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

[Devin Monnens]

Actually, while we're on the topic, I assume we've got a detailed report on
Videogame Nation in Manchester? The exhibit is closing on the 14th of
September. I just read an article on it in Retro Gamer, and was surprised to
see that many objects in the exhibit had been donated by developers
(including original artwork from Broken Sword donated by Charles Cecil of
Revolution Studios). This was exactly the kind of thing we were talking
about in the White Paper, and I wanted to know if anyone had done a case
study on this to see how the developers were contacted for donations and
what level of value these objects had to the developers themselves and the
reasons why they decided to donate. This could be coupled with analysis of
the Get Lamp project as well as the Wing Commander documentaiton project.
Along the lines of what to preserve, maybe there's two parts - one being
defining what all aspects of a game could be preserved or documented, and
the other being which area does the archive want to focus on. You can't
preserve everything because eventually you have to find a place to focus on.
You can either do a poor job at trying to save lots of things or you can do
a good job specializing in one area. That's my idea at least. Who knows with
digital, but I can certainly see it from the research and analysis side of
things (not all archives are going to have a detailed collection of curated
text adventure game materials).

On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 9:59 AM, Andrew Armstrong <andrew at aarmstrong.org>wrote:


>  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

>

> The sleep of Reason produces monsters.

>

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-- 
Devin Monnens
www.deserthat.com

The sleep of Reason produces monsters.
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