[game_preservation] Game developers memorial page?

[Henry Lowood]

Devin,

This is a superb idea.  I doubt anyone will have anything negative to 
say about the idea; the only issue is really how we implement 
it?  Any thoughts on that?  Devin, would you be willing to take the 
lead?  Andrew Armstrong is the wiki editor for the SIG, and I'm sure 
he would be willing to provide guidance.   Also, the group should 
probably agree on a rough format or perhaps a procedure for getting 
appropriate names on the page.

Henry

At 02:27 PM 1/21/2008, Captain Commando wrote:

>To all on the Preservation SIG (and whoever is listening in),

>

>Every once in awhile, we hear something through the community that 

>the games industry has lost another one of their own. Now in the 

>film industry, they usually have a short memorial service for those 

>who passed on during the past year at the Oscars. I e-mailed Jason 

>Della Rocca about this and turns out the Developers Choice Awards 

>used to do this but they don't anymore (incidentally, just the GANG 

>- game audio - awards does this anymore, and that ceremony is really 

>worth going to). I'm also told the Developers Choice Awards actually 

>isn't run by IGDA, so will have to ask them directly about why they 

>are no longer running a memorial service.

>

>Well, we think it's a good idea to set up a memoriam style page on 

>the IGDA wiki so we can keep track of who we've lost and remember 

>them. While this message may somewhat ironically be going through 

>the Preservation SIG (preserving memories as well as games?), we're 

>already pretty active. I think building some sort of page like this 

>might help bring the community together a bit more and say that 'you 

>know, we remember who you guys are, and even if you weren't 

>household names or we haven't listed everyone, we know you guys 

>existed and what a good part you were of the game development 

>community.' So I'm going to propose that we start building one.

>

>I also bring this up because among the recently departed are not 

>videogame industry professionals (and technically, we should really 

>be calling it the International VIDEOGame Developers Association as 

>despite the welcome appearance of guys like Steve Jackson, the GDC 

>doesn't seem to have much to do with paper-based games). Ron Knerr, 

>inventor of the Hula Hoop and 'publisher' of the Frisbee also passed 

>on as did Bobby Fischer, the chess champion.

>

>I think when we are talking about remembering game developers, we 

>need to consider what the Games part of the IGDA means. Are we just 

>videogame developers or do we speak for board games and card games 

>as well? We tend to ignore these a lot because they aren't as 

>publicized or don't make as much money as videogames do, but they're 

>still important and they're still out there. And even if the IGDA is 

>really only encompassing just the videogames part, I think the 

>memorial page should at least in some part recognize those 

>communities as they really do influence how we make games in digital space.

>

>Any thoughts?

>

>-Devin Monnens

>

>--

>The sleep of Reason produces monsters.

>

>"Until next time..."

>Captain Commando

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Henry Lowood
Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections;
      Germanic Collections; Film & Media Collections
HRG, Green Library
557 Escondido Mall, Stanford University Libraries
Stanford CA 94305-6004 USA
lowood at stanford.edu; 650-723-4602
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