[game_preservation] Ian Bogost on the 'thingness' of games

[Devin Monnens]

Ian Bogost recently gave a keynote in DiGRA on videogames and ontology. In
it, he argues that videogames may be defined as a multitude of things, from
code to plastics to experiences to cultural phenomena.
http://www.bogost.com/writing/videogames_are_a_mess.shtml

I believe this brings up an interesting question that we've encountered a
few times in our discussions: what is it that we are preserving?

Is this question made any easier to answer once we consider videogames as a
multiplicity of objects? Obviously, not all of these elements are
preservable. Maybe we don't want to preserve some of these elements anyway.
Or maybe this gives us many things we would like to preserve but are unable
to preserve them all.

Can we apply this to a case study, such as the preservation of Doom, by
breaking Doom into a multiplicity of objects?

-- 
Devin Monnens
www.deserthat.com

The sleep of Reason produces monsters.
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