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

[Daniel Cook]

A great topic. Online games are living communities and as such the whole
concept of preservation in the form of butterflies pinned to display cases
is logically difficult to understand.

The closest form of preserved art that I can think of that comes close is
that of a 'theater performance'.  The technical rules are at best a
framework.  The performance of the specific players at the specific time to
the specific audience is what creates meaning.  The gameplay that emerges is
a far more complex than the base rules alone.  Players create new implicit
rules and negotiated social norms that lead to new emergent behavior.  A
simple example of this is the complex economic systems that appear in games
with little to no support for such behavior. The norms that end up running
the game are distinctly dependent on initial conditions...change the people
and you've fundamentally changed the game.

>From this perspective, it seems impossible to fully preserve an online game
with traditional archival techniques.  The remaining options available are

   - Preservation of historical evidence...dead memories of what once was.
   - Preservation of the executable portion of the ruleset.  Have you ever
   seen a running MMO without the people?  It is a ghost town, not a game.

What if games are a living communal art, not a consumable boxed product?
 One that must be performed in order to survive? I personally tend to see a
successful online game as a coherent wave rippling outward in a constantly
shifting ocean of human activity.  It is not some static thing; no
dusty cartridge to be plugged into some retrofitted emulator.  The pieces
inevitably change, but the recognizable pattern moves onward.

In this sense, the players who create a culture around a game are not so
much a resource to be tapped for help preserving of a dead thing.  Instead,
they are the last remaining tribe members of a proud culture.  Real
preservation is the act of empowering them to convert others into players so
that the performance can carry onward into the future.

take care,
Danc.

On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 3:59 PM, Jerome McDonough <jmcdonou at illinois.edu>wrote:

> 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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