Do You Want to Save Your Progress?: The Role of Professional and Player Communities in Preserving Virtual Worlds
Kari Kraus is an assistant professor in the College of Information Studies and the Department of English at the University of Maryland. Her research and teaching interests focus on new media and the digital humanities, textual scholarship and print culture, digital preservation, transmedia storytelling, and game studies. She is currently writing a book, under contract to MIT Press, on the role of conjectural methods, counterfactual reasoning, and speculative design in the humanistic disciplines.
Rachel Donahue is a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland iSchool. Her research interests include digital preservation, electronic records management, and intellectual property. She holds an undergraduate degree in English and Illustration and a Master of Library Science with an archives specialization. Rachel is a Research Assistant at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), currently supporting the second phase of the Preserving Virtual Worlds (PVW) project, funded by the IMLS. In the past she worked on the first phase of PVW and the Mellon Foundation funded Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections projects at MITH and had a three year internship with the National Archives and Records Administration's Center for Advanced Systems and Technologies (NCAST), an internal organization created to bridge the gap between advanced research and NARA operations. From 2009 to 2012, she served on the steering committee of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) Electronic Records Section.
This is the source
Almost since the inception of the industry, the player community has been
instrumental in preserving video games and other variable media art. Drawing on a
combination of primary and secondary sources of information, including the Preserving
Virtual Worlds project (an academic investigation into viable models of preservation
for videogames and 3D virtual worlds based on a series of archiving case studies) and
the results of a game documentation survey conducted by Donahue, we examine how
players are taking responsibility for collecting, managing, curating, and creating
long-term access to computer games. Because our interest lies with the contact zone
between players and information professionals, we also describe and analyze how we
and other scholar-archivists are collaborating with or relying on the user community
to preserve virtual worlds, with an eye to how these relationships might eventually
be codified within a larger preservation framework.Do You Want to Save Your Progress?
Preservation Strategies of the Game
Industry, and What Their Users Could Teach Them,
Game preservation with a difference: fans, pirates, and hackers
Production, distribution and consumption of all forms of digital information: text, music, image, video: have all been democratised. So why should the curation of these be any different?
What is an amazing cultural shift — I’m probably exaggerating a little bit — but what we’re looking at is that artworks are going to be preserved because seventeen-year-olds are doing the work of preserving them.
Archives . . . are about dynamic recordmaking, and remaking, re-remaking, over and over again, without end, rather than the traditional record-keeping, looking after and keeping safe some fixed records product as a sacred artifact.
In 2006, Margaret Hedstrom and a team of researchers at the University of Michigan
published the results of an experiment exploring how users evaluate the authenticity
and usability of computer games and other digital materials that have been preserved
through multiple methods. The study found that users tended to prefer playing
emulated and migrated versions of a popular 1980s-era computer game known as Chuckie
Egg over the original version. Arguing the importance of the user's perspective in
archival decision-making, the authors begin and end the paper with a call for further
research into the needs and preferences
of the user community
Participatory culture provides one obvious context in which to consider the rise of
the player archivist and preservationist. In recent years much has been made of the
allegedly stark contrast between amateur and professional culture, and those writing
about it tend to structure the conversation in markedly polemical terms. While
proponents of amateur culture extol the democratization of the means of production,
opponents denounce the decline of subject expertise, certified credentials,
and institutional standards.
permanence through change(museum studies);
transformission: transmission + transformation (textual scholarship); and
preservation through adaptive reuse(architecture).
permanence through changein the context of transmedia narratives. See Ruppel,
advising,
assisting,or
educatingthe latter.
The article is divided into five sections: Part I overviews the primary risks to videogame longevity, including hardware and software obsolescence a mere 5–10 years after a game’s initial release. Part II summarizes what actions are currently being undertaken to preserve videogames by three communities of practice: the videogame industry, the player community, and the information professions. In order to assess the contributions of the first two communities, Donahue administered two surveys designed to reveal where professional and amateur preservation activities intersect with and deviate from one another. Part III introduces the user paradigm of preservation through adaptation, drawing on the example of
data-centricapproach of porting or modding to a
process-centricapproach of rendering the original object through emulation or virtualization.
data-centricand
process-centricapproaches to digital preservation is taken from
While paper records remain potentially accessible for decades and even centuries with no intervention, videogames are subject to hardware and software obsolescence a mere 5–10 years after their release. Prior research into the preservation of electronic records has largely focused on static files created on personal computers, which present far fewer challenges than an interactive piece of software, often designed for use on a proprietary system.
authenticityfor video games that may align better with their complex version histories. See the
A Counter-Friction to the Machine: What Game Scholars, Librarians, and Archivists Can Learn from Machinimists about User Activism.
so what?even though the game might have been revolutionary for its time.
To determine what
Forty-eight individuals from the videogame industry responded to the survey, but only
16 answered every question. Of the respondents, 26 were from companies that had 50 or
more employees, and only 6 of these made it beyond the question, Have you
considered establishing an archives/records management program?
Nine of the 26
responded that they did have a formal program, 15 did not have one, and 2 skipped the
question entirely. Those with formal programs, in both smaller and larger companies,
grouped their records according to project and/or type of asset (e.g. code or
graphic). Figure 1 shows the main divisions of records included
in archives/records management programs.
Comments to this question showed a range of disorganized preservation activity. Some companies indicated using a wiki to manage and preserve their records, many referred to a version control system or code repository, and a few mentioned nightly backup tapes without elaborating on the content of those backups. The most promising comments were from respondents who claimed they used configuration management (CM) processes and policies for all of their major game builds, though not for individual developer materials.
According to Jessica Keyes, CM identifies
which processes need to be documented
and tracks any changes identifies the functional and physical
attributes of software at various points in time and performs systematic control
of changes to the identified attributes for the purpose of maintaining software
integrity and traceability throughout the software development life cycle.
Using a code repository or asset management system is certainly an important part of a good CM plan. And yet, although they were mentioned in an earlier question, only 50% of respondents said they utilized them when asked specifically.
Although 2 respondents said that they did use records schedules, most free-text
responses regarding how permanence is determined displayed a fairly casual attitude
towards preservation. There were many references to item types that were necessary or
reusable being kept, while everything else was tossed, and to materials only being
kept for successful games. Some companies retained related documentation, while
others did not. Storage environments (Figure 3) ranged from
enshrining physical records in an off-limits closet to a hard drive stored under a
developer’s desk. The word whim
in reference to an individual deciding the
fate of records was used more than once.
In summary, there seems to be a tendency within the game industry to make
preservation decisions at the level of the individual developer, with no official
guidance. When Donahue asked the question of a Garage Games developer at Foundations
of Digital Games, he responded, [laugh] We don't.
Other than the source code of a game that ships, we don't care. I just had someone
looking for annotated versions of our tools and we don't have them.
To be
fair, this is explicable. Game developers tend to work with a fixed deadline: the
majority of their income is made in the holiday season, so they need to get releases
out early in the 4th quarter. They also operate on a finite budget, which tends to
mean fewer programmers working more hours–leading to everyone working at too
breakneck a pace to give a thought to what happens to any of the interim
products.
The survey also asked respondents to indicate what kinds of digital and analogue
objects they were preserving (Figure 2). Of the materials listed
in the questionnaire, all categories were saved by at least one company, except for
Game magazines/clippings files.
The most popular categories were source
code and compiled binaries, as well as game assets and artwork, with 85% of
respondents reporting they preserved each of these item types. Following closely
behind at 77% each were design documents and tools developed to support game
creation.
Only 8% saved recordings of game play or machinima (video productions using a game
engine as the recording/acting mechanism). This finding contrasts significantly with
the practice of game players. At the time of this writing, a YouTube search for
speed play game
yields 14,800 videos and game play demo
yields
73,100 results. One example of a user community project,
the most popular or obscuregames.
Of the 12 respondents who answered the preservation tactics question, 7 reported simply saving the files in their original format, 1 migrated to an unspecified preservation format, and 3 transformed files on demand if the game was needed for another reason (such as a re-release) in the future. One respondent went so far as to say that once a game’s platform is gone, the software is, too. Emulation was referenced only as a test platform during development. Responses to the description questions revealed that metadata tends to be captured as unstructured text rather than using a schema or authority list, if it is done at all.
Additional comments support the interpretation that the survey responses reveal a
lack of industry interest in preservation. Many game companies simply are not
concerned with their games beyond the development lifecycle. If the results of this
survey reflect the practices of the industry at large, we are in serious danger of
losing large chunks of our cultural heritage. The concept of benign neglect
can be applied safely to paper records and even some analog audiovisual media — but
apply it to digital objects and they will almost certainly end up in the dustbin as
soon as they go out of active use.
Luckily for future historians, gamers, and students, the player community is very active in preserving the software and artifacts of the games they love. If enthusiasm can be inferred from response rate, the contrast between the community and industry surveys demonstrates very different levels of interest. Recall that 16 people (or 33%) of those answering completed the industry survey, a decent rate of response, according to some. The community, on the other hand, completed the survey 87% of the time, generating 54 full responses, with numerous people emailing that they wished they’d had a chance to take the survey before it closed.
Illustrating the diversity of the community, respondents were split between exclusive collectors of officially released material, and those who collected unreleased as well. Systems that interested them ranged from the Vectrex (1982–84, a home system with built-in display, that used vector graphics rather than the more common raster graphics) and Pong (1972 and after, a single-game console originally popularized in bars) to the PS3 and Wii. Thirty percent collected ephemera, and about half used emulators to play games for systems that interested them. The free text comments on the emulation experience were rich, and, with emulation being a primary access method for obsolete systems, deserve further exploration and analysis in a later study.
The enthusiasts were also asked which websites they regularly visited and/or contributed to, with 77% partaking in both activities. These websites represent a very valuable preservation contribution by the game community. Sites like GameFAQs.com, MobyGames, and Home of the Underdogs (before its unfortunate demise) provide metadata and context information at a level many cataloguers would envy. This data is essentially peer reviewed, as there are scores of well-informed visitors constantly viewing and updating it. Some sites have a formal moderation system for quality control.
Nineteen of the respondents had engaged in preservation activities beyond website
participation. The most common activities were contributing to an emulator, imaging
disks, and restoring/refurbishing hardware (Figure 4). More unusual activities were
designing a preservation architecture,
The archival literature has, relatively speaking, a dearth of
preservation-centered articles for interactive objects. InterPARES (International
Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems) is a series of
projects investigating problems related to the authenticity, reliability, and accuracy of electronic records throughout their
life cycle.
Experiential,
Interactive and Dynamic Records,
its focus was on files generated by
artists, musicians, and scientists, rather than software. Regardless, a repository
looking to preserve videogames would do well to follow the Preserver
Guidelines
laid out in the Project Book
In particular, the oft repeated mantra (in the realm of e-records) of getting involved early in the lifecycle process is important to game preservation. The dangers of obsolescence make it extremely useful to have the source code for games of enduring value. Due to the nature of development and the rapidly changing market, raw source code is more likely to be available before a game is officially released – before it has been compiled into the executable programs we run on our systems at home. Taking a disk image from an official release – making a hardware-independent copy – only provides the binary files, and these are difficult to migrate to other formats should it become necessary. The trouble with binary files is that they obscure the underlying code and are difficult to impossible to decompile. If, however, we have access to the source code, it would allow an enterprising programmer to change small amounts of the code to create a source port to a different operating system. This is somewhat comparable to the value of having negatives vs. photographs; you can do a lot more with the negatives, and the same is true for source code.
An example of the utility of source code is seen in the source ports available at
DoomWorld
This discussion of objects other than binary files brings us to another important guideline laid out by InterPARES 2: identify all digital components. One of the challenges of preserving a videogame is that referring to it in the singular is deceptive. A videogame is actually made up of as many as hundreds of different objects, some of which may be hidden depending on the settings of the operating system one is using to access it. Making sure that every file is identified and every file-type known is an essential part of keeping an accurate record of the program. This is another area where having the source code is helpful. Identifying a file as a binary or executable is essentially useless; all information related to the structure and programming of the file is obscured.
Similar to InterPARES is the Variable Media Network’s questionnaire for new media
artists.
Beyond these two projects, some of the most useful things to come out of the
archival world are standards for metadata and the Open Archival Information System
(OAIS) reference model, which have obvious applications and import for any digital archive.
Having taken a preliminary look at how three different communities of practice
approach the problem of video game preservation, we will now consider preservation
strategies that involve reprogramming, reimplementation, re-creation, and adaptation.
Our contention is that one of the preservation models that governs certain categories
of virtual worlds, such as non-commercial IF, operates under the sign of modification
rather than reproduction.
Consider, for example, the case of
rip outa game behavior are interspersed throughout the source code, and a number of programming decisions have been made with player customization in mind.
It is clear that the MHTO Occupation Force, which commissioned ten contemporary digital artists to mod the game using a specially designed kit for the purpose, sees its reimplementation as an intermediary node in the genealogy of
In its conceptualization and design, the MHTO project reflects a view of authenticity
that Heather MacNeil, archives scholar, ascribes to Heidegger when she argues that
cultural objects are in a continuous
state of becoming
an anticipation, a process, and a continuous
struggle
to become works do not stand still
production-consumption spectrum of the life of the
work,
then it becomes evident that the principle of fixity, which
privileges authorial agency, falls on the production end of the spectrum
It would be a mistake, however, to seize on the apparent oppositions. Where the two approaches converge is in their shared commitment to the continuity of the intellectual object; where they diverge is primarily a function of how much variance each is willing to tolerate in the different manifestations and expressions of the work. Moreover, the two value systems and the preservation strategies through which they are realized often work together rather than at cross-purposes. The player community not only reprograms and modifies classic games, it also develops emulators for them, allowing users to experience the games in an environment that mimics an obsolete platform or operating system and in a form that clones the structure and contents of the original software data files. For this reason the community may be said to be Janus-faced, looking forward to new incarnations of influential or obscure titles while at the same time looking backward to canonical versions and official releases. The availability of
These inter-preservational approaches happen not only synchronically within a single
community, but also diachronically across communities. The patterns of interaction
often resemble those found in architectural preservation, where there is a clear
reciprocity between residents of buildings, on the one hand, and preservationists, on
the other. Writing about the functions and roles that each of these stakeholder
groups assumes, Paul Eggert summarizes the resulting dynamic that unfolds in time:
only adaptive reuse [by generations of
inhabitants] will have put very old buildings in a position to be proposed for
professional conservation and curation in the present
A good example is
Most of the game modifications referenced thus far are the product of what Alan Liu
would call smart constraints
Although primarily focused on the role of smart constraints in the development of
[O]ne day, a few of us wandered into [Crowther's] office so he could show off his program.(my emphasis)It was very crude in many respects – Will was always parsimonious of memory – but surprisingly sophisticated. We all had a blast playing it, offering suggestions, finding bugs, and so forth
twisty little passagesof the Kentucky cave system in his text-based world, the principle of parsimony was already axiomatic. Steven Levy locates its origins in the mainframe computer culture of the 1950s and 60s, when
program bumming,or
the practice of taking a computer program and trying to cut off instructions without affecting the outcome,emerged as its own distinct aesthetic, cast in the crucible of limited physical memory and punchcard media, whose minimal storage capacity created a strong incentive for programmers to make their code as efficient as possible, thereby reducing the size of the program deck
Some programs were bummed to the fewest lines so artfully,Levy notes,
that the author's peers would look at it and almost melt with awe
Parsimony is as much a gamer creed as it is a hacker creed. It is evident in the
subculture of runners
)
who complete a video game as quickly as possible by optimizing the play-through with
no reversals, mistakes, or wasted effort.
The migration of parsimony from the code level to the game level is discernible in
other ways as well. The concept implies not only efficiency, but also economy of
expression, with a less is more
ethos. It is this dimension of parsimony that
game mods based on dumb constraints often reflect. One sees it, for example, in the
readiness of an earlier generation of software pirates to sacrifice seemingly
significant game properties in the interest of low-bandwidth warez
distribution. The resulting game rips, which drained the digital objects of high-end
features such as audio or video,game rips
in full: Pirated programs known as
See also Solveig Singleton, rips,
i.e., programs that have had
superfluous items extracted from it, designed largely for the
bandwidth–impaired . . . are available for file sharers and warez Web sites.
For instance, where a full digital ISO image of a game may be as much as 700 MB
in size, a rip of that game can be far less, once the music and videos from the
game have either been removed or large textures in the game have been
downsampled, i.e., reduced in quality from the original. This can result in a
700 MB file becoming a 70 MB game, which is much more accessible to those who
wish to offer it with their own server space and for downloads on a
low–bandwidth connection. A similar technique is applied to applications,
movies whose underlying premise is of the lossy
MP3 format, which has
acted as a cornerstone file type, elevating audio piracy to its current state
of popularity . . . Game rip releasers often even go the distance, allowing
users to customize their game if they have the bandwidth. A stripped down
version of the game will often be released with its removed components also
made available for download, if desired. Thus, one could download a copy of a
sports game, the music for the game, the movies for the game and in–game
commentary, all separately. This practice is predominant among
newsgroups.Worse is Better
; Keep It Simple,
Stupid
: and The Principle of Good Enough.
As part of the CAMiLEON emulation Project, Margaret Hedstrom and Christopher A. Lee
have defined those properties of
digital objects that affect their quality, usability, rendering, and
behaviour
that must be preserved over time in order to ensure the continued accessibility,
usability, and meaning of the objects
most of
those who use the term would be hard-pressed to define it or say why it is
important,
to date, little research has been undertaken on the
practical application of the concept and approach. It is therefore widely
recognized that there is a pressing need for practical research in this area, to
develop a methodology, and begin identifying quantifiable sets of significant
properties for specific classes of digital object[s]
The convictions of the hacker community offer an interesting counterpoint to such
ambivalence. The manifesto-like intensity with which hackers revere the principle of
all information should be free
The study of such engineering mattersthat includes the
duplicability,
clarity,
legibility,
maneuverability,and
performabilityof the individual units that comprise a notational system, is, Goodman states,
fascinating and [intellectually] profitable
that runs throughout the history of the Atari VCS platform,according to Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost in
the transformative port,especially of arcade games
significantis whatever the target platform can accommodate. Those properties that resist being shoehorned into the new system end up as collateral damage. In the case of the
later VCSre-introducedPac-Man hacks and rebuilds
credible arcade sounds, revised colors, better sprite graphics, and colored fruit.
techno-historicconstraints on game aesthetics, see Andrew Hutchison,
Although a work of variable media art rather than a video game, the history of William Gibson’s
multi-unit artwork,it is difficult to classify, both physically and generically
time-burned,like the photo album described in Gibson’s poem, which functions as the central node of the work. Inside are etchings by Ashbaugh and double columns of DNA that ostensibly encode the genome of a fruitfly
a trope,notes Matthew Kirschenbaum,
that manifests itself as a photograph album, a Kodak camera, a pistol, and a traffic light, as well as in less literal configurations
tumbled boards and offcutsare pictured in an old photograph
would need to send two copies to the Library of Congress. To classify it, they . . . [would] have to read it, and to read it, they . . . [would have to] destroy it.
Rosehammerand another that of
Templar, secretly video-recorded a live public performance of
the Hells Angels of Cyberspace,according to Wikipedia, where it was readily available for download and quickly proliferated across the web.
What,he asks,
were Rosehammer and Templar to[my emphasis]do with their bootleg video
In 1992, of course, uploading the actual footage to the Internet would have been impossible to contemplate from the standpoint of storage and bandwidth (let alone with available means of playback). Therefore, just the text of Gibson’s poem was manually transcribed and posted to the MindVox BBS as a plain-text ASCII file, which allowed it to propagate rapidly across bulletin boards, listservs, newsgroups, and FTP sites. Today, however, the footage would have undoubtedly been posted direct to YouTube, Google Video . . . or some other streaming media site, eliminating the need for scribal mediation. It is worth remarking, then, that the brilliant act of low-tech, manual, and analog transcription through which Rosehammer and Templar accomplished theirhackofAgrippa (analog video copied by hand as text) ineluctably datesAgrippa as the product of a certain technological moment at the cusp between old and new media.
In the final analysis, network throughput served as the arbiter of significant properties, forcing the hackers to attempt to distill
semi-autobiographicalpoem. If this austere version seems wholly incapable of functioning as a proper surrogate for the original, then it’s worth underscoring the role it played in bringing about the revival of
These materials . . . offer a kind of closure to anyone who, like me, has ever stumbled across the text ofAgrippa on the open net and wondered, but how did it get there? Those mechanisms are now known and documented. So we take satisfaction in the release of these newAgrippa files (as it were) to scholars and fans alike, and we marvel that after sixteen years in the digital wild a frail trellis of electromagnetic code once designed to disappear continues to persist and to perform.
The example of
There is a need for memory institutions interested in establishing video game
repositories to support policy positions and offer services that are better
aligned with the preservation and use practices of the game community, not only
because of the potential for integrating the members of this community into the
larger preservation network, but also because their attitudes and values may well
influence those of professional archivists in years to come. With their deep
curatorial investment in games, players have adopted a versatile set of approaches
for collecting, managing, and providing long-term access to these cultural
artifacts. While bitstream preservation and emulation are an essential part of the
overall picture to which gamers have made enormous contributions, so too are
re-releases, remakes, demakes, ports, mods, and ROM hacks.Remake
and demake
are game design terms coined by Ian Bogost. As
defined by Bogost, remakes are recreations of earlier works, irrespective of the hardware platform of
original creation or recreation.
Conversely, demakes are retro-inspired reimaginings of modern games, as if they had been created on
earlier hardware. Demakes are not necessarily created to run on older
machines, but their design and behavior are constrained by the real or
perceived constraints of vintage systems.
See Bogost’s spring 2010
syllabus for Archives in the wild
is a phrase coined by Jeremy John, et al. in the
British Library’s softer
view of authenticity that underlies these
strategies operates at what Seamus Ross would call a lower threshold of verisimilitude
What policy initiatives and preservation services might be adopted in response to the needs, practices, and perspectives of players and player-archivists? We propose the following:
In addition to providing authenticated capture, ingest, hashing, and storage
services for archival copies of games, digital repositories might also offer
appropriate services for access copies of games in the wild. Because these
copies are often modified rather than fixed representations and in line with
the softer
canons of authenticity previously mentioned, repositories
could provide users and player-archivists with the means to analyze, document,
and measure their inter-relationships using similarity metrics and other
approaches.
Applying the techniques of digital stemmatics, archivists could help users
visualize and interpret these patterns in sophisticated ways. Developed in the
19th Century, stemmatics codified a set of methods for analyzing the filiation
of literary manuscripts. Significantly, the tree structures representing these
relationships have parallel importance in evolutionary biology and historical
linguistics, where they are used to group genomes or languages into families;
show how they relate to one another in genealogical terms; and reconstruct lost
archetypes future
researchers will be able to create phylogenetic networks or trees from
extant personal digital archives, and to determine the likely composition of
ancestral personal archives and the ancestral state of the personal digital
objects themselves
Stemmatic methods have already been applied to board games: Joseph Needham, a
pioneering historian of East Asian science, technology, and culture, published
a family tree of board games connecting divination, liubo, and chess through a
long line of ancestry and descent
Two other tools cited recently by Jeremy John are also relevant in this context:
Because game archives in the wild cannot usually be authenticated according to
standard integrity checks, an alternative method for evaluating the
authenticity of their holdings might involve the application of trust-based
information. Jennifer Golbeck, for example, has demonstrated how the trust
relationships expressed in web-based social networks can be calculated and used
to develop end-user services, such as film recommendations and email filtering
In her book
jeopardizing our future,as author Mark Bauerlein would have it
Game design isn’t just technological craft,she says,
it’s a twenty-first-century wayof collaborating, thinking, problem-solving, and changing attitudes and behavior
creative solutions to our most urgent social problems
through planetary-scale collaboration
none of them,McGonigal has remarked, in referring to the entire universe of MMO and video games, not just her own,
have saved the real world yet.
Or
Vincent Joguin, an expert in computer emulation, was an avid gamer and demoscene
programmer in the 1990s, producing so-called modularity
in this context means that a range of standard hardware
components have each been individually emulated, creating a collection of
mini-emulators that in theory can be combined and extended in myriad ways to mimic
almost any imaginable computer architecture. Joguin’s signature contribution,
however, is a virtual computer small and simple enough to be continuously ported
to new platforms. One virtue of Olonys, as the system is called, is that it in
effect liberates emulators such as Dioscuri from hardware-specific environments,
allowing them to execute on any computer. It thus addresses one of the great
paradoxes of preservation through emulation: the need to create meta-emulators to
run already existing emulators, whose host systems will themselves expire in
time.
In its broad strokes, the trajectory of Joguin’s career – from video game
enthusiast to programmer hobbyist to dedicated digital preservationist – is
recapitulated in the trajectories of countless numbers of players, who over the
last two decades or more have been modeling community-driven practices and
solutions to collecting, documenting, accessing, and rendering video games,
arguably the most culturally resonant digital artifacts of our time. As we have
seen, there is no shortage of preservation challenges with which to contend: bit
rot, the scourge of technological obsolescence; the parasitic reliance of software
programs on code libraries supplied by the operating system and other software
packages; and the growing number of digital collections sitting on shifting foundations of silicon, rust,
and plastic
as one writer has ominously expressed it
To speak of the contribution of gamers exclusively in the future tense, however,
is to fail to do justice to the scope and ingenuity of their accomplishments thus
far, as demonstrated in this paper. The
internet is populated with legions of amateur digital archivists,
archaeologists, and resurrectionists,
wrote Stewart Brand of the Long
Now Foundation more than a decade ago They track down the
original code for lost treasures such as
It is no accident that this tribute to the heroic efforts of the player community comes at the conclusion of a chapter entitled
digital black hole.The import of his message is clear: for love of space invaders and bonus fruits, of rescuing the girl and fighting and defeating the boss; for love of treasure, power-ups, and sprites; for love of all these things, players have been inspired to save our video game inheritance. But in the process of salvaging these fragile 8-bit worlds, they have also helped save some of the real world. Like the technology trees found in popular strategy games, where the acquisition of one technology is dependent on that of another, the solution to any of the superthreats conjured by McGonigal, from pandemics to fuel shortages to mass exile, is predicated on methods for reliably transmitting legacies of knowledge from one generation to the next. When those legacies are encoded as bitstreams, it is video game players who have been in the vanguard of figuring out how to do it, bolstering McGonigal’s assertion that gamers are a precious
human resource that we can use to doreal-worldwork
Games can save the world,
Jane McGonigal
emphatically tells us.
Jane, they already have.
The Old Version Flickers More: Digital Preservation from the User's Perspective.
Picking Our Text: Archival Description, Authenticity and the Archivist as Editor.
Adventurein Code and in Kentucky