Saved Games: Preserving the New TV

The Digital Preservation Project's effort to archive videogames
4/8/2009 6:10 PM | 4 Comments | Page 1 of 4

As more and more people do their research and get their information online, companies have worked to digitally preserve everything they can. From Google's controversial efforts to digitize and archive every book ever written to Hollywood's continuing project to convert its films to bits and bytes, a great percentage of humanity's cultural achievements will soon be saved for future generations.

Ironically, it is the digital achievements that have had the least institutional structure for preservation. Though the Internet Archive has been trying to save Web sites and online discussions for years, only now is there a concerted effort to save the history of computer gaming -- preserving the software, the hardware and the virtual worlds. The International Game Developers Association has released a white paper on how game developers can help preserve their own history. But with so much of gaming history already on the edge of oblivion, four American universities and the Library of Congress have joined forces to archive what they can. And the Digital Preservation Project's game-saving efforts are not as easy as you would think.

Jerome McDonough of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign says that gaming needs to be protected and preserved. "I'd argue that computers are the first really new medium to emerge for artistic endeavor since the creation of television," he says. "What you're seeing today in computer games is the birth of a whole new genre of artistic work. Preserving these early efforts is as important today as it would be to try to preserve Edison's first moving image materials.

"They are a tremendous social phenomenon, as well as a new artistic medium. If we can't preserve computer games and interactive fiction, we can't preserve a very significant part of our modern culture."

Four universities are involved in the Digital Preservation Project, with a couple of corporate partners including Linden Labs, the people behind Second Life. The scholarly approach, with its institutional constraints and measured pace, and the limited budget, mean that they can't save everything. But each school in the project brings a special skill to the table.

"Stanford University Libraries has one of the better collections of computer game material in the country," says McDonough. "The folks at Maryland have longstanding connections with the electronic literature community, which is also very concerned with how this literature will be kept accessible. Andy Phelps and his gang at Rochester Institute of Technology are very interested in problems of virtualization of platforms, and how that might be applied to games in the digital preservation realm. I've been involved in metadata problems (and some other problems) with digital preservation going back five or six years now, from before I was working as a professor here."

It is the collaboration that makes the Digital Preservation Project so potentially powerful. With one of the partner schools right on my doorstep, it only made sense to get a ground-level view of the process and problems of archiving virtual worlds and other digital media.

The Maryland project

Matt Kirschenbaum, a board gamer and a scholar, is sensitive to the role of institutions in preserving our cultural heritage. Kirschenbaum is an English professor at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). "One reason we have cuneiform tablets is that we have big buildings to keep them in, and they aren't lying out in the street. Not everyone has access to them. While there are technological challenges to preserving games, there are also social and institutional challenges to preserving this type of digital media.