One of Lowood's recent additions to the virtual worlds archive is a short compilation of screenshots and video on the evolution of games from text adventures, in which game action was typed out descriptively, to graphically sophisticated titles.

Perhaps the most compelling footage shows an attack from Eve Online, a science fiction game. An array of small spaceships serving the “Goonswarm” alliance assaults a much larger ship from another group, while the audio track follows the frenzied barking of commands to keep up the pressure. When the large ship is destroyed, there is a cacophony of online voices shrieking in triumph.

How do events like that fit into the larger culture?

“The Library of Congress has always collected across a broad spectrum of content types and subjects, ranging from works of serious scholarship to icons of pop culture,” says Beth Dulabahn, director of integration management for the Library of Congress.

“Video games fit right in with that tradition. Besides showing us how society has entertained itself, they also provide a graphic picture of how technology itself has evolved over the decades.”

Nice short piece on a subject near and dear to my heart. Even though the initial grant runs out next year, I hope this is just the beginning for some really fantastic collections of gaming history.

Saving Worlds: Preserving the Digital and Virtual [STANFORD Magazine via How They Got Game]

Newman also cited the vast variety of game formats as a major challenge to archiving and to displaying games in an attractive way. "There have been attempts to curate exhibitions of video games in the past, and they have been hit and miss affairs," he notes.

"Where you're dealing with coin-op games, you're usually fairly safe because they are designed to be approachable 'pick up and play' experiences," he continues, "but many pride themselves on the tens — even hundreds — of hours of gameplay they offer and on the complexity of their branching narratives and structures."

"How do you take a 150-plus-hour game that may take all sorts of different storylines depending on choices you make or your proficiency as a player, and show it to somebody who's never seen it before and may not have much experience of games?"

The Archive hasn't quite reached the point of answering that question. "This is not a brick-and-mortar building — not yet, anyway," Newman points out. Right now, the group is focusing on research and collection of games and gaming hardware, across several decades and myriad platforms.

Well, even if they can't answer the question yet, at least they're trying. Other archivists are struggling with many of the same questions, like 'How do we preserve MMOs?', but it's really cool to see how a variety of institutions are attempting to deal with this. I'm certainly looking forward to seeing how all these archives continue to develop and grow.

UK National Video Game Archive's Newman On Preserving The Past [GameSetWatch]

I’d like to conduct in-depth interviews with all types of people involved in the creation process, from programmers and testers to visual artists and music composers, as well as game developers, producers and visionaries ....

Another part of my research is to collect oral histories from gamers and game developers regarding their experiences playing games, specifically during "epochal" moments, like when Lord British was assassinated in Ultima Online. Some people also happened to record those moments, and it would be very interesting to collect those artifacts for the cultural record.

I'll be curious to see how this project develops, since it could potentially be very influential in how other collections begin organizing and preserving new media and video games more specifically. The idea of oral history is a particularly good one — the historian in me is glad people are working on things like this now, as opposed to scrambling when it's almost too late.

University of Texas at Austin Looks at MMO Preservation [Game Culture] & LJ Talks to Megan Winget, Who Studies Preservation of Online Games [Library Journal] [via GameSetWatch]

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:

Gamers are used to this problem by now, but that doesn't make it any more tolerable. Imagine if nobody could listen to a Duke Ellington record, or watch a Hitchcock movie, or read a Yeats poem. Not only would that rob us of our cultural inheritance, it would eliminate the influence that these artists have on contemporary culture. The same principles should apply to games. As gamers, we need to recognize that some games are more than disposable diversions, and that their relevance endures even as the technology that created and supported them falls into obsolescence.

Preserving and promoting classic games is vital to the health of the entire industry. In gaming, as much as any art form, "merit" is not always self-evident. Anyone with a passionate interest in game development should have a sense of what has already been achieved, and that cannot be developed if gamers are only playing "the latest and greatest" titles.

Zacny suggests a concerted effort at rereleases, a 'classics revival' of sorts. I'm personally quite excited by the fact that several institutions are making a concerted effort at planning for and undertaking archiving of games and consoles — I hope, much like my beloved books that were out of print by the middle of the 19th century but were lovingly reprinted in the 20th, we see a trickle down effect from that. A more concerted effort on the part of publishers would be fabulous, but that will require an audience hungry to purchase this stuff.

Excellence Never Goes out of Date [The Escapist]

These virtual worlds are actualized in user experiences that are sometimes unique, often social, and always necessary for understanding these worlds. Just as an archived book is of limited use if researchers cannot open its cover and read it, an archived world will be of limited use if researchers cannot visit it. Unless we also develop solutions for preserving user experiences, future generations will have no way to understand how these experiences became such an important part of our culture.

I'll be curious to see how libraries and archives deal with the unique challenges of preserving games in a meaningful sense. I also wonder what sort of access policies will be in place: the trend for print media is certainly to get as much of it digitized or online as humanly possible. This has the dual benefit of making materials more accessible, but also keeping the originals safe; in the face of preservation and access issues, how much do the physical trappings matter?

Save game now [The Brainy Gamer]

GameTap and related services are like the archivist at the rare book room of a public library? So says Matt Matthews from The Curmudgeon Gamer in an interview over at GameSetWatch. The topic is game archivists and business models like GameTap, where you pay for a game but are dependent on the service to actually play and keep it, something he terms 'the virtual rare book room':

There is a gatekeeper who stands between you and things that you (think you) own (in the instance of, say, a public university where the people ostensibly own the library's holdings).

... Archivists can (and should) purchase originals of arcade games and console games and Windows/DOS games and others as often as they can. But the model that GameTap and Steam and XBLA and PSN and other services represent is one in which the company always stands between you and your game, ready to exact a toll if they can work out a way to do it.

He's got a point: those of us who use other sorts of material in our research can frequently get our hands on a copy and purchase it outright, with no one standing in our way to keep that material. Unlike a rare 17th century folio, there's no reason Sam & Max needs to be kept under lock and key.

Preservation, GameTap, and Curmudgeoning [GameSetWatch]

As I was perusing The Arcade Flyer Archive yesterday in search of an appropriate piece for Arcade Flyer Art Saturday, I noticed a little announcement post from site co-owner Dan Hower. After acquiring over 10,000 new coin-op flyers from a private collector, TAFA plans to launch two new archive collections, The Pinball Flyer Archive and The Arcade and Amusement Game Archive.

The pinball flyer archive will include electromechanical, solid state, bingo, video pinball and pinball redemption. The arcade and amusement game flyer archive will include an even wider assortment of game types, including pitch n' bat, rifle, bowler, novelty, driver, wall, 16mm film and other electromechanical and novelty coin-op equipment. The three flyer archives will be independently cataloged.

To help pay for the costs of getting these new sites off the ground, Dan will be selling TAFA's original duplicate flyers on eBay under the name "dphower." I will be sure to post an announcement once these flyers go up for auction so perhaps you can buy a great piece of arcade art and support TAFA at the same time. TAFA is an amazing resource and historical archive and if you haven't checked them out before, you owe it to yourself to do it now. I would also like to personally thank Dan and his partner in the site Eric Jacobson for working so hard to preserve a huge chunk of arcade history. Flynn De Marco

This is an interesting idea, and one that applies to a larger arena that just game levels, I think:

This document seeks to lay a foundation for the conservation of our 'virtual architecture', the environments and places that make up the synthetic worlds of video games. More commonly referred to as 'levels', 'maps' or 'worlds', these environments are the stage for players' experiences in video games. Unfortunately, little has been done to protect, catalogue and analyze these game spaces, but such conservation is necessary in order to provide reference material for study.

The document (why do people still publish stuff like this in horrible PDF?) outlines rules for defining architecture worthy of being preserved, attempts to catagorize different kinds of levels, and uses artschool words like "enucleate" next to offhand phrases like "by the way". I found the entire thing vaguely irritating.

Why particularly game levels, and not games in general? I would love for there to be an archive of games, period, with media backed up and preserved as hermetically as possible. I still treasure my single floppy from RAMPAGE's PC release.

Convention for the Protection of Virtual Architectural Heritage [TerraNova]
The convention itself, non-PDF [Mario Gerosa]