[game_preservation] U.S. Crash was Re: Generations standards?

[Martin Goldberg]

On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 12:55 PM, Andrew Armstrong
<andrew at aarmstrong.org> wrote:

> Has anyone actually ever thought to writing up the "definitive" (or at least

> in more depth, with much more information then typically) account of this

> period of game history?


As mentioned, I had been focusing on this period a great deal over the
last year, mainly because of the crossover of the three books I've
been working on.  I was considering writing an article on it as well,
but would certainly be open to working with anyone from this SIG on a
more formal lengthy paper.


>It seems particularly irksome to Americans, from

> this lists own postings! I know that some of the better books are outright

> wrong on this too, we discussed it before, making it hard to track down

> reliable information on this. I don't recall anyone mentioning a resource

> which covered that time period well.


Internal documents, direct interviews, financial coverage of the time,
etc.  These are the only reliable resources I've come across when fact
checking, and they usually involve lots of crosschecking amongst them
regardless (for instance, people's memories tend to falter with age or
some like to rewrite history in their favor).

I stopped using previously published accounts of that period some time
ago, unless it's direct quotes or interviews that I can refer to and
cross reference with.


>

> I mean, the Wikipedia Article (as an example of a resource) is all over the

> place - including being pretty poorly written, and needing proper citation

> material, and is I think even outright wrong or just worded so badly in

> places it is an area that seems to need some more thought.


I tried working on it a number of years ago, most of what I put in was
removed over time.  Wikipedia is a funny beast (I'm heavily involved
on there in the video game project) that kind of hides it's actual
purpose from the general public.  The purpose of the articles on there
are not to become repositories of every info related to the subject,
but rather to reach what's called Good Article (GA) and Featured
Article (FA) status.  To do that, articles must reach a certain
standard which includes multiple peer reviews for content standards,
accuracy, references and reference standards, etc.  An example of a GA
status article is the PONG article.  The problem is, the average
person going to Wikipedia has no clue about this structure and tends
to give equal weight to non-GA status articles, such as with the crash
article you're referring to.


>

> So that possibly needs a rewrite, but then when you get to doing that kind

> of thing you think "why not just write it all up properly?" which is why I

> ask :)

>


That's why I gave up on doing massive rewrites there (I used to do
them).  Became much easier to let others attempt it and fill in the
holes, as well as provide references when they're needed (which is
what I mainly do now).


> Andrew

>



Marty