Saved Games: Preserving the New TV
The Digital Preservation Project's effort to archive videogames
4/8/2009 6:10 PM | 4 Comments | Page 4 of 4
This gets especially complicated for those early games that shipped with tchotchkes that were often used as either copy protection or as central parts of the gaming experience. Even if this experience can be preserved at the physical archive, it cannot be perfectly replicated at remote locations that may have online access to the archive materials. What can be preserved, and who is the prospective user of these archives? Future game designers may be interested in the games just for tracking influences, where future scholars may be very interested in the material history of the hobby, making preservation of working hardware integral to the preservation of the software.
Looking ahead
So much depends on the project's next step. The existing grant has a two-year term, but McDonough is confident that the Library of Congress is committed to this project. "If, at the end of those two years, we've identified practical methods for trying to preserve computer games and interactive fiction," he says, "I think we can build on what is essentially a research initiative, and moving that knowledge forward into practical use. Both Stanford and UIUC have gaming collections, and I think gearing up our libraries' preservation programs to handle these materials would be a good idea."
At Maryland, Kirschenbaum is already thinking of the next step in his preservation efforts. "MOOs and MUDs," he says. "They're the natural bridge between interactive fiction on the one side and virtual worlds on the other. It's not that we don't think they are important; we just don't have the time or resources right now. Those would present some interesting and unique problems.
"We also want to look into establishing more formal relationships with the amateur preservation community on the Web (MAME developers, the abandonware community) and bring them in, in a more organized way."
Rachel Donohue wants to take the project in the other direction, engaging the publishers and developers with preservation in a more direct way. "I've talked to a few people in the industry, and, you know, they just don't do it. They don't worry about records management on the design side, only what they are legally required to keep on the business side. I think that's really tragic."
Left out of this discussion, of course, is the average gamer community. This is an archival project, and not an effort to make out-of-print games or materials as easily available as out-of-print books or public-domain written work. But for game researchers, developers and serious students of the industry, this joint effort by the American government and various academic and business partners is an important first step in saving what can be saved and how it can best be kept for future analysis. Once best practices are in place, it should be easier for archivists all across the country to contribute in their own small way.
