Abstract
This article extends previous work known as Preserving Virtual Worlds II (PVWII), funded through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The author draws on interview data collected from video game developers, content analysis of several long-running video game series, as well as the project’s advisory board and researcher reports. This paper exposes two fundamental challenges in creating metrics and specifications for the preservation of virtual worlds; namely, that there is no one type of user or designated video game stakeholder community, and that significant properties of games cannot always be located in code or platform. The PVWII data serve to explain why existing ideas about preservation of video games are inadequate when games are treated as digital cultural heritage. Preservation specialists need to bind nebulous and dynamic digital objects, a process that is necessary while inherently artificial. Â
Highlights
That institutions like the Library of Congress (LoC), New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Internet Archive, and the UK National Videogame Archive (NVA) are concerned with preserving games signals a new era in preservation of digital objects (Bachell and Barr, 2014)
This article employs interview data from the Preserving Virtual Worlds II (PVWII) project; content analysis of the set of video game franchises explored during PVWII; specific examples from one series from the research set, Carmen Sandiego, that serve to illustrate the broader findings; and meeting minutes and project reporting done by the principal investigators, their research assistants, and the grant’s advisory board members
Interview subjects were asked questions such as: What makes a franchise over time? What elements are most significant about a game? What draws you to this franchise? What was the formula and why did you stick with it? What are the anchors? What is significant about this game? If things must change over time, what must remain consistent? This is important because the lack of preconditions helps to capture, at different times and with different participants, various elements of the vocabulary and model identified by the Digital Object Properties Working Group (DOPWG) of the Planets project, including the performance of the object, properties and values according to both creators and users
Summary
That institutions like the Library of Congress (LoC), New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Internet Archive, and the UK National Videogame Archive (NVA) are concerned with preserving games signals a new era in preservation of digital objects (Bachell and Barr, 2014). Rather, preserving games is about understanding the significance of a particular place and time, the social interpretability of a game (McDonough, 2013 in Anderson and Delve, 2013) This is to say, for example, that it may be more important to understand the affective experience of Halo 5 to people in 2015 and what will be necessary in future to facilitate such comprehension, rather than to keep a working copy of code and its native computing environment. This article employs interview data from the PVWII project; content analysis of the set of video game franchises explored during PVWII; specific examples from one series from the research set, Carmen Sandiego, that serve to illustrate the broader findings; and meeting minutes and project reporting done by the principal investigators, their research assistants, and the grant’s advisory board members From these data emerges new conceptions of significance. Significance exists at a number of different levels: in the code, and the computing environment; analog and digital peripherals; and in social and cultural experiences of the game, such as particular performances of play or relationships between the game and contemporary world events
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