Abstract
The subject of digital game preservation is one that has moved up the research agenda in recent years with a number of international projects, such as KEEP and Preserving Virtual Worlds, highlighting and seeking to address the impact of media decay, hardware and software obsolescence through different strategies including code emulation, for instance. Similarly, and reflecting a popular interest in the histories of digital games, exhibitions such as Game On (Barbican, UK) and GameCity (Nottingham, UK) experiment with ways of presenting games to a general audience. This article focuses on the UK’s National Videogame Archive (NVA) which, since its foundation in 2008, has developed approaches that both dovetail with and critique existing strategies to game preservation, exhibition and display.The article begins by noting the NVA’s interest in preserving not only the code or text of the game, but also the experience of using it – that is, the preservation of gameplay as well as games. This approach is born of a conceptualisation of digital games as what Moulthrop (2004) has called “configurative performances†that are made through the interaction of code, systems, rules and, essentially, the actions of players at play. The analysis develops by problematising technical solutions to game preservation by exploring the way seemingly minute differences in code execution greatly impact on this user experience.Given these issues, the article demonstrates how the NVA returns to first principles and questions the taken-for-granted assumption that the playable game is the most effective tool for interpretation. It also encourages a consideration of the uses of non-interactive audiovisual and (para)textual materials in game preservation activity. In particular, the focus falls upon player-produced walkthrough texts, which are presented as archetypical archival documents of gameplay. The article concludes by provocatively positing that these non-playable, non-interactive texts might be more useful to future game scholars than the playable game itself.
Highlights
Over the past few years, the subject of digital game preservation has moved up the research agenda with the ‘Preserving Virtual Worlds’ project, the Independent Game Developers Association Game Preservation Special Interest Group’s white paper (Lowood, 2009), and the European KEEP1 project among a growing number of projects turning their attentions to matters of capturing the complexities of gaming environments, arresting media decay and “bit rot,” and emulating obsolete gaming platforms
For the National Videogame Archive, they represent a valuable source of first hand material that map the territories of games and record the ways in which they are brought to life and played with by their players
The updating of walkthrough texts months, years, even decades, after the release of the titles to which they refer speaks to the longevity of digital games in the hearts of players and a desire among certain of them to pause and linger on these titles even in the face of an apparently ever-developing marketplace where technological obsolescence and perpetual innovation are watchwords
Summary
Over the past few years, the subject of digital game preservation has moved up the research agenda with the ‘Preserving Virtual Worlds’ project (see McDonough et al, 2010), the Independent Game Developers Association Game Preservation Special Interest Group’s white paper (Lowood, 2009), and the European KEEP1 project (see Pinchbeck et al, 2009) among a growing number of projects turning their attentions to matters of capturing the complexities of gaming environments, arresting media decay and “bit rot,” and emulating obsolete gaming platforms. Records of play, production and performance – whether these take the form of specially created audiovisual documentaries of development histories (such as the NVA’s “Directors’ Commentaries” series), videos of players’ gameplay performances (“superplay” videos), or collections of texts produced by videogame fans that archive and explore the experiential potentialities of specific titles (e.g. walkthroughs) – are treated not merely as ephemera or interpretative tools with which to make better sense of or to contextualise the game but are considered to be valuable materials in their own right. Despite the focus of this article, the NVA is not opposed to the preservation of digital games as both material and virtual objects, or to emulation as a means of making games playable for future generations. The focus of this final section falls upon the use and value of player-produced ‘walkthroughs’ as part of a digital game preservation strategy
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