[game_preservation] Long-Term Storage

[Captain Commando]

> Yes, but I'm thinking of a little smaller set of 'whys,' rather than a big

> 'Why', and I think this gets to some of the issues your'e thinking about

> with respect to context.  If I'm preserving a game to inform scholars in the

> future about the programming techniques used by the late 20th century gaming

> industry, it implies a fair different emphasis on what I'd collect and

> attempt to preserve than if I'm trying to inform scholars about the emergent

> community practices of MMORPGs.  Both of these would situations would also

> differ somewhat from what I might try to collect and preserve if all I want

> to do is ensure on-going access to working copies of the games.

>

> It's one of the truisms of the preservation world that preservation without

> access is pointless, but we need to have discussions of the various reasons

> people will want to access this content in the future (or at least some

> reasonable guesses on our part) to help plan out collecting activities.



Ok. I suppose then we should be thinking about who will be interested in
this 80 years from now rather than who will be interested in it now. We have
a tendency to only be interested in what games are out now and think of each
new game as a positive step forward where the games of today are always
better than those of the past. As a result, most gamers seem to have little
interest in older games, unless it's through nostalgia.

Myself, I am interested in preserving games primarily so they can be
accessed - so they can be played. For the player perspective, this requires
telling me a little bit on what the game is about, what 'genre' of game it
is, what it plays on, how to get it to run. As well as documentation on tips
for playing the games. Part of this also requires information on what are
the 'top games' in each category or the 'most significant games' or 'games
of interest.' So the games that were deemed most fun to play, but also the
ones that produced something interesting for the medium, even if they were
spectacular failures. So the question for the player is, 'what do I want to
play,' 'how do I play it,' and 'how do I find out what I might be interested
in playing?'

I am also interested in another perspective, a contextual or
critical-analytical perspective: who made the game, when was it made, what
were the circumstances around its creation, and what else did these people
work on? Historically, this can also help tell us a lot about how games have
evolved over time and why they were made the way they were. A lot of this
information is recorded in Mobygames.

There are also the questions of how the game was made, and this requires
names of developers, understanding of how games were made for the platform,
analyzable code, descriptions of what work was like.

I assume there are many other people who would be interested in games, and
so there are other questions you would have to think about - and then 'how
do I preserve the games to provide the information I need?.' And again, with
the exception perhaps of barebones 'can you play it?' I don't know if all
this information has to be 100% for every single entry - though obviously
for the most important titles, it should be as complete as possible.
Mobygames was only possible through the work of hundreds of people, same as
the compilation of Gamefaqs strategy guides (though these aren't always
reliable), and even these are incomplete.

I also want to add that finding out what you want to archive and how to
archive it is just as important as organizing the archive - how are you
going to identify each artifact and how can the entire archive system be
standardized so that two different archives can share the same information?


But for larger data stores focused on preservation, I think the driving

> factors are going to be speed of access (I don't want to have to migrate a

> petabyte of data that's on tape) and the ability to detect when something's

> wrong (the computer can tell me when a drive has gone belly up and needs a

> replacement, but it can't tell me anything about a tape on the shelf).

>


This is also important for personal collections! I've gotten a small taste
of what it would be like to copy large numbers of files from disc backup to
hard drive by going through a whole spindle. I've done this early to perform
data migration from CD to DVD, but if you're doing multiple DVDs, this takes
much longer - not to mention the troubles of organizing things. I have been
using a free program called ycopy, which unlike the Windows bulk copying
tool will copy every file over that it can and make a note of the files it
was unable to copy due to corruption and not shut down if it fails to copy
one file in the middle fo the process.


The sleep of Reason produces monsters.

"Until next time..."
Captain Commando
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