Preserving Games

Author: Megan

  • Interviewing Within the Industry

    For a while now I’ve been concerned about my ability to conduct interviews within the industry. I have been told by someone who would know that very few studios are going to allow me to look at their development process because in many cases, that process is itself a trade secret. I’m early enough in the process to not know if this is true or not, but in an attempt to be prepared, I’ve come up with a few workarounds for this issue:

    1. Collect oral history interviews with pioneers regarding their early experiences building video games, the processes and tools they employed, their needs then and now, and their attitudes regarding preservation of their creations. I figure that many of these people still hold IP on their first games (although I might be wrong on this); and even if they don’t still hold copyright, talking about their experiences during this formative period of development is beyond the reach of industry lawyers. Who would some of these pioneers be? And does anyone have contact information for them? I’m envisioning this as something like the Stanford and the Silicon Valley project at Stanford. I know that there are lots of interviews with pioneers out there, but I’d like to conduct some oral histories as well.
    2. Interview out-of-work designers and developers. I’ve been told that this group is large in Austin specifically. They may or may not be under gag orders, but again, talking in generalities about the development process seems like it should be fair game, particularly if I never mention the name of the interviewee, the companies they worked for, or the games they worked on.
    3. Interview open-source game developers. (both text-based and image-centric) They, by definition, are not beholden to “the man,” and should be able to freely talk about their development process,  their needs, attitudes, and tools. I’m also making the assumption that they work under the same conditions, with the same tools and and work processes as those within industry (but again, this assumption might be wrong – but anything I find will be interesting).
    4. Finally, talk to those players who have the ability to modify their games (this can be related to Second Life, or events like machinima). I don’t know if players have systematic methods or tools for modifying their games, or common attitudes towards creation and modification, but it certainly would be interesting to explore it more deeply. Additionally, interviewing players/modifiers  would be interesting from the “what is a creator when everyone can be a creator” point of view, as well as from a preservation perspective: “what is important to preserve: the original system or the ability to modify the original system in the same way that it was possible to modify it when it was originally available?”

    Any thoughts would be appreciated.

  • BBC Interview – Outcomes

    A few weeks ago, the project got some good press from Library Journal and the BBC, with an interview for the Principle Investigator, Megan Winget. This interview garnered a lot of feedback from the player community, particularly four distinct groups of players:

    1. First, there were the gamers who had witnessed objectively meaningful events:

    2. Then, there were the players who save all of their chat logs to a centralized location, as well as collect chat logs from their friends, generating huge amounts of data;

    3. Players who save different kinds historical information (like raid parties, events, stories, narratives) from their guilds or communities – via wikis.

    4. Players who are responsible for building different mods of their environments, and want to save those modifications in some way.

    These projects suggest some research issues that I think are very interesting: First, while my IMLS funded project focuses on the creation behaviors of industry players, there is a culture of creation within the gaming community itself. Talking to the people in group 4 would be interesting from examining the concept of ‘creator,’ particularly as the creation model is being changed given the opportunities inherent in the gaming process.

    I’m also interested in the role of players in the creation of meaning within games. I think it can be argued that gamers, whether they have the ability to explicitly modify their game environment or not, have a greater ability to control their experience than do people who interact with traditional media, like movies or tv. My balywick is preservation, so I’m curious to explore what that difference means specifically in terms of preservation. To meaningfully preserve a game, do we need to preserve that ability to modify and freely interact with the system? Or will it be good enough to use the traditional preservation model and preserve a static, paradigmatic version of the game. How will we need to augment the preservation model to make it more appropriate for interactive systems like games? In order to get at this, I think that the research community is eventually going to have to do a qualitative investigation of user attitudes and conceptions of game spaces, and the importance of the game spaces in their players’ lives. I’d like to fit that in to the IMLS funded project, but am not sure that it’s appropriate to do so.