Raiford Guins
Professor and Director of Cinema and Media Studies, Adjunct Professor in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering
Contact Information
Research and Creative Interests
- Design History & Culture
- Industrial Design & Graphic Design
- Game History & Preservation
- Life Histories of Objects & Material Culture
- History & Philosophy of Technology
- Cultural History & Museums
Biography
I am a Leeds United supporter… “Until The World Stops Going Round” MOT/ALAW/WACCOE
For my side-hustle I am a Director and Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the Media School, Indiana University. I also co-edit the MIT Press Game Histories Book Series with Henry Lowood. In broad strokes, I study technological artifacts and their material lives from the vantages of design, philosophy, history of technology, and material culture studies. I’m undisciplined (a byproduct of being trained by British intellectuals involved with the mixed-disciplinary experimental journal, Block, and who taught their unique version of Cultural Studies in an Art History department at the University of Leeds in the 1990s… and it was beautiful!)
I recently finished writing a trade book entitled, King PONG: How Atari Bounced Across Markets to Make Millions, for MIT Press. Publication expected in Spring 2026. And now I am in the early stages of researching a new book tentatively titled, Museum Games: Journeys Across the Globe in Search of Playable Media. Beyond that I have aspirations to (finally) write a book on music (early to mid-1980s NYC Electro), a cultural history of DayGlo color, and a theoretical fiction on vinyl collecting (think Hornby’s High Fidelity meets Swedish death cleaning). Like Felix the Cat, my interests are a mixed bag of tricks…
I have written the following books: Feeling Leeds: Notes on Loving a Football Club from Afar (Pitch Publishing, 2022); Atari Design: Impressions on Coin-Operated Video Game Machines (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020); Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife (MIT Press, 2014); Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control (University of Minnesota Press, 2009); and co-edited EA Sports FIFA: Feeling The Game (with Henry Lowood and Carlin Wing, Bloomsbury, 2022); Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon (with Henry Lowood, MIT Press, 2016); The Object Reader (with Fiona Candlin, Routledge, 2009); and Popular Culture: A Reader (with Omayra Zaragoza Cruz, Sage, 2005). Lastly, I served as the general editor for this collection on Henry Lowood’s works: Replayed: Essential Writings on Software Preservation and Game Histories (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
My writings on game history appear in many journals and magazines including: American Journal of Play, Cabinet, Design Issues, Design and Culture, Game Studies, Journal of Design History, Journal of Visual Culture, Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, and ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories. Many of my articles can be downloaded via academia.edu
On, On, On!