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

[Andrew Armstrong]

I mean to post up a report on the IGDA Preservation SIG wiki on our 
presentation at DiGRA actually. For those interested, I made lots of 
notes on the sessions I attended: http://aarmstrong.org/notes/digra-2009

One of the things we discussed between ourselves was, to a point, 
exactly this: a multitude of "questions we dare not ask". I am sure all 
history and preservation people deal with this too (in fact I should try 
and get in contact with some of them to gather consensus from what they 
work on! Perhaps Tom Wooley knows more about this since he works in a 
multimedia museum). Dan Pinchbeck suggested a meeting between everyone 
for a day at one location so things like this could be discussed - he 
might try and get some money to cover people's travel, and it'd be 
awesome to lay out things like this with some discussion.

As for the question "what to preserve" specifically? It's difficult, 
everyone thinks one thing is more important then another. There isn't 
unlimited space (although many places are on a "we'll accept anything of 
given quality we don't have some copies of already" but think in 10 
years or so if that'll be true still). I personally don't know the 
answer, although sometimes you can have a historical record of something 
without the actual item - the record of things with photographs, scans 
and metadata might prove useful for space saving. Volunteer time is 
another big one too - even with the items, it is a choice between what 
to restore, present, research and archive depends on the time you have. 
Some guidelines would be good - beyond the simple "if it is rare/one 
off, it is usually worth preserving", since I'd hope this is mainly 
obvious (depending on the item).

Tetris might be a nice one to do actually for the "multiplicity of 
objects" mainly because DiGRA had a presentation by a (I think non-games 
researcher) on basically "What is Tetris?":

http://aarmstrong.org/notes/digra-2009/evolution-of-the-tetromino-stacking-game-an-historical-design-study-of-tertris

It's interesting because it was an early game, it had direct and 
indirect influences, it has a strange story on the "IP" angle and other 
things too. I got permission to put his paper online so I'll get it on 
the IGDA site at least. Doom is a good choice too, certainly in some 
ways more "limited" - it influenced other things, but no real direct 
copycats and since it wasn't released as long ago there is, 
statistically, less there. The ET example in Ian's keynote again is 
another one - certainly "easier" to determine "what" it is, except that 
"what" changes constantly even for such a one off game.

Also, Ian's keynote went basically *woosh* for most of it, being very 
hard to follow for me personally (them start and middle mainly was the 
problem - the last bit makes sense). It being down on a page is a lot 
easier to follow :)

I'm also infused with energy to get the bibliography work to a point I 
can get a prototype up and running, since the researchers themselves 
admitted they find it hard to find research material - usually, it 
appears by most accounts, it is "find a similar paper, and look at the 
references, then look at those references", and so forth. Not that the 
project is just for research papers of course, but as a mass of content 
in themselves, they're mainly top of the pile.

Andrew

Devin Monnens wrote:

> 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 <http://www.deserthat.com>

>

> The sleep of Reason produces monsters.

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