David Wolinsky Papers now available for research
Video games, Gamergate, Internet history, online communities, social media - and their influences on today’s societal and cultural landscapes - these are but a few of the overarching themes oral historian and documentary researcher David Wolinsky examines in his interviews, the David Wolinsky papers, 2014-2024, a collection now available at Stanford Libraries through the Silicon Valley Archives.
David Wolinsky, formerly an editor with the Onion and NBC News, and a journalist and writer, began his project independently, recognizing a gap in traditional journalism's ability to address emerging issues in digital communities. Diving into the video game industry, Wolinsky interviews game developers, graphic designers and artists, musicians, gamers and streamers, and community managers such as: Atari co-founder Nolan K. Bushnell; Patrice Désilets - creator of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Assassin's Creed; Purple Moon co-founder Brenda Laurel; illustrator Ashley Woods, for Tomb Raider, Marvel, and DC Comics; Vivian Ding, lighting artist for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) and its 2022 sequel; and Senior Community Manager Katie Fleming, gamer and fan fiction writer of Tomb Raider stories. Wolinsky’s conversations with his interviewees encompass everything from game design and development, to employee exploitation, sexism and toxic fandom, as well as the use of games as recruitment tools by the military or for terrorism, ethics and governance, and also cultural sub-genres and online communities not necessarily well-known in the mainstream.
Seeing the spillover effects of the gaming culture on society as a whole, and parallelisms with the entertainment and restaurant industries, Wolinsky throws out his net ever wider with each interview as he finds interconnectedness between them - speaking to cosplayers, filmmakers, food industry experts, journalists, scholars, board game creators, and psychologists to name a few. Wolinsky also looks back at the foundations of the Internet and the online world of today. We learn from conversations with veteran computer scientists, software engineers, and online community managers how their hopes for a more globally-interconnected, libertarian and meritocratic world - has also led to one that has become increasingly siloed, intellectually and culturally fraught, and anonymous in time. A few interviewees in the Wolinsky collection in fact chose anonymity as a result of misogyny, harassment or trauma experienced online - issues David Wolinsky explores when discussing Gamergate, a 2014-2015 online harassment campaign against women in the video game industry.
In an interview with Wolinsky, Henry Lowood, the Harold C. Hohbach Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections, describes how Silicon Valley moved from engineering-related problems into entertainment - producing games industry pioneers such as Bushnell and Al Alcorn of Atari. In an example of how games and computers entwined throughout this region’s history, Steve Wozniak’s creation of the Apple II computer was directly inspired by his work for Atari in designing the arcade video game Breakout. Lowood then sums up, “Silicon Valley’s impact has gone from re-defining the technologies of the world to re-defining culture, that’s been a big theme we’ve been very interested in looking at closely - documenting that history.”
The inclusion of the personal narratives found in the David Wolinsky papers thus bring to the Silicon Valley Archives additional perspectives and voices for researchers to explore at Stanford University. As his research is still on-going, more interviews from David Wolinsky are anticipated to be released over time. Wolinsky’s work also form the basis of his “Don’t Die” website and has led to his recently released book, “The Hivemind Swarmed: conversations on Gamergate, the aftermath, and the quest for a safer Internet” (2024). Consisting of over 500 interviews, representing 650+ recorded hours and 27.8 gigabytes of digital content to date, the Wolinsky collection might have begun with the intention to document the video game industry, but when seen as a collective whole - ends up capturing a large part of Silicon Valley’s history and its subsequent global reach.