[game_preservation] game review websites

[Simon Carless]

Hey guys,

On the point of preserving game review websites and other media related 
to this, there's somewhat of a double-pronged attack already in place:

- the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which tries to preserve _all_ 
websites on the Internet in some form, has webpages going back to 1996. 
Sites can exclude themselves by changing their robots.txt file, but 
there's definitely plenty of material in there which is no longer 
available, and is important. However, because of the mass of 
information, this part of the Archive's operations work on the 'archive 
everything, exclude on request' mantra, something that the material that 
I'm working on does _not_ do. Nevertheless, it would be a good idea for 
somebody to go through and find good Wayback-archived review/official 
sites that no longer exist. In fact, I'm thinking about setting up a 
Wiki for this! So stay tuned.

- things like video footage from sites can be archived with permission 
from the site, and I've done this on behalf of the Internet Archive for 
some of the more indie sites, like Kikizo Games, and also 
goodcowfilms.com. Unfortunately, big sites like GameSpot won't really 
want the entirity of their video content mirrored right now, because 
they make money from getting people to stick on their site and pay for 
extra/existing content. But all things in good time - we're already 
getting a lot of good relevant video content from the above entities.

On another tack, the Preservation SIG, and related people, just got a 
very nice write-up in, of all places, The Hollywood Reporter:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/columns/video_games_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000663278

It's intelligently done, but interviewing with Paul Hyman reminded me 
about how relatively disorganized this effort still is. I should point 
out that at least we've been organized enough to _SET UP_ the SIG, which 
is significantly more organized than anyone else has been so far, heh. 
We have the profile, so we'd be silly not to act on it.

As perhaps I've mentioned, the first thing I'm going to try to do is set 
up this 'Preservation Consortium' under the auspices of the IGDA, and 
then we can 'officially' archive all of the great CAPS Project disc 
images, privately, at the Internet Archive. This'll help us a lot in 
bulk. Then we should take a good look about where we should go from 
there. Both Jason Della Rocca and Jesse Schell have had some excellent 
suggestions, and the SIG's idea is to _co-ordinate_ external efforts, so 
if everyone works on what they're doing, in their own corner, then we 
won't be impeding progress as we look for ways to, wait for it, synergize.

Thanks for all your patience, all,
Simon.