[game_preservation] Value in archive website?

[Mceniry, Matthew]

In addition to all of this you could reach out to the YouTube/streaming community to see if you could obtain some "digital record" of how games are played.  Copyright issues there are more tricky, since publishers and developers see these as a marketing tool rather than a breach of ToS.  I do not know how they would react should you keep an archival copy, though it might be okay if you provided a link back to the source instead of uploading original material.  The user contributed feature would also require a lot of moderation since there's definitely a ton of emotion surrounding games and being objective in nature might come difficult to some contributors.  It is certainly a titanic undertaking, but also is something that would make a great addition to what MobyGames has become, especially as you're marketing this toward a more academic spectrum.  I'd be interested in staying in the loop on your future developments.

Matt McEniry

-----Original Message-----
From: game_preservation-bounces at igda.org [mailto:game_preservation-bounces at igda.org] On Behalf Of Jim Leonard
Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 1:14 PM
To: IGDA Game Preservation SIG
Cc: Scott Sheppard
Subject: Re: [game_preservation] Value in archive website?

On 5/29/2013 11:55 AM, Scott Sheppard wrote:

> For several years, I've tossed around the idea of creating a website 

> platform that blended the benefits of wikipedia style crowdsourcing, 

> last.fm <http://last.fm> style community interaction/scrobbling, and 

> imdb style credits and profiles, for video games.


Sounds like MobyGames 2.0.  (ie. MobyGames + Creative Commons)

 From experience, I can tell you that the largest hurdle was determining a heirarchy (taxonomy) of job functions (and title aliases for equivalents).  There can be five "designers" on a game but they are "story consultant", "level designer", etc.

The second largest hurdle was developing a verification system.  There are very many people who had only peripheral access to the development of a title but try to list themselves in the credits as "associate producer" or similar (aka a former employee trying to bolster their resume for a job search).  Also junior testers trying to pass themselves off as "Lead QA", etc.

Your hurdles will mostly be a large investment of design, planning, coordination, and time.  The technology/implementation should not only come much later but will be much easier than the former.  Just make sure that whatever you come up with can always be expanded or altered at any time, since 1. you will likely want the cooperation of most major preservation institutions, not all of which will agree on the best course of actions, and 2. the nature of developing games changes almost as rapidly as the medium itself does.

I wish you the best of luck -- you will need it :-)
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org)
Check out some trippy MindCandy: http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.oldskool.org/ You're all insane and trying to steal my magic bag!
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