Saved Games: Preserving the New TV
The Digital Preservation Project's effort to archive videogames
4/8/2009 6:10 PM | 4 Comments | Page 2 of 4
"If you think preserving games and virtual worlds is a sexy, adventurous thing for the Library of Congress to be involved in, you're right," he jokes. "Most of the grant program that is funding us is for preserving state records and things like that."
Setting the processes and priorities has proven to be challenging, even "arbitrary and opportunistic," says Kirschenbaum. With only two years of funding from the Library of Congress, the schools could not do everything -- so they adopted a case study approach, choosing significant historical milestones such as the original
Spacewar! (1962), often considered the first videogame. When Stanford University discovered the original tapes for the William Crowther game
Adventure (1975), which is in the public domain, it became a natural starting point for Maryland's emphasis on interactive fiction and virtual worlds.
If a game was played on teletype, do you need the teletype to get the full experience?
Games to be archived were also chosen for the technical problems they presented, argues Douglas Reside, one of Kirschenbaum's colleagues. Not all of
Second Life can be preserved, so only a couple of its islands will be preserved as examples. "The challenges there are very different from the challenges presented by
Adventure, which developed in a multi-author way over the course of a decade," he says. "The game was originally played on something like a teletype, and then ported to a number of different platforms. Then you have
Mindwheel, which was in shrink-wrapped boxes for five different platforms, but development stopped with the commercial release."
Kirschenbaum also sees the project as research into the very nature of archival work. With so many different types of games to archive, it quickly became apparent that there would be no "silver bullet" for preservation. Formal similarity between games did not mean that they could be saved in the same way. And emulation, the most familiar form of preserving digital entertainment, is not the same as preserving the original game experience. Saving multi-authored experiences like
Adventure and
Second Life requires ways of reflecting both the process of change and the core experience itself.
"For
Second Life," Kirschenbaum says, "we are using videography of the world. That's where the Internet Archive comes in. We're also experimenting with collecting the data that gets passed from the server to the client, and using XML to recreate a 3-D environment. Theoretically, that would allow someone in 50 or 100 years to create an avatar and walk around the world. It wouldn't, however, allow social interactions. But we have the video for that."
For the Maryland team, this is not about preserving games as much as it is about preserving the gamer experience. They are expanding to the preservation of what Kirschenbaum calls "paratextual materials" -- walkthroughs, FAQs and other user-created content that is unavoidably part of the game space. Rachel Donohue, a graduate student attached to the program, argues that this sort of approach is crucial to a real archive.
The most famous game in the world is on Stanford's list.
"This goes toward the archival concept of context," she says. "You have a game and it can stand in isolation, but to understand if it had an impact on society you really need the external information." She points to
DOOM, a game that Stanford is working on preserving, as an example. It was, after all, endlessly modded and adapted, and this very customization was what put it at the center of the Columbine Massacre argument.
