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I've mentioned my love for the delightful How They Got Game, which catalogues some of the neat holdings of the Stanford Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection (among other things); now, they're getting some love from the Stanford alumni magazine, which highlights the Library of Congress 'Preserving Virtual Worlds' project (including, naturally, the Stanford initiative). Curator Henry Lowood discusses what Stanford is doing, and how, while Beth Dulabahn of the Library of Congress talks about why the LOC is behind all of this: More »
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I'm an archive junkie — I consider it a side-effect of my profession, since we spend half our lives in temperature-controlled buildings with lots of old stuff. So I watch the growth of the video game archives across the globe with no small measure of excitement — not only does my little historian heart go pitter-patter at the fact that people are being so proactive in figuring out how to preserve our beloved medium for future generations, but it means a couple more places to poke my head in when I have a good excuse. The recent announcement of the UK National Video Game Archive has led to some fruitful discussion on how to preserve games — not just in terms of the hardware, but also as a culture. Which, of course, is a hell of a lot harder than making sure books don't rot: More »
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Rob Zacny has a thought provoking piece up at the Escapist: on the whole, we're the worst genre when it comes to preserving our history, even the great classics acknowledged as 'great.' In a society — never mind technical area — where progress and marching forward is the name of the game, it's not exactly surprising, but a problem nonetheless. And not just for the history buffs among us: More »
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By virtue of my profession, I'm a bit of a preservation nut - careers will be built on sources that would be rotting away if it weren't for intense efforts to preserve them, and there's still a large swath of the historical record that's gone forever. The list of lost films from the 'golden ages' of silent film, for example, is staggering, and that's for works created in the 20th century. Luckily for video games, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Maryland, Stanford, Rochester Institute of Technology and Linden Lab have banded together under the auspices of the 'Preserving Creative America' initiative of the Library of Congress. Our own Mark Wilson wrote about this months ago but there was even a GDC roundtable on the issue. The project is intended to get 'endangered' and rare games into the proper hands to preserve and archive them - but in a way that will also give a sense of the original experience: More »
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