Who Are You?

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.