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…