[-empyre-] Gamers as Technologists/Content Creators/Preservationists

[Jerome McDonough]

Hello all,

By way of introduction, and as a means of bringing a somewhat  
different slant on the topic of gaming subcultures into this  
discussion, I thought I might talk a little about the work that  
Stanford, RIT, U. Maryland and UIUC have been doing on the Preserving  
Virtual Worlds (PVW) project and the relationship between the work  
we're doing on game preservation and the larger social world of  
gaming.  I hope a you'll excuse a brief digression into contemporary  
thinking on digital preservation en route.

PVW has been exploring how we might package computer games and  
interactive fiction for long-term preservation (interpretations of  
"long-term" vary, but these days, I tend to equate long-term with  
'long enough for copyright to expire,' for corporate works typically  
95 years).  Our work has been built on top of the Open Archival  
Information System Reference Model, a combined functional model and  
data model for operating an archive developed within the space  
sciences community.  One of the key aspects of the OAIS data model is  
that preserving digital information requires preserving more than just  
the digital object you're concerned with; you also need to preserve  
the information necessary to interpret those 1's and 0's as meaning  
data, what it refers to as "representation information."  If you're  
going to preserve a PDF file, you need to preserve the PDF  
specification.  If you want to preserve a bunch of Java source code,  
you need to preserve the relevant standard for textual encoding (e.g.,  
Unicode) as well as the documentation for the Java language itself.   
Another important aspect of the OAIS reference model is that  
understanding an object in the future requires more than preserving  
the object and its representation information.  You need other,  
contextualizing information that frames the object and enables people  
in the future to understand its significance and relevance in the  
larger scheme of things.

Digital games and interactive fiction are what we in the digital  
preservation field call complex, compound objects.  They involve large  
numbers of different files of varying types, and may have a large  
number of dependencies operating system libraries, unique and  
specialized hardware, etc.  They are also come in multiple  
representations.  The source code version of a game is a very  
different entity from the binary executable for Windows which is a  
different thing again from the OS X version, etc.  In  many ways,  
digital games represent a worst-case scenario for a digital  
preservationist.

As a digital preservationist, the larger gaming community is of great  
interest because many of the activities they engage in as a result of  
their enthusiasm for games result in the generation/capture/collection  
of the exact information I would like to have as a preservationist.   
Gaming enthusiasts, particularly in the retro-gaming community, have  
invested large amounts of time and energy in collecting technical  
specifications on hardware platforms, documenting proprietary file  
formats (see the documentation that the Doom community has available  
on WAD), and generally putting together a lot of the representation  
information that I need to be able to render the contents of a game's  
files interpretable in the future.  They even produce open-source,  
freely distributed emulators, which constitute another, unique form of  
representation information regarding the operation of executable file  
formats.  In addition to gathering a great deal of valuable  
representation information, gamers also generate a lot of  
documentation regarding their own activities (e.g., speed runs,  
machinima, etc.) and the culture of various games (e.g., WoWWiki and  
Warcry for World of Warcraft, SLUniverse for Second Life, the Active  
Worlds Historical Society pages for AlphaWorld), which provides vital  
context information for games I might want to preserve.  As part of  
their gaming activities, gamers are appropriating technology to their  
own purposes, generating significant amounts of new digital content  
about games and their uses/culture, and in many cases also generating  
new technologies (emulators, mods).

In short, gamers are already engaging in many activities that I need  
to make sure are done as a digital preservationist.  The only down  
side is they tend to do put their materials on web sites that have the  
typical web half-life of 6 months.  One of the issues we have  
discussed a great deal in our project is how the digital preservation  
community and the gaming community(ies) might work collaboratively  
together with the preservation community providing reliable  
institutional support (and stable infrastructure) so that the  
representation and context information generated by gamers in their  
course of their own activities can contribute to the long-term  
preservation of games.  The Archiving Virtual Worlds subcollection  
created by our project in collaboration with the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/details/virtual_worlds 
) is an example of the sort of collaboration we'd like to see more of,  
a preservation system that collects documentation of games,  
documentation produced in the main by the gaming community itself.

There has been excellent discussion over past two weeks of gaming  
cultures focused on use of games.  I'd be interested in extending this  
discussion to talk about gamers as a subculture of technology and  
content creators, and not just consumers.

Jerome McDonough, Asst. Professor
Graduate School of Library & Information Science
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
501 E. Daniel Street, Room 202
Champaign, IL 61820
(217) 244-5916
jmcdonou at uiuc.edu





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