Robert Zacny has an interesting piece on the issues and challenges of videogames preservation over at The Escapist. There’s a lot on the work of The National Videogame Archive in the piece as well as the Good Old Games project.

On a personal and professional level, one section really resonated with me:

The game room meant more to me than I knew at the time, and so I didn’t protest when my parents cleaned it out. I couldn’t articulate why I wanted to hang onto the boxes for all my old videogames, including ones I hated.

As a gamer, my house (and loft) is full of games (all in pristine condition, being something of an obsessive) and while a good number of those games are things I truly love, some of them I cannot – and never could – bear. Bringing me nothing but frustration, annoyance and a sense of wasted time and money, they are nonetheless as treasured a part of my collection as the films I don’t like and the clothes I never wore. On a professional level, it does raise an important point about the ‘canon’ of videogames. Iain and I thought long and hard about including ‘bad’ games as well as ‘good’ in the 100 Videogames book (where good and bad are hugely subjective terms once you remove issues like crashing and buggy code). We want to find ways to carry forward the idea of a balanced canon into The NVA. This is not a collection of ‘the usual suspects’ and you can often learn an awful lot from flawed design (and lot of awful). Our imperative is to tell the stories that represent the past, not to sugar-coat it or write a revisionist history where only Super Mario Bros., SFII and The Legend of Zelda speak for our cultural heritage.

Sandy Spangler, Mark Parry from gamecity on Vimeo.

What you see here is the wonderful Mark Parry and Sandy Spangler from Sony London Studios pledging their support to The National Videogame Archive by donating the original, working prototype EyeToy camera for PS2. Complete with its handwritten ‘#1′ prototype sticker, this little black box revolutionised gameplay by blurring the boundary between the virtuality of the gameworld and the actuality and domesticity of the living room – and all for 30 quid!

Here’s Dr Richard Marks, the man who devised the EyeToy, talking about his creation and showing some tech demos.

We are hugely thankful to the lovely people at London Studios for this donation and are incredibly excited to see where they take EyeToy next…just look at this video for a glimpse of some is-it-real-or-is-it-sci-fi goodness…PlayStation Eye and the EyePet…

of course, for people old enough to remember Tomorrow’s World, this might look just a little like MIT’s interactive physics interactive whiteboard demo…

You can find out more about EyeToy at the official site and read about the history its development at Gamasutra where friend-of-GameCity Tom Kim has written a nice ‘In-Depth’ article.

Iain, Tom and I have just returned back from The National Archives where we had been invited to give a talk on our work on The NVA. As it’s often difficult to judge the experience and games-literacy of am audience, we decided to concentrate on a few areas to give a sense of the motivations and mission of the project.

The idea of ’supersession’ is always a persuasive one and immediately helps people get some sense of our perspective on games as important cultural artefacts as opposed to suites of technologies or abstract code. Perhaps the most important aspect of our talk, however, was the focus on the ‘cultures of videogames’. The idea that the game is not the only – or perhaps even most important – unit of currency may be a somewhat counterintuitive one but it is absolutely at the heart of our approach and it became clear that this contextualisation and recognition of the wider place of games in the everyday lives of players is a key differentiator of The NVA. Not treating games as extraordinary things but rather utterly embedded in the normal lives of ordinary people is something central to our thinking and I am glad that we got this point across and that it seemed to resonate so well with the folk at the Archives.

We concluded our talk with a discussion of some of the challenges of exhibition and display focusing on issues such as the non-linearity of games and the impact of deliberate and competence-based choices on narrative branches and therefore the extent of the game seen through any single playing. As a means of demonstrating this challenge, we showed some video examples of ’superplay’. Two in particular we showcased were:

a single-player playthrough of both sides of a two-player game of cult curtain-shooter Ikaruga. Watch for the hands!

and an approx 5-minute Tool-Assisted Speedrun (TAS) of Super Mario Bros. We didn’t explain TAS straight away and let people try to work out what was happening. Surely nobody can be this good? Mario seems to be jumping through the piranha plants…Indeed, nobody can be this good. And that’s the point – playing beyond human ability. Find out more about Tool Assisted Speedruns at the excellent TASVideos.

Examples such as these are really useful for a variety of reasons.

First, they’re enjoyable things to watch. Watching virtuoso performances of videogames is clearly entertaining and the masterclasses we showed off today continue to impress us. However, there is an important, less trivial and obviously populist, crowd-pleasing point to this. We tend to think of videogames as experiences that have to be played to be understood. Certainly, I am sympathetic to this position and have, in my time, been one of those game studies scholars imploring students and researchers alike to play the damn games. Would we feel it acceptable to show up to a Shakespeare studies conference introducing our talk on Romeo and Juliet with the opening line, “Well, obviously I haven’t read the play, but I had a glance at the York Notes on the train…” Why then is/was it acceptable/necessary to declare oneself ‘a gamer’ at a particularly high-profile games conference not so long ago. So, aside from the crowd-pleasing function, showing superplay/gameplay videos really helps hit home the idea that games are often enjoyable spectacles in their own right. Rather than being robbed of their integrity by removing direct player input, they are reinvented and seen afresh as audio-visual media. In fact, as a viewer, one is able to concentrate on things that simply go unnoticed during play. This shouldn’t surprise us too much, though. We’ve long written on the uses of games in social groups and among teams of players who adopt different roles during play (map-reader, puzzle-solver etc.). From an exhibition perspective, the idea that you don’t have to play the games and that there are other ways of making sense of them is an important one and presents an opportunity and challenge for us.

Second, superplay really powerfully demonstrates the difficulty of locating ‘the game’. If videogames are as plastic and mutable as this – as capable of supporting such radically different (and sometime radical is precisely the right word as performances can take the form of reworkings and interventions that disrupt the logic and meaning of the game – particularly when we consider the use of glitch exploits and sequence breaking…), if they can support this range of gameplay performances, then where is the game? The variety and opportunity of these ‘playings’ is at least one of the things that makes videogames exciting and vibrant for gamers. For archivists, it makes them a complete nightmare! This isn’t just a variety of readings or interpretations as we might be used to dealing with in relation to film, television or literature. These games play out, quite literally, in different ways depending on who is playing, what their motivations are, how good they are, how much they know, sometimes how random events manifest, not to mention the influence of plain-old luck. A challenge indeed, but one that we were keen to highlight – along with the fact that we don’t have all of the answers yet.

What was reassuring, though, was that in talking to some of the country’s leading experts in digital curating and conservation, we are at least asking the right questions.

Read what Iain and I have to say on the challenges and opportunities of videogame archiving and exhibition in a feature on preserving digital media in the March issue of Edge magazine. The piece Lost in Transition looks at a range of game experiences from Richard Bartle’s work on MUDs to the creation of videogame articles on repositories such as Wikipedia. The challenge of combining ‘expert’ and fan/novice editors on Wikipedia is particularly interesting and draws into sharp relief the difficulty of operating folksonomic classifications and collaborative authorship. The collective intelligence of the group is a powerful tool if it can be successfully harnessed and the passion, interest and knowledge of videogame communities is, without doubt, a rich resource, but as Wiki admin Matt Kellner points out on the article, finding a workable solution that accommodates often wildly different opinions is an interesting challenge.

It seems that the preservation and conservation of digital media is fast becoming a hot topic with more and more attention centring on the ephemeral nature of much electronic communication. Coupled with the realisation that so much of our communication, as well as the media we consume, are electronic, it’s hardly surprising. In addition to the issues of capture (and even discovery as the good people at The National Archives pointed out – does the rapid emergence of Twitter as a channel of communication demand a reappraisal of the capture strategies as new platforms come (and go) with alarming speed?), we have a particular additional challenge at The NVA in relation to exhibition. From a game studies research and development perspective, this is one of the areas that The NVA is most likely to prove influential. It comes back to locating the game again. So, even if we get to the stage where we can reverse – or at least arrest – the deterioration of plastics and save the code, what of the performances of play? How do we begin to codify them, let alone demonstrate and display them?

Obviously, make sure you read the whole magazine, but you might want to start on p74…