension made Intellivision the first system to have downloadable games via cable television. Developed beginning in 1978 and first launched in April 1980, PlayCable involved not just technological innovation but new organizational structures. Furthermore, it involved novel marketing strategies centered on the idea of videogames as a subscription service. These strategies included competitive “playathons” as early as 1981, some of the first examples of what is now termed esports. The 1983 collapse of PlayCable, connected to but distinct from the great videogame Crash of 1984, reveals tensions over the future of interactivity, domestic play, and the economics of the videogame industry. The full story of PlayCable reveals how these tensions were integral to the historical dynamics through which videogames rose to their contemporary prominence.
Bios
Tom Boellstorff is Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, former Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist (flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association), and series editor for Princeton University Press’s “Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology.” Dr. Boellstorff’s publications include the books The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia (Princeton University Press), A Coincidence of Desires: Anthropology, Queer Studies, Indonesia (Duke University Press), Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton University Press), Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method(with Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, and T.L. Taylor; Princeton University Press) and Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie® (with Braxton Soderman; MIT Press; open access version here). Dr. Boellstorff’s articles have appeared in venues including American Anthropologist; American Ethnologist; Annual Review of Anthropology;Cultural Anthropology; Current Anthropology; Disability Studies Quarterly; Games & Culture; International Journal of Communication; Journal of Asian Studies; Journal of Linguistic Anthropology; Ethnos; GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies; Media, Culture, & Society; Television & New Media; and Visual Anthropology Review.
Paolo Ruffino is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Curation and Computational Creativity at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, UK. Ruffino has been investigating the independent production of videogames, labour unions in the videogame industry, and nonhuman and posthuman play in the digital age. He is the author of Future Gaming: Creative Interventions in Video Game Culture(Goldsmiths/MIT Press 2018), editor of Independent Videogames: Cultures, Networks, Techniques and Politics (Routledge, 2021) and author of articles for Games and Culture; Convergence; Television and New Media; and Critical Studies in Media Communication. He is one of the four founding members of the artist group IOCOSE.