[-empyre-] games as art or art as game

[Melanie Swalwell]

Hey Julian,

>  to speak practically however, what shape would an termless, typeless
>  archive take? how does one search a flat-file-system without meta-data?

Yes, you're right about taxonomies and archives.  Clearly, I'm no archivist ;)

Though I still reckon that articulating what's interesting about
specific works of game art isn't helped all that much by taxonomies.

But seeing as this came out of your post about an agreed set of
categories/taxonomy being useful prior to overhauling the selectparks
website, and people writing to ask you for more information on types
of game art/specific works, and further to the discussion we had last
year about selectparks' "link archive" function, and the problems with
websites going down, etc...  I've been thinking since then about the
idea of an online collection of game art video documentation: a
collection to which artists could directly upload video documentation
of their work, with the Internet Archive as a possible host.  Rather
than ad hoc videos on google or youtube etc.

Obviously viewing video is not the same as playing an interactive
work...but that wouldn't be the point.

As a researcher in this area, I think it would be a useful collection.

What do others think?  Would such a collection be of value?

Melanie