Who Are You? by Alex Custodio

Who Are You? by Alex Custodio

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.

Alex Custodio is a scholar, writer, and artist living in Montreal.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780262044394
ISBN 10	0262044390
Title	Who Are You?
Author	Alex Custodio
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	MIT Press Ltd
Year published	2020-10-13
Number of pages	248
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.