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

[Daniel Cook]

>
> Mmm, in some cases, yes.  But not all.  In cases where the source code for
> a game has become available (e.g., Adventure, Doom's engine) migration may
> be a more effective means of keeping a game around than creating a media
> dump file to work with an emulator.  It's sort of unfortunate from a
> preservationist point of view, as it would be desirable to try to minimize
> the number of strategies employed to preserve games, but at this point I
> don't think there's a one-size-fits-all strategy for keeping games alive.
>

This makes sense.  There are many types of games and even a single game
yields a spectrum of experiences.

Several divergent thoughts...

*Games as a system, not a signal*
One topic that fascinates me about most media is that it has a preferred
path of being consumed.  You watch a movie from end to end.  You read a book
from the beginning.  You look at a picture with your eyes.  Within
relatively narrow constraints, the types and order of stimuli that is input
into user is quite predictable.  Each viewer brings their own variable
experiences and interpretations to the flow, but the stimuli is a constant.
 It seems much easier to preserve a constant.  I can take a movie of a movie
and it still works.  I can take a movie of a picture and capture the essence
of it. I can make a black and white cheap copy of a painting and still the
basics come through.  The signal might be diminished or tweaked, but it is
still very much the same signal.

Some highly restricted single player games might have this attribute, but
most game do not.   The input to the player you attempt to preserve is
highly variable. Instead of a static signal with a fixed method of
consumption, you are trying to preserve a possibility space defined only in
part by rules. Multiplayer games are even more complex because the signal
that drives the experience is in large part dependent on the other players,
a variable that cannot be easily controlled.

*Goal of preservation*
When this preservation topic was discussed at Project Horsehoe (a game
design think tank) several years ago, the emphasis was on giving game design
legitimacy.  Preservation in this context was about capturing evidence that
great design had occurred and had been done by a designer.  The creative and
production notes of the design, evidence of how people had reacted to the
game, etc were all targets for preservation.

This type of preservation serves a very specific purpose: to elevate game
designers.  An incredibly common problem right now is that although many of
the fundamentals of game design are universal  (ex: many of the techniques I
apply today in social games would be readily familiar to a game designer
from the 1980s), individual game designers only are given respect by the
culture at large if their previous game was a top 5 financial hit in a genre
that people are still making.  The result is that many designers in the
prime of their creative careers are left begging for scraps.

In this light, preservation exists in order to put design and design
artifacts on a pedestal supported both by larger, longer lived
cultural institutions and an ongoing conversation of intellectual thought.
 A gold painted carved frame in a museum plus the rationale of a well
respected curator gives surprising legitimacy to blobs on a canvas that was
ignored in an attic for 100 years.  Surely video games, one of the most
explosively creative and original forms of art to emerge in centuries
deserve some of that as well.

take care,
Danc.
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