[-empyre-] on pre-designed decay / gamifing the archive

[Rafael Trindade]

On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 12:32 PM, Rafael Trindade <trirrafael at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi people,
>
>
> On preservationism - I'm really into it, but I don't think that to*preserve
> * is to *keep alive*. Things die, period. Dumping, modding, hacking,
> translating, archiving, reproducing, re-enacting, nothing of the sort can
> bring things exactly how they were. What I felt when I was young at the
> arcades and rental stores cannot be brought back, and it's ok. Preservation
> is about to keep memories, to make stuff accessible even when deceased; so
> that one can make sense of it (i.e., history). Most of us are scholars of
> some sort, and we know that schorlarly habits were forged on researching
> ex-stuff. That's one of the troublesome issues of fields like new media
> theory.
>
> I sense that what keep things alive is just this inevitable decay - what
> players live and do, today, is different but derived from what others (or
> themselves) lived and did.
>
>
> The urge of saying this calmed down, and suddenly I read myself and found
> myself preaching. Awfully sorry, nothing of this is unknown for you; I just
> wanted to say that, maybe, this is the reason why there's not a
> "one-size-fits-all strategy for keeping games alive". Correct; not only for
> the ways that the stuffing/curating of the artifacts can be done, but
> because the meaning of *preservation* may differ, depending on who you are
> and what are your attachments and intentions to the [gaming] culture at
> hand.
>
> My regards,
> Rafael
>
> On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 11:50 AM, Gabriel Menotti <
> gabriel.menotti at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> “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.” [Jerome
>> McDonough]
>>
>> Wouldn’t it be the case maybe of creating a self-adaptable / malleable
>> strategy of maintenance? Or incorporating it to the games themselves,
>> so that they have their own pre-designed form of decay (I mean,
>> historical persistence)?
>>
>> In that sense, and considering that archives are themselves
>> socio-technical systems, could they be “gamified”? Would that
>> facilitate preservation? Or create another problem in the preservation
>> of the archive?
>>
>> (I'm sorry, but I can't think of any examples of either case right
>> now. I invite you to speculate with me. =))
>>
>> Best!
>> Menotti
>> _______________________________________________
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>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
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>>
>
>
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