Fresh from his historic trip to the International Space Station, Richard Garriott is making a slightly less historic trip to the Zach Theater in Austin, Texas, on the 24th of January in order to tell everybody willing to pay $65 for a ticket about the experience. Shows will run at 2:30 PM and 8:00 PM, during which the gaming pioneer will discuss what it was like following in the footsteps of his astronaut father.

While I doubt he'll touch much on gaming issues, such as his recent departure from NCsoft, there is a Q&A session after each lecture, which I feel should needs to be positively brimming with questions about the utter failure of his latest MMORPG, Tabula Rasa. If you're going to be in the Austin area on the 24th, pony up the $65 and go make us proud.

Extreme Voyage: Richard Garriott's 12 Days on the International Space Station [Zach Theatre via Massively]

But today we have a different story for you with a very different ending. The fact of the matter is, according to The Library of Congress, video games are just as important to our historical past as literature, movies and music. And at the moment, the LoC is teaming up with major universities across the country to begin a 2-year initiative with the sole intent of figuring out just how institutions can preserve video games for years to come, while making the content accessible for use and study.

So our story today doesn't present some artificial controversy ending in a sad, bleak future of debate and wasted efforts. Our story today is about the very real victory for game developers, enthusiasts and scholars, in which the top library in the nation has said they're part of this video game fad for the count.

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"We're taking baby steps here," confessed Beth Dulabahn. She's the Director for Integration Management at the LoC. "No sense on making it harder on yourself that you have to."

In truth, the Library of Congress has been collecting games since the 1980s. Due to their advantageous position—the Copyright Office is part of their organization— they've come across various collections just by receiving copies of published materials as mandated by copyright law.

"Many people would probably be surprised at the kinds of things we have here," Dulabahn explained. "For example, we have probably the US's largest comic book collection, over 100,000 comic book issues that have come in through copyright."

While their collection is currently small, only encompassing around 2,000 titles that are 100% the result of copyright deposits (as opposed to formal acquisitions or donations), they aren't yet ready to collect more. What? But we just said that the Library was crazy about video games! This brings us to the initiative and what's going on now.

The Initiative

At the moment, there are a few forces affiliated with the Library to answer a fundamental question before they can begin serious acquisition: How does one build a video game archive in the digital age?

Within the Library itself, you have the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division. One can decipher their responsibility from their apt title. Now relocated to a new facility in Culpeper, VA, the division has pulled those 2,000 games out of temporary warehouse storage, and specialists are using their new lab space to examine hardware preservation while doing R&D for future solutions of game archiving.

"One of the facets we want to document with videogames [as we did with film] is not only having the actual games themselves, but many of the associated material to have the real sense of the full gamut of what videogames and the industry meant in cultural terms," said Senior Cataloger Brian Taves. Yes, he means the sweatshirts, the posters and the shoes. They want all the cultural materials they can find.

These specialists aren't just film and audio buffs who were roped into video game preservation for grant and funding purposes. On the contrary, the two members of the division I spoke with were extremely enthusiastic about the prospects of a video game archive, likening the challenges to those already faced in film and broadcast, and the cultural importance to that of any other artistic medium they archive.

"It is one way, a bit like the fabled discovery of the library's paper print collection back in the 1940s. When they found, in a closet, films that had been deposited for copyright of otherwise lost films in the very early days of filmmaking that proved to be a real treasure," said Taves. "And for us, that's what this has turned out to be and we're really excited to see this collection growing.... The Library's been collecting films for almost 70 years now on an active basis, so we see videogames now as part of that whole body of acquisitions."

So that's one aspect of Library game preservation, but at the moment, it's the smaller part of what the Library is working on. The larger initiative is called the "Preserving Virtual Worlds" project.

The National Digital Information Infrastruction Preservation Program is a huge initiative interested in digital preservation. This encompasses basically everything imaginable on Earth. Under that, there is the Preserving Creative America initiative. Here is where you see the Library's interest in preserving all sorts of creative works, like film or books, into digital formats. Then, one of the eight grants under this Creative America umbrella is the Preserving Virtual Worlds Project.

Preserving Virtual Worlds

Spearheaded by the University of Illinois, the Preserving Virtual Worlds project is a 2-year program starting in 2008 that will hopefully build a model of game and interactive fiction archiving. In a partnership with Stanford University, University of Maryland, Rochester Institute of Technology, and one commercial institution—Second Life makers Linden Lab— University of Illinois hopes to create metadata standards to make content manageable before moving forward to create case studies (ie test examples) of actual video game archiving.

I sat with the University of Illinois faculty/Project Coordinator Janet Eke and Principal Investigator Jerry McDonough recently and talked more about Preserving Virtual Worlds over lattes.

"This project is really about how do we begin to preserve this type of content, answering some fundamental questions of how will we even begin to do this," explained Eke. "And what we will begin to preserve is a huge question that will certainly come along...but we're really starting with how."

It may all seem like a load of bureaucracy - all these committees, initiatives, grants, 2-year chunks of time, etc. And then on top of it all, those running the study claim that they are nowhere near being ready to archive video games. But there really are a multitude of problems that need to be sorted out before archives can move forward on a mass scale.

Take copyright, for example. While the Library worries less about copyright due to their relationship with the Copyright Office, organizations like the University of Illinois aren't granted immunity with products that show up at their door, despite partnerships with the Library.

"... if I own a physical copy of a piece of IP, I can dispose of it as I wish," McDonough explains. Aptly, he'd been (legally) streaming the BBC in HD just moments before on his Mac. "I can sell it, I can give it to somebody, but I can't copy it. Copyright is just that, you're not allowed to make a copy without the permission of an IP owner unless it's gone out of copyright."

And to archive, McDonough thinks that copying is an absolute necessity. Because while consoles should and will be preserved (somewhere in the chain of archiving), they probably won't provide the most practical way for users to experience and research content.

"Things on five and a half inch quarter...hardware is getting scarce and the medium has almost no longevity. The only way we can make sure the stuff stays alive is getting it on an active computer system with demons monitoring it that make sure were not suffering bit corruption," says McDonough.

It's a frustrating situation to be in, but the irony is not lost on us: Copyright is meant to protect an IP, but ultimately, that copyright may prevent researchers from saving a work from extinction. Microsoft once explained to me the difficulty of tracking down IP owners to reproduce their games as XBLA titles. Protip: If Microsoft can't find the source of an IP, nobody can.

The only way to solve copyright issues moving into the future is to bring commercial partners on board. Whether or not you like Linden Lab and their game (?) Second Life, there's no doubt that it makes for an excellent archival model for the project. On one hand, we get a case study of a library teaming up with a commercial venture. On the other, we get a model for MMO archiving, if such a thing is even possible.

Brenda Gunn can explain the significance of libraries partnering with commercial groups better than I, a mere blogger ever could. She's the Associate Director of Research & Collections at the UT Austin's Videogame Archive. She's not directly related to the Preserving Virtual Worlds project, but she's keeping an eye on the study because it's the hot topic right now in video game archiving.

"This is a significant point in that [LoC] is saying libraries and archives can't do this alone; the funding simply is not there...the level of ongoing support for this videogame archive will have a direct impact on the what level of access [we] can provide."

That's why at UT Austin they've teamed up with partners like NCSoft's Richard Garriot, FPS legend Warren Spector, or even "The Fat Man" himself, video game music legend George Sanger. According to Gunn, before such partners approached Austin, a game archive "wasn't on our radar at all."

Research libraries will absolutely need the support of commercial video game publishers to archive their work. Whether it's to help create metadata (companies provide information on everything from the engine they used to their plotline) or just supplying access to those precious IPs, the commercial aid is not an option, it's a necessity.

"If you're going to do any game preservation on a large scale, it has to happen with [commercial] help. If for no other reason, they control the IP. They don't give us the content, we can't preserve it," explains McDonough. "So the question is, do they have strong enough interest in preserving the content to contribute any of their own resources towards it. How much do they care about their own game alive?"

Shimmering Hope

We opened this feature with a bang. We told you that the war was won, that the governmental and academic library community was on gamers' side. And then we went into a list of reasons why archiving still wasn't ready to happen and scared you with words like "copyright" and catchy Wall Street slogans like "IP."

But trust us. If nobody cared, they wouldn't have all these headaches. The freaking Library of Congress is onboard. And this is a major, major win.

"Perfection, we don't know what that is," says Project Coordinator Eke. "You're striving to succeed, and that striving will define what it means to succeed..."

Hmm...it sounds like they get MMOs, at the very least.

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It looks like the year of the MMO at this year's GDC. Live it up, Fahey. Live. It. Up.

Austin GDC Adds Keynote From Square Enix's Tanaka [gamasutra]

How do game developers spend their Saturdays? They probably gather at Richard Garriott's lakeside estate, feast on BBQ, listen to live music, engage in padded sword fights, toss water balloons, and start very small bonfires.

You are driving down a road. Ahead of you are two immense wrought iron gates. Normally they are closed. Today, they stand open and deserted. On either side, the rock walls are dripping water. The canyon descends at the end of the road, the road itself appears to drop off into space. Slowly, you drive through the gates...

This isn't some role-playing game. This is, in fact, Richard Garriott's real-life estate in Austin, Texas. The Ultima designer has built a little piece of Britannia-on-earth. And on this Saturday, it's hosting the local International Game Developer's Association BBQ picnic.

The road winds and descends impossibly for some time. It narrows and turns to gravel. On the left is a sheer wall of rock. Finally, volunteers in bright yellow shirts can be seen up ahead. They're directing cars to parking spaces on the flat bottomland, under enormous pecan trees. "Hey!" one of them calls, "The party's down here."

Once parked, the first thing to explore is the miniature village. There's a jail, lighthouse, tavern, church, watermill, town hall, and endless houses. Across a brook, there's a lawn with a castle facing off against a ship. In the distance is one small house, nestled by a large rock.

At the edge of the woods, there's a sign warning of the haunted forest, and noting the witch's castle is one mile away: I'D TURN BACK IF I WERE YOU.

Richard Garriott told Kotaku the full story behind the buildings. "A lot of the early Ultima characters - Iolo, Dupre, Sentri, Mariah - they were all my college buddies here at the University of Texas, which is where I wrote the first few Ultimas."

He'd borrowed their personalities, likenesses, and Society for Creative Anachronism names. "Years later when I bought this property, a lot of them were still pretty active in the SCA, so I built these cabins in homage to the history we have together."

"The first one that I hand-built myself with my girlfriend Kelly was for Iolo," Garriott said. "Then, this gypsy wagon you see over here was for Mariah. Iolo was really a guy who makes crossbows here in town. Mariah is my assistant Michelle who's worked with me since Origin, and now NCsoft."

Garriott builds another cabin every three months or so. And the bigger structures, such as the theater, the castle, the ship, those are built once per year. "Based on whatever party theme we're throwing that year, I'll add another structure for that event," he says.

That infrastructure comes in handy when Garriott has various parties, from his big Fourth of July event, to company parties, to the SCA, or, like today, the IGDA event, where the developers got cold drinks, spots in the shade, and talked shop while waiting for BBQ.

While a Frisbee was seen, the most popular pastime was Chanbara, which is a very fancy way of saying "hitting each other with padded sticks." Or, fencing with non-metal swords. Which is all a very therapeutic way to challenge co-workers to a duel, and still be able to work when Monday rolls around.

Things took a surreal turn when a dozen-and-a-half costumed crusaders arrived. They happened to be in town to audition for the Sci-Fi original series "Who Wants to Be a Superhero?" One of them was good enough to make the cut (we can't tell you who), and will appear in the July 26th premiere. And when it came to super powers, all of them had Chanbara skills.

Moments before lunch was served, a small speech was given to the crowd of 300. Rodney Gibbs, a studio head of Amaze Austin who acts as the IGDA-Austin front man, thanked the vendors - barbeque from the Saltlick, drinks from Opal Devine's, and ice-cream from Amy's - as well as the sponsors and volunteers.

Richard Garriott said a few words, joking about being the "old fogey" of the Austin game industry, having worked with some of the assembled developers before, adding "if I haven't worked with you, it's a pretty small community, and I'm sure I will in the next decade or two."

Garriott then introduced the event sponsor by saying, "I don't know about you guys, but at NCsoft, we're a 100% Dell shop. In addition to being a great sponsor, these guys really do make great products."

Glen Robson, Dell's director of gaming was brought up in a small town in Scotland. He joked that, were it not for the game industry and coming to work in it, his career choices were limited. "I'd be tossing a caber, or worse, I'd be knitting."

An indescribable BBQ lunch was followed by a lazy afternoon of talking, water balloon fights, and ice-cream. As evening settled in, torches were lit, and people began to gather in the replica Shakespearean theatre for a musical performance by The Captains of the Chess Team.

The band is a spontaneous game-industry ensemble consisting of famous audio guru George Sanger, his intern on keyboard, game designer Josh Hamrick on drums, Linda Law on bass, guitar by W. Scott Synder, and fronted by Midway Austin's audio director, Marc Schaefgen.

"You've all been beautiful," Schaefgen told the audience between songs, adding, "We are the captains of the chess team, and we will pwn you!" The set list included Safety Dance, a rousing performance of Video Killed the Radio Star, the ever popular Numa Numa (originally "Dragostea din tei"), and the Star Wars-centric parody Yoda.

There would be a warming fire later on, following the encore, and people would slowly go home. But the band was the culmination of a good day. The audience was into it, and the feeling prevailed upon one developer so hard he just had to mount up on the stage and get to gigging with the band.

The ones that get into it are definitely the kings of the party.

Special thanks to Clay Hillhouse and John Henderson for additional photographs.

It looks like the nine twits who broke into Richard Garriott's village in Austin, partied, stole thousands in liquor and then left photographic evidence have been identified.

No real surprise there.

The Travis County Sheriff's Office issued arrest warrants on criminal trespass for Amy Adams, 19; Christopher Erich Ambrosius, 20; Jamie Marie Anderson, 18; Jeffery Steven Figge, 22; Ryan Keith Hess, 20; and Abraham Cazares, 21.

Travis Lynn Foxell, 20; Steven Andrew Silva, 20; and Scott Berner, 21; were charged with burglary of a building.

None have yet been arrested, though at least one of the men seen in the image has his very own MySpace on which he brags, when asked if he stole anything in the past month: "Borrowed with out intent of returning it!"

Hmm, whatever could he be talking about? Hit the jump for details from the warrant, courtesy of the Austin-American Statesman.

According to Rios and the arrest warrants, about 12:30 a.m. Feb. 1, the group parked three cars near the Pennybacker Bridge on Loop 360 (Capital of Texas Highway). They followed trails on a hillside, crawled under a fence and walked two miles to Garriott's property in the 7400 block of Coldwater Canyon Drive. The 70-acre property has a two-mile metal fence around it.

Foxell told Berner that he had previously broken into a building on the property, an arrest warrant said. Foxell showed Berner some coins and tavern pipes he had taken from the building, according to the warrant.

The group called Garriott's property Midgetville because of several small buildings on it, warrants said. Several resemble playhouses, including a fake jail and treehouses with rope bridges, Rios said.

Once the suspects entered Garriott's property, some of them broke the exterior locks on two buildings to get inside, the warrant said.

They also broke into a bar, the warrants said. The group piled an ice chest so high with expensive Scotch, port and several kinds of wines that the top wouldn't close, Rios said.

They left behind several empty beer cans on a trail, the arrest warrant said.

A few days later, Adams and Foxell went back to get Adams' camera, Rios said. When they got to Garriott's property, however, they found photos of themselves posted on the buildings, he said. Garriott had printed photos from the camera in an attempt to identify the burglars, Rios said.

Investigators took the pictures to several high schools in western Travis County, posted them on the Web and gave them to area homeowners associations.

Garriott wanted to offer a reward, but investigators decided to release the pictures to the media March 16, said Roger Wade, a spokesman for the department.

Five days later, Adams walked into a sheriff's office with her attorney and identified herself and other people involved, according to an arrest warrant.

Pouring over the comments in the MySpace accounts I found a one reference to a village by ScottyBoy, who wrote the day after the incident occurred: "Dude Last night . in the weeble village ... fallin of cliffs ... HIT ME UP." Brian Crecente

Nine who left pics at crime scene identified [Austin-American Statesman]

Blizzard plans to open a new 46,000-square-foot office in Austin which will focus on customer service, according to the Austin Business Journal.

The new building will house about 500 employees.

"We'll have numerous immediate job openings at the Austin customer service center, and we plan to expand that staff as needed in order to ensure that we can provide the best possible service experience for our players on an ongoing basis," commented Blizzard COO Paul Sams in the report. The executive further explained that Austin was chosen based on its community, as well as the city being a hub for existing call centers in North America.

One can't help but wonder if this will be the first step toward a fully functional Blizzard studio in the Texas town. Brian Crecente

Blizzard Opens New Austin Support Facility [Gamasutra]

At the recent Austin Game Conference, Hollywood producer Jon Landau (Titanic, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Dick Tracy) talked MMOs and film. Earlier this year, Landau and director James Cameron became board members for MMO game network Multiverse. While nothing official has been announced, Laundau referred to himself as "a filmmaker who's involved in creating IP that games are based on." With cinema's production and technology moving closer to gaming, the producer points out:

It turns out films and MMOs are not that different. That shouldn't be too surprising, though. After all, what we do as filmmakers is create virtual worlds...Both our industries build experiences that have the same goals.

And in Hollywood, those goals are sequels, while in online gaming, they're called "expansion packs." Brian Ashcraft

More Here via Eurogamer

The association is hosting resumes for all of those recently laid off. So far it looks like about seven NCSoft former employees have taken them up on the offer. Looking at their resumes it looks like this very small sampling came from a mix of the companies games including City of Villains, Guild Wars, Dungeon Runners and, yes, Auto Assault.

If you're a developer looking to hire in the Austin area, perhaps you should check the IGDA first. Brian Crecente

Recently Laid off? Let IGDA Austin know [IGDA-Austin]