Saved Games: Preserving the New TV
The Digital Preservation Project's effort to archive videogames
4/8/2009 6:10 PM | 4 Comments | Page 3 of 4
Context will be preserved largely through descriptions of the game and the environment in which it appeared. Donohue cites "contemporary reviews, articles, playthroughs [and] speedruns" as examples. The rapidly expanding academic and retail literature on gaming, Kirschenbaum notes, helps situate what they research. "What we are doing is not happening in a vacuum. It's not necessarily the case that we need to explain what
Second Life is from the ground up. This is a two-year exploratory project, after all."
The art and hassle of archiving
The Preservation Project has run into a number of problems unrelated to technology or finding material to save. Donohue points to its experiences with
Mindwheel, an adventure game that was co-written by Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, as a sign of how murky the intellectual property rights could be.
"Synapse Software has changed hands so many times that it is relatively unclear who precisely owns
Mindwheel at this point. It was bought by one company that sold some of its assets to another company who sold some of those assets. Most of the people we've gotten in touch with only say that they don't support the product anymore, so we have to go by the active license -- [it's] really a form letter."
UIUC's Jeremy McDonough does not see the IP rights as a serious long-term problem, however. "Libraries have managed to preserve works without running afoul of intellectual property law in the analog realm for some time.
Second Life does present a slightly more complicated case than many, in that users retain IP rights over their creations (rather than it all ending up the property of Linden Lab). That means that archiving any significant chunk of
Second Life means a large number of individual negotiations for permission to copy. We're currently working on software to help speed the process of identifying rights holders within a particular island of
Second Life and engaging in discussions to enable preservation. So, games can be complicated in terms of their IP, but actually not much more so than films and television."
The only game from a poet laureate and one of Maryland's core preservation efforts.
For McDonough, the big impediment to preservation is Congress's 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which limits who can copy a work, and how. Libraries and archives must apply for exemptions from the DMCA.
"If we can't copy a digital work legally, there's no way we can preserve it; all media die eventually," McDonough notes. "While the DMCA provides for exemptions, forcing the library world to continually reapply for exemptions -- to engage in what should be routine preservation activity -- places a significant burden on libraries to no particularly good end.
"Technological protection measures [e.g., DRM], combined with the DMCA's prohibitions against circumventing such measures -- even to engage in preservation copying -- are a particularly problematic combination when trying to preserve computer games. As a result, it's actually proving easier for us to contemplate preserving games from computing's early history (
Spacewar! and
Adventure) than some of the more recent games."
Maryland's Doug Reside takes a more pragmatic approach to the problem. "As of yet, there aren't any standards for digital preservation the way there are for paper preservation -- even beyond games, for archiving things like email or Word documents. Add to that the complexity of preserving something interactive and graphical. With DRM." Because the problems with the "boring records" on the Internet haven't been settled yet, the archiving community hasn't even come up with a general approach to how game or virtual world preservations should be done. There are only a few "best practices" in place that everyone can agree on.
