Ian Bogost has an interesting piece on emulating the Atari VCS that highlights another of the issues surrounding emulators as archival tools. However, here the concern is not about the integrity of the emulation or the hacks, tricks and tweaks that potential undermine the authenticity of the running of the original code. Rather, Bogost draws attention to the impact of the fundamental differences in the way games look (and I would argue also, sound) on modern displays versus the kinds of monitors/TVs of yesteryear. As Ian notes,

In today’s world of huge, sharp LCD monitors, it’s hard to remember what a videogame image looked like on an ordinary television of the late 1970s. Emulators like Stella make it possible to play Atari games on modern computers, serving the function of archival tool, development platform, and player for these original games. But unfortunately, they also give an inaccurate impression of what Atari games looked like on a television.

Given that it was designed to live in a world of smudgy, smeary CRTs rather than pin-sharp LCDs, we could well agree that the VCS should be seen through the gauze of noise, colour-bleeding, and ghostly afterimages. Certainly, that’s how things would have looked in the 1970s and 1980s where there was little or no alternative. But, we could similarly argue that these technical limitations were not ones of the VCS game-designer’s making and that ‘their game’ – the game that they conceieved and that is capable of being displayed if the self-same code is run on a device connected to a different display – looked pinsharp and was devoid of such ‘characteristics’.

This debate puts one in mind of the thorny issue of remastering audio. Should we take advantage of contemporary studio tools and techniques to create the much-rumoured new versions of The Beatles catalogue that are ‘more respectful’ to the original recordings – or, perhaps more pertinently, that conform to our contemporary sense of audio integrity and archival standards (e.g. no over-limited ‘loudness war’ processing, mono versus stereo etc.)?

Just as with the emulation of videogames, there are technical, aesthetic, political and ethical questions to be addressed here. The NVA’s focus on the contexts of games and gameplay means that we have to consider these issues seriously as the decisions we take profoundly affect the experience of our audiences and the ability of the game to communicate.

Of course, we are fortunate that the National Media Museum already has a peerless collection of TV sets and display technologies, though if we are going to go all the way with emulating the domestic contexts of gameplay, we’re going to need to collect some brown corduroy sofas and hire the set designer for Abigail’s Party.