As I Was Saying (Book Review)

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Before It’s Too Late: A Digital Game Preservation White Paper

Over the last four decades, electronic games have profoundly changed the way people play, learn, and connect with each other. Despite the tremendous impact of electronic games, however, until recently, relatively few programs existed to preserve them for future generations of players and researchers. Recognizing the need to save the original content and intellectual property of electronic games from media rot, obsolescence, and loss, the Game Preservation Special Interest Group of the International Game Developers Association has issued a white paper summarizing why electronic games should be preserved, problems that must be solved to do so, some potential solutions, and why all these issues should matter to everyone interested in electronic games and play in general. In the white paper, the editing of which was partially supported by the Preserving Virtual Worlds project and by funds from the Library of Congress, its editor and six authors (Rachel Donahue created a survey for IGDA members not included in this article) issue a call for heightened awareness of the need to preserve electronic games—endangered by relatively rapid electronic decay and intellectual neglect alike—for play scholarship and for the culture of the twenty-first century

Preserving Virtual Worlds Final Report

The Preserving Virtual Worlds project is a collaborative research venture of the Rochester Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of Maryland, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Linden Lab, conducted as part of Preserving Creative America, an initiative of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress. The primary goals of our project have been to investigate issues surrounding the preservation of video games and interactive fiction through a series of case studies of games and literature from various periods in computing history, and to develop basic standards for metadata and content representation of these digital artifacts for long-term archival storage

Collection Management (Book Review)

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Found Technology: Players as Innovators in the Making of Machinima

Part of the Volume on Digital Young, Innovation, and the Unexpected The focus of this chapter is a new narrative medium called machinima, which means producing animated movies with the software that is used to develop and play computer games. Machinima has provided digital game players with a medium for performing for other players about topics that matter to them, whether it is showing off their prowess as players, commenting on game culture, telling stories, or making statements about current events. This chapter is about how players learned to use multiplayer digital games for these purposes, and how their gameplay was able to take them from deep engagement with games and game technology to the discovery of new uses for digital technology and media

Players are artists too

Presented at Art History of Games Symposium on February 5, 2010 in the High Museum of Art’s Rich Auditorium on the campus of the Woodruff Arts Center, in midtown Atlanta.Runtime: 42:19 minutesLowood is curator for the history of science and technology collections and film and media collections at Stanford University. Lowood earned a Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley. Over a period of more than twenty years, he has combined interests in history, technological innovation and the history of digital games and simulations to head several long-term projects at Stanford, including How They Got Game: The History and Culture of Interactive Simulations and Videogames in the Stanford Humanities Lab, the Silicon Valley Archives in the Stanford University Libraries and the Machinima Archives and Archiving Virtual Worlds collections hosted by the Internet Archive. Dr. Lowood is leading Stanford’s work on game and virtual world preservation in the Preserving Virtual Worlds project funded by the U.S. Library of Congress. He is also the author of numerous articles and essays on the history of Silicon Valley and the development of digital game technology and culture. With Michael Nitsche, he is currently co-editing The Machinima Reader for MIT Press and has just completed guest editing a volume of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing on the history of computers and games.It is easy to provoke debate by posing a simple question, such as, "Are digital games a form of art?" A less controversial observation would be that it takes a lot of artists to make a digital game. This dichotomy between the theoretical exercise and the practical observation frames my interest in the creative player. As I have written elsewhere, it strikes me that rumination about the status of games as artistic works, while stimulating and useful, often distracts attention from more important aspects of expression through the medium of interactive computer and video games. Let me say before I am misunderstood that critical attention to game design, art and programming, all as parts of defining the authorial or artistic roles of game developers is a core problem for game studies. Players would not be using games to express their talents if game developers had not given them compelling games. Now that I have said that, let me reveal my point-of-view: The creativity of players is as compelling as game design. Player creativity has defined the digital game as a platform for personal or artistic expression. Player creativity, including the multiple forms of performance and spectatorship that it has spawned, deserves more attention from game studies. Players are artists, too

Memento Mundi: Are Virtual Worlds History?

In this paper, I consider whether virtual worlds are history in two senses of the word. The first explores the implications of the life-cycle of virtual worlds, especially of their extinction, for thinking about the history of computerbased technologies, as well as their use. The moment when a virtual world “is history” – when it shuts down – reminds us that every virtual world has a history. Histories of individual virtual worlds are inextricably bound up with the intellectual and cultural history of virtual world technologies and communities. The second sense of the virtual world as history brings us directly to issues of historical documentation, digital preservation and curation of virtual worlds. I consider what will remain of virtual worlds after they close down, either individually or perhaps even collectively

Euro-Librarianship (Book Review)

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