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Who Are You?: Nintendo's Game Boy Advance Platform (Platform Studies) Hardcover – October 13, 2020

by Alex Custodio (Author)
4.7 out of 5 stars 17 ratings
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Celebrate Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance in this video game history that traces the handheld’s network of hardware and software afterlives!

In 2002, Nintendo of America launched an international marketing campaign for the Game Boy Advance that revolved around the slogan “Who Are You?”—asking potential buyers which Nintendo character, game, or even device they identified with and attempting to sell a new product by exploiting players’ nostalgic connections to earlier ones. Today, nearly 2 decades after its release, and despite the development of newer and more powerful systems, Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance lives on, through a community that continues to hack, modify, emulate, make, break, remake, redesign, trade, use, love, and play with the platform.
 
In Who Are You?, Alex Custidio considers each component of this network—hardware, software, peripheral, or practice—to illuminates the platform’s unique features as a computational system and a cultural artifact. You’ll learn about:
 
• The evolution of Nintendo’s handhelds and consoles, and how they embed nostalgia into the hardware
• Nintendo’s expansion of the Game Boy Advance platform through interoperability
• Physical and affective engagement with the Game Boy Advance
• Portability, private space, and social interaction
• The platformization of nostalgia
• Fan-generated content including homebrew, hacking, and hardware modding
• And much more!
 
Although the Game Boy Advance is neither the most powerful nor the most popular of Nintendo's handhelds, Custodio argues, it is the platform that most fundamentally embodies Nintendo's reliance on the aesthetics and materiality of nostalgia.
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  1. Part of series
    Platform Studies
  2. Print length
    248 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publisher
    The MIT Press
  5. Publication date
    October 13, 2020
  6. Dimensions
    6.31 x 0.96 x 9.31 inches
  7. ISBN-10
    0262044390
  8. ISBN-13
    978-0262044394
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Alex Custodio's rich and rewarding take on the Game Boy Advance shows how to innovatively read residuals of media culture. Paying careful attention to both materiality and cultural narratives, Custodio's take offers a must-read for game and media studies while showing how to develop media archaeological research in the contexts of practices such as modding." - Jussi Parikka, University of Southampton, UK, and Academy of Performing Arts, Prague

"With Who Are You?, Alex Custodio gives us an essential, and elegant, addition to platform studies as she deftly moves between the Nintendo Game Boy Advance as it was when it was released in 2001 and the way the portable device has generated nostalgia and innovation over the twenty years since at the hands of hobbyists, tinkerers, and everyday users alike." - Lori Emerson, Associate Professor and Director of the Media Archaeology Lab, University of Colorado Boulder

"Alex Custodio's rich study of Nintendo's design culture delivers a new take on platform studies by considering the Game Boy Advance as a flexible assemblage of technologies and practices. Gunpei Yokoi described Nintendo engineering as 'lateral thinking through withered technology.' Custodio builds on this for critical and historical studies in ways that will fascinate anyone with an interest in game, technology, or media studies." - Henry Lowood, Harold C. Hohbach Curator for History of Science & Technology and Film & Media Collections at Stanford University Libraries

Review

“Alex Custodio’s rich and rewarding take on the Game Boy Advance shows how to innovatively read residuals of media culture. Paying careful attention to both materiality and cultural narratives, Custodio’s take offers a must-read for game and media studies while showing how to develop media archaeological research in the contexts of practices such as modding.”
—Jussi Parikka, Professor, University of Southampton, UK, and Academy of Performing Arts, Prague
 
“With Who Are You?, Alex Custodio gives us an essential, and elegant, addition to platform studies as she deftly moves between the Nintendo Game Boy Advance as it was when it was released in 2001 and the way the portable device has generated nostalgia and innovation over the twenty years since at the hands of hobbyists, tinkerers, and everyday users alike.”
—Lori Emerson, Associate Professor and Director of the Media Archaeology Lab, University of Colorado Boulder
 
“Alex Custodio’s rich study of Nintendo’s design culture delivers a new take on platform studies by considering the Game Boy Advance as a flexible assemblage of technologies and practices. Gunpei Yokoi described Nintendo engineering as ‘lateral thinking through withered technology.’ Custodio builds on this for critical and historical studies in ways that will fascinate anyone with an interest in game, technology, or media studies.”
—Henry Lowood, Harold C. Hohbach Curator for History of Science & Technology and Film & Media Collections at Stanford University Libraries

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ The MIT Press (October 13, 2020)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 248 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0262044390
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0262044394
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.14 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.31 x 0.96 x 9.31 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 out of 5 stars 17 ratings

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Alex Custodio

Alex Custodio

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4.7 out of 5 stars
17 global ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Samuel Green
    5.0 out of 5 stars Very Informative
    Reviewed in the United States on May 1, 2021
    Verified Purchase
    I am a student of the history of technology. I never owned a Game Boy and do not consider myself much of a fan of Nintendo. However this book has caused me to change my mind about them and gave them some respect in my eyes. I can only imagine if you had a gameboy growing up this would be very nostalgic.
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Top reviews from other countries

  • Mr. A. Scheuber
    5.0 out of 5 stars GBA in cultural and intellectual context
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 15, 2021
    Verified Purchase
    Really entertaining book - the best history of the GBA, but more importantly about what it means today in a world of romhacks, hardware mods and retromania.
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