Videogames: the impossible archive

Posted by Stephen Gray on Tuesday 03 May 2011 at 5:32pm
Tags: digital preservation |

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Giordano does make reference to the excellence progress made in this area by the National Videogames Archive (at the Bradford Media Museum) and the recently completed KEEP (Keeping Emulation Environments Portable) Project but ultimately suggests that the task is so complex as to be impossible. Technical ‘emulation’ (the most prominent preservation tactic for videogames) of old code on today’s hardware solves only some of these issues.

Giordano points out that typically, no definitive ‘version’ of a game exists. A ‘game’ is rather an entity spanning several platforms, markets and time periods.

His second key point is that games cannot be reduced to simple objects (even digital ones) as each one involves materials such as packaging, media, posters, storyboards and bug reports. The loss of the original controllers such as joysticks, make playing today’s ‘emulated’ games a very different experience. Crucially, games are also tied to a social context or more likely, several different social contexts.

Giordano gives the example of arcades which “had a performance dimension, with more able players who put on a real “show” of their abilities, with a crowd of followers who flocked around them.” This aspect becomes even more complex for today’s online games.

Giordano defines a game as “a relationship between the user/text/space and usage and social context”. A game archive which depends on emulation can preserve game’s code but cannot recover lost gameplay.

Source: English translation of Almost the Same Game: Text and Gaming Experience Between Continuity of Forms and Changing Context

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