[-empyre-] Games, histories and preservation

[Melanie Swalwell]

This discussion has really taken off, which is terrific.  There's a
lot to respond to.  For now, I will take up this thread:

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 10:32 AM, Sean Cubitt <scubitt at unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>
>  Goog good: one should also recall the recall of the sony emulator installed
> on Macs for a few weeks in the 90s
>
>  But there are issues here
>
>  Eg The Duchamp Large glass replica by Richard Hamilton. It fractured one
> night in the Tate Millbank. It was repaired. Is it still a replica? (this
> without discussing the Barnett Newman debacle in Amsterdam when the whole
> canvas was incorrectly painted over after a knife attack)
>
>  [a more curious one: Courbet's Stonbreakers, icon of 19th Realism, was
> subject of Agfa colour film tests in the late 30s /. Early forties. It was
> destroyed in the Dersden firebombings. The colour photo is all that remains.
> What relation does the photo – and its replications – have to the lost
> 'original'?]
>
>  Eg (2) the variable media network <http://variablemedia.net/> experiments.
> Weinbren's Erl King emulated : the colour gamuts are no longer the same. The
> touchscreen response times are much faster. Refresh rate is different as is
> apparent screen resolution and actual luminance. Etc etc

I'm wondering about invoking the notion of the original in relation to
computer games, particularly old ones.  Games' mass produced
simulacral quality for one thing, but also the way that consoles etc
take on individual qualities as they age and decay.  They've each got
individual 'provenance' if you like, in their histories of care and
abuse.  There is a lot more variety amongst actual artefacts than
artworld ideas of an 'original' might suggest.  Particularly as early
game producers were no respecters of originality....the existence of
so called 'clones'/hacks/local variants is a case in point.  I like it
very much that MAME (the big emulator project for arcade games)
recognises and values these variations, even labelling them
"masterpieces".

This actual variation -- stemming from real world conditions of use
and abuse -- provides a welcome break from much of the discourse not
just about originals, but about ideal archiving solutions, in which
the implicit message often seems to be, "it's all too hard".

A favourite quote of mine from the MAME FAQ reads:

"Apparently, Scramble's board was especially easy to re-use; several
games were hacked to play on it. A long-running joke with MAME
enthusiasts is that anything can be run on Scramble hardware - N64
games, your toaster, your automatic garage door, etc. :?) (Ironically,
Scramble itself was hacked to play on Galaxian hardware!)"

I wrote a paper with the collector, Michael Davidson, a couple of
years ago in which we discuss some of these complexities etc in the
case of one particular NZ made arcade game, "Malzak".  This is
forthcoming in a collection Ludologica Retro and online at
http://nztronix.org.nz/malzak.php.

I'm wondering: are there any people on the list who work in cultural
institutions, who'd be willing to reflect on some of their experiences
with games or other software acquisition and preservation?

Melanie