[game_preservation] Value in archive website?

[Greg McLemore]

I'm involved with the International Arcade Museum and its Killer List of Videogames (KLOV) - likely the longest running such project, originating in the 1980s.  Besides just a game encyclopedia archive, we provide everything from message forums to over 150,000 pages of online pdfs covering antique coin-op machines.

Unlike the other projects mentioned, our founding focus centered on coin-operated video games.  We later expanded into areas including non-video coin-op machines.  Obviously coin-op is a much smaller world than console and computer games, and not a world increasing much in size.

We have a new version in the works due to be rolled out soon-our first major infrastructure upgrade in a while.  We are working on adding an API, game credits (obviously a particularly vexing and thus previously delayed addition), improved technical data, increased opportunity for user interaction, etc.   A core focus of the upgrade (besides UX and database changes) is to improve work flow and remove significant bottlenecks in the moderator/curator/approval process.  We have extensive back-end tools for multiple curators, though we've learned that these tools aren't ideally geared to how volunteers actually want to work.   It's time for the next version...

We are also working to improve how we 'unique id' games and to make our cataloging system friendlier to outside institutions.

Historically, a key challenge has been a variable quality of submissions and the processing of them - not so much accuracy (although our update will include better handling of correction processing) but simple stuff,  spelling, grammar, and redundancy in text changes and in photo submissions.  It's amazing how many well-meaning submissions are unusable.  If you send us a photo of a game cabinet, please turn on the lights in the room, take your cat off the machine, and take a picture of the whole machine, not just 2/3 of it!    It's easy when a submission is great or unusable, but more challenging when its partially usable or of poor quality but the best we have.

Greg


From: game_preservation-bounces at igda.org [mailto:game_preservation-bounces at igda.org] On Behalf Of Richard Moss
Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 8:55 PM
To: lowood at stanford.edu; IGDA Game Preservation SIG
Cc: Scott Sheppard
Subject: Re: [game_preservation] Value in archive website?

I'm involved in a similar project called Archive.vg, only it's pitched more as something "for the people" that academics might benefit from than explicitly for academics.
We launched a proof-of-concept beta website, API, and app in July last year, and right now we're prepping a 2.0 release with a completely new backend and design. Unfortunately most of our data is inaccessible at the moment (and parts of the website don't work-long story), except perhaps through the API, but you can get an idea of our scope at this stats page<http://archive.vg/stats>-100,000+ games, nearly 2 million credits, 300,000+ ROM identifiers, lots of images, and more. We don't want to host any actual games-only information about and related to them.
If you want to discuss specifics, it's probably best to hop onto our IRC channel-irc.freenode.net<http://irc.freenode.net> #archive-and chat to Niemann. He's the founder and lead developer. I'll quickly run through a few things here, though:

These three blog posts might provide some helpful background and context:
http://archive.vg/blog/8-site-news/35-welcome-to-the-archive
http://archive.vg/blog/8-site-news/42-we-re-now-open-to-the-public
http://archive.vg/blog/8-site-news/99-archive-summer-relaunch-announcement
We're trying to build something akin to an IMDb for games-a one-stop shop for information about video games; it's kind of like MobyGames and GameFAQs, but with a design that's inviting and easy to use (this is key to our vision) and technology that's modern and scalable. We already have a huge amount of data; moving forward we plan to integrate more types of information and a system for community contributions whereby there is a points system and a number of trusted "curators" who are responsible for ensuring accuracy in their domain-I'm pretty geared in to the history of Mac gaming, for instance, so I might be put in charge of checking user contributions in Mac games.
My hope is that on top of these community contributions, we'll be able to strike partnership deals with groups like World of Spectrum<http://worldofspectrum.org/>, Planet Virtual Boy<http://planetvb.com/>, and Lemon Amiga<http://www.lemonamiga.com/> to ensure highly-accurate and highly-detailed information related to each platform.

Anyone can pull information from our servers via an API. You can request a key by emailing ryan at archive.vg<mailto:ryan at archive.vg>. There's a bunch of stuff using our API at the moment, mostly in the arena of media centers, emulation, and personal game libraries. Perhaps the best example is OpenEmu<http://openemu.org/>, an open-source plugin-based emulator for Mac with a beautiful UI. It's not released yet, but you can compile it yourself via github<https://github.com/OpenEmu/OpenEmu>. As an interesting aside, we're looking at possibly enabling video uploads directly from OpenEmu in future.
We have an iPhone app<http://archive.vg/mobile>, too, which will hopefully get a major update and an iPad version later this year.
Our blog (which I run) is dedicated to the history and culture of games. I try to do as much proper reporting and journalism as I can, but there's also some more light-hearted criticism/analysis and discussion on there. For instance, I do a monthly feature highlighting great long-form writing about games, a series where I pick a random game to play and write about, news pieces with original research that no one else picks up (like this one<http://archive.vg/blog/21-news/91-writing-the-manual-on-the-virtual-boy> on the Virtual Boy Sacred Tech Scroll or this<http://archive.vg/blog/21-news/101-game-play-lets-you-play-game-boy-on-your-iphone-5-without-jailbreaking> on a JavaScript Game Boy emulator for iPhone 5), and longer features that go in-depth on a topic or individual (eg, this<http://archive.vg/blog/12-feature/80-a-fool-and-his-money-cliff-johnson-s-long-journey-to-develop-a-sequel-to-a-25-year-old-game>, this<http://archive.vg/blog/12-feature/36-the-perils-challenges-and-uncertainty-of-collecting-and-preserving-video-games>, and this<http://archive.vg/blog/12-feature/97-the-history-of-thq-through-its-logos-and-branding>).
We're currently bootstrapping, which means that progress is slow because we all have day jobs. I'm a freelance writer/journalist, our lead is a high school teacher and CTO at Tackk<http://tackk.com/>, our designer works for Twitch.tv, our database guy is in IT management, and so on. There are seven of us in the core team, plus some helpers. (And we're always eager to talk to would-be team members, helpers, or investors.)

I'll do my best to answer any questions you might have, but Niemann on the IRC channel is your best bet for specifics.
Richard

On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 4:46 AM, Henry Lowood <lowood at stanford.edu<mailto:lowood at stanford.edu>> wrote:
Scott,

>From an institutional point-of-view, the main issue with any project focused on preservation (besides what it actually contributes) is sustainability.  Another issue if there is interest in working with and contributing to the work of institutional repositories is interoperability - particularly with emerging metadata schemes.

Henry

On 5/29/2013 9:55 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.

As my ideas have formalized over the years and I've learned more about the business side of the industry, it seems more and more plausible as a beneficial tool for the industry as a whole. I believe that this could also be beneficial for helping facilitate preservation, though in a not so direct way. I'm not as familiar with the requirements that are unique to library standards of data organization, nor am I deeply knowledgeable about what is considered important to preservation of video games in particular.

So my question then is this, do you feel that such a platform would be a viable way to collect important aspects of games for preservation? What would need to be in place so that libraries or other institutions could use this data to their benefit? Here are the (still rough) mission of the goals to be achieved with this platform:
1.     To document and digitally archive as many aspects of the video game community and culture throughout history as possible. This includes but is not necessarily limited to Games, Credits, Companies, Characters, In-game Items, Photos, Videos, Blog Posts, and Real-Time Play Metrics for every video game and video game platform that ever was or will be created.
2.     All data is collected by the community, employing lessons learned from game design as a way to help guide the community's interaction as a whole. -----ie. The overall community goal is collection, with algorithms in place to help people understand where to focus their attention for the largest community benefit.
3.     All data entered or collected by the community is 100% open and free to duplicate/distribute as a 'cultural work' (ie. wikipedia), so long as it does not infringe on the original holder's copyright. -----This will allow libraries/archives, companies, players, developers, analysts, scientists, and any other interested parties, to use the data in any way they deem important. Akin to the Steam Hardware Survey<http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/>, only we'll offer tools to the public download the data in raw format.
4.     Present collected data to the public community under the context that it is a platform for community interaction and information, with the intent of becoming the defacto hub for all things related to digital games. -----The intent is to be an organized location where players, developers, and academics alike can link to the original content. Thus not competing with existing platforms, simply acting as a hub.

--
-Scott

"We build our games like a Japanese garden, where the design is perfect when you cannot remove anything else."
-Jenova Chen


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--

Henry Lowood

Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections;

  Film & Media Collections

HSSG, Green Library, 557 Escondido Mall

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