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

[Paolo Ruffino]

Dear all,
I'm Paolo Ruffino. I've been lurking so far and I'll be moderating the
last week of this debate.
I'm a Phd student at Goldsmiths, Univ. of London, where I am working
on a research project about video game consumers. I'll discuss about
my project more in detail later on (maybe), but now I would just like
to add a couple of questions to this thread about video game
preservation.

Firstly, I would like to ask what is the role played by nostalgia in
game preservation. Retrogaming and game emulation seem to be based on
a sort of nostalgia for good ol' games, for lost times when everything
was more simple and fun. This is not, obviously, the only discourse
surrounding these phenomena, but certainly plays an important role. I
would like to ask if you believe this is an issue in game
preservation.

Also, and partly related to the first question, I would like to know
if it is possible, or if it has ever been attempted, to trace back the
origin of game preservation itself. When did we start to be concerned
with game preservation? This is a crucial question, as archaeology and
the preservation of historical artefacts is, itself, historically
placed, and is influenced in its trends by many cultural factors. Has
anyone ever tried to trace back the very origins of this trend of
looking back at the past of video game history, and preserving it for
present and future generations? When did it emerge this sort of self
awareness in video game culture for its own history, and the need to
preserve it?

Lot of stuff to discuss about, maybe. Hopefully someone has been into
it before and can answer these questions. Thanks!


On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Rafael Trindade <trirrafael at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>



-- 
paolo ruffino
http://paoloruffino.com
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