[-empyre-] the performance of history / rom-hacking the museum

[Gabriel Menotti]

Dear all,

As Jerome McDonough puts it, practices of preservation can be a
challenge to the social nature of videogames and gaming. As digital
artifacts, videogames are naturally systemic, depending not only of
their inner components, but also of a surrounding environment in which
these components can be executed – what Jerome called
“representational information”.

Certainly, this surrounding environment entails socio-cultural
dimensions that are not so easy to maintain. From Daniel Cook’s
contribution, we are reminded that games are naturally hard to
preserve because they are performative.  No matter if you sustain the
conditions of play, the actual gameplay can be lost once the game
becomes crystallized / objectified.

(Here, a comparison of game rules to actual law might be interesting.
How often outdated law does not become a series of meaningless
traditions, completely disconnected from the ongoing social protocols?
In that sense, should they be preserved? What about their conditions
of existence?)

In the context of our debate, it makes me wonder how much of what
seems just representational information is a constitutive part of
playing itself – sometimes a very important one. From the examples so
far: what would be of the speedrunners without their
video-recording-tools and forums? Or of the fighting game communities
without their fractal ecosystem of arcade parlours and championships?
So, in terms of historical preservation, how should these
“environments” be treated?

Meanwhile, Rafael Trindade has shown that emulation, a practice
sometimes necessary for the maintenance of gaming systems (if not of
games themselves), has many different reasons behind it. The kinds of
enjoyment people get through emulation are not related to a
transparent mode of playing; they are always self-conscious of other
levels of engagement with gaming systems and their historical
character.

In that sense, I’d ask if emulation really is a "static thing". If we
understand preservation as the maintenance of access to videogame
systems and their actual ongoing performance (more than the
preservation of the stable conditions for that performance), a simple
practice such as translation becomes extremely crucial. From a certain
perspective, translation seems able to turn canons inside-out,
bringing newer (but paradoxically older) references to a certain
gaming tradition – for instance, many important JRPGs (such as Mother
3) that were brought to the west years after their original release.

Therefore, should romhacking be considered the ultimate way of
performing videogame history and keeping it alive? Wouldn’t it be the
strongest form of preservation?

Best!
Menotti