[game_preservation] game review websites

[Andreas Lange]

Hello Martin,

yes this is an good idea. specially because it is highly unsure, what 
will happen to such material if the reviewed games become older or the 
site closes. it would be good to have someone in charge who try to 
preserve such important documents. there are also a lot more documents 
which would be worth to be preserved. think at the artwork at the boxes, 
the manuals, the walkthroughs, marketing material, recorded game plays 
and for sure the games itself. it is not that all this material isn’t 
collected now. there exist a lot of great archives - hobbyists and 
professional ones. the problem is the accessibility of such collections.
without a few exceptions all this material is copyrighted. so it needs 
some work of persuading to make the material available to a wider public 
lets say for educational purposes.
therefore I suggest to consider the foundation of an international 
coalition for the preserving of digital games. if it would be successful 
to agree with the most relevant players in this field (means the 
developers, the license holders, academia and the archivists) on a 
structure and a mission of such a construct it would be much more easier 
to approach the ones who own relevant material.
together with Henry Lowood from Stanford we drafted a first concept of 
how such a coalition could be described. if you are interested you can 
download it here:
http://www.digitalgamearchive.org/works/InternationalCoalitionforPreservingDigitalGames_1.rtf

it might look like the creation of a big administrative overhead. and 
yes, it surely needs some efforts to realize such a plan. but the reason 
I suggest it is just realism. we know from our own experience as from 
others that it is a sisyphus work to individually approach the lisence 
holders for each piece of IP they own. IMHO it could be worth to invest 
a certain amount of efforts in the founding of such an initiative if the 
result will be a much easier access to the material which is relevant 
for research purposes. what do you think?


best, andreas


Andreas Lange
DiGA e.V. - The Digital Game Archive
www.digitalgamearchive.org
phone: +49 (0)30 55155773
fax: +49 (0)30 55155772




martin reimer schrieb:
> I think it would be a good idea to try and contact some of the online
> game review websites like gamespot.com and ign.com to try and leverage
> their game reviews and images. It would really put use ahead if we
> could use their assets since these sites have thousand of screen shots
> and videos. It would be helpfull to collect the reviews as well since
> it gives gamers an insight as to how the game plays and was actually
> reviewed at the time of release, instead of us going back now and
> reviewing it from todays stand point. Can who ever is in charge here
> write a little email saying that we are a non-profit educational group
> trying to preserve video games etc..
> 
> Martin Reimer
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