UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA ARCHIVE DEVOTED TO VIDEO GAMES STUDY

When it comes to games, Ken McAllister and Judd Ruggill don’t play around.

The two University of Arizona humanities professors have spent the past two decades quietly assembling what is probably the world’s largest archive devoted to the study of video games and game culture.

The Learning Games Initiative Research Archive now contains more than a quarter of a million items, including at least 15,000 individual games, 200 game systems and thousands of documents, books, promotional materials and other artifacts from the game industry’s ever-expanding universe.

The catalog runs the gamut, from a 1948 patent for the earliest “cathode ray tube amusement device” to the latest Playstation console.

And unlike other university archives where you need “white gloves and a wand with an acidfree 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.”