a brief primer on video game preservation
Hello, friends. As noted in a previous post, I am currently working on a thesis on the topic of video game preservation. I wanted to get my fingers typing and the conversation going with some of the interesting stuff I have encountered in my research thus far.
For context, this project was born out of the combined experience of studying for a master’s in film preservation while working as an intern at the Strong National Museum of Play.
I plan on having an ongoing series regarding the subject of video game preservation, going over the history of the electronic game preservation movement, evaluating game history from the perspective of a preservationist, and to participate in the dialogues surrounding what exactly video game preservation consists of and/or could consist of.
My approach will be largely defined through the training I have undergone the past two years in the field of film preservation. I bring this knowledge with all the freshness of a pupil and I hope that my relative innocence to the industry of video games puts me in a good place to evaluate and discuss where and what video game preservation looks like, where its going, and where it stands in relation to the broader history of audiovisual archives. (Even that term is sticky, as I will discuss shortly).
Needless to say, video game preservation is a niche topic within a niche topic. It's a field still in its emergence and is often ill-defined, if defined at all. There are several theoretical obstructions in the way of a cohesive understanding of what video game preservation would entail and I will try to outline some of them here.
what to preserve?
When it comes to preserving, say, a painting, it seems like a simple enough task. Presuming you have the training and resources to carry it out. There is the one, sole object before you to take care of. There is a long lineage of practitioners you can learn from. The very chemical makeup of the cleaning tools you should be using are well-documented within the field. Similar parallels exist with other fields of preservation, such as that of film. But when you get to video games, do you just have to more or less wing it?
Even the categorization of video games has been an obstacle for GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) institutions to overcome. There has been a push to consider various pieces of audiovisual media as "time based" media, and while this designation is serviceable for, say, a video art installation, it is insufficient for something like a video game. This is further discussed in my post, "are video games time based media"? Where I ultimately argue for the extension of the term "ludic" should be carried into the realm of designation for GLAM institutions. For the rest of this article, though, I will refer to our subject matter as “video games” and “electronic games” interchangeably— so that I do not write in a dense, pretentious way.
Moving forward with my consideration of video games as ludic electronics, how does one preserve such a thing? Well, luckily I am not the first one to consider such a question. There has been a small, ever-growing group of academics, archivists, and curators of various stripes arguing for the need to preserve electronic games. This is what I will be referring to in my thesis as the "Electronic Game Preservation movement".
key players
A movement far more formalized than some may expect, although it is at times more formalized, at other times less. For the sake of my historical recounting, ground zero is 2009— the year the closest thing to a "manifesto" of game preservation was released: the International Digital Games Association's Game Preservation Special Interest Group's "Before It's Too Late: A Digital Game Preservation White Paper" (referred to evermore, simply, as the "White Paper"). Just a year later, The Strong National Museum of Play opened its eGameRevolution exhibit and debuted its International Center for Electronic Games (ICHEG), an initiative spearheaded by Jon-Paul Dyson. And during the process of the writing of the White Paper, the Library of Congress was undergoing its Preserving Virtual Worlds Project, which remains one of the only initiatives towards game preservation taken on the federal level in the United States. Various efforts were made previously, of course, but it was not until the White Paper that the process of actually formalizing, standardizing, and advocating for the field became substantial.
Key to the formation of the White Paper and to the Library of Congress' efforts was Henry Lowood, the Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections and the Curator for Film & Media Collections in the Stanford University Libraries. He will be a recurring character in our story of game preservation. He is one of the most original and forward-thinking scholars who have approached the issue of preservation.
Without getting bogged down in details, I want to survey some of the other contemporaneous efforts to preserve games. Note that this will be U.S./english-speaking-centric, as I am certain there must be efforts in Japan I am simply not aware of yet due to language barriers.
Another important voice in the field comes from Video Game History Foundation. Frank Cifaldi has succeeded in that area where so many others interested in the field have achieved so little: advocacy and awareness. If you makes a cursory inquiry into video game preservation on the internet, a non-specialist may come away with the feeling that the VGHF is doing the only work on video game preservation. This, of course, is not true. In fact, VGHF is a comparatively smaller organization than nearly all the others mentioned here. They have numerous projects that seem to be in pursuit of serious preservation efforts, such as not only preserving commercial copies of games but also their source code, assets, and documentation. They excel at speaking the language of the largest group interested in the subject—gamers themselves. While I am not privy to the details of their preservation projects, other institutions engaged in video game preservation have much to learn from VGHF's ability to communicate the urgent need for preservation to fans and potential donors.
There are numerous other institutions, such as National Videogame Museum (UK & US) that seem to take the approach of what I would call a "preservation arcade". Basically, the idea is to make historical games available and playable to paying guests with a layout that is far more arcade than it is museum. There is an incredible number of such places, and they have varying degrees of archival sophistication. For instance, I would put the retro arcade in my hometown, Vector Volcano, somewhere on this spectrum as well. The focus is almost entirely on access and playability. This is far better for people gaining an understanding of video game history, as you will still be playing Centipede on a CRT display, rather than emulating it on your computer or playing a port on your iPad or some other, further distortion. These are important for the health of a preservation field, but do not typically do the real work of preservation. These preservation arcades play a similar role to theaters which still project 35mm. However, an institution like The Strong has a similar approach on the surface, although I know from my work that there are deeper efforts at preservation. These other preservation arcade-style places may have similarly vast collection behind the scenes, but if they do, it is hardly promoted. If they do not have serious preservation or conservation efforts behind the scenes, then I fear they will simply become arcades with a few museum exhibits attached.
Another institution which focuses on access is the Learning Games Initiative Research Archive, but it is not focused on access to the public. It is rather, focused on access to researchers. The archive can even let researchers borrow video games from their massive collection with multiple locations around the country and the world. But it is in the humble opinion of this blog writer that such an archive cannot be truly archival unless it restricts access to be on-premises. This does not mean I don't appreciate the efforts of LGIRA, just as I do in fact appreciate preservation arcades. But I'd rather not characterize it as an archive, but rather something akin to a cinematheque in the world of film preservation. I plan to elaborate on this further, but such an approach has parallels with Henri Langlois' philosophy as the founder of the cinematheque francais, the very institution responsible for film preservation despite the fact that it paradoxically damaged said films in the process. We could even call it a “gametheque” for want of a better term. I think the role of such institutions is again vital to keeping maintaining a healthy amount of interest among the public and enough research opportunity to maintain scholarly output. But I still insist that this is not enough, we need these sorts of institutions but we also need institutions which operate in a way which we can truly consider archival.
The institution that seems the most concerned with finding long-term preservation standards and creating a cohesive plan to preserve their country's video game heritage, is the National Film and Sound Archive in Australia. The NFSA is at an ideal spot to lead the field as they are a well-funded federal archive which already specializes in film and audio preservation, and therefore already has a large staff of experts in audiovisual preservation. Combine this with their focus on preserving a single nation's gaming industry, which happens to be far smaller than the U.S.A.'s or Japan's— we may be faced with the funny truth that in half a century or so the most well preserved and well documented games in the world may, indeed, be Australian ones. NFSA, from my research, seems to be the most concerned with the numerous, highly complex issues involved with preserving a video game. While I do not know the state of their preservation efforts in a concrete way, I can attest to the fact that they have staffing, funding, expertise, and comprehensive collecting policies.
One of the most important entities in video game preservation which entertains perhaps the most prominent place in the public imagination is the "Internet Archive". An effort simultaneously sophisticated and scatter-shot, IA focuses its efforts on retaining public access to digital artifacts. IA has been around since the late 90s and is focused on preserving a highly amorphous and slippery entity: the internet itself. The efforts to preserve video games are largely a subset of their wider preservation efforts, just as audio and film is. However, due to the fact that IA is almost entirely focused on the digital and the online, it is a key player but cannot be expected to preserve the entirety video game history, only certain aspects of it.
The focus on access rather than conservation is evident, as something like their copy of the Oregon Trail is one which is immediately accessible via a quick Google search. This is great for anyone trying to experience such an iconic game, who may not have the means to, say, fly out to a game archive and play it on-site (who does, anyways?). However, this copy of the game has a previous player file on it, and, as Andrew Borman (digital curator at The Strong) pointed out to me, you can even see the gravestones of this previous player.
idealism and recursion
This single copy of The Oregon Trail on IA may become the one that is most accessible and, therefore, most shapes the public perception of the game. But while access being prioritized is effective, it may cause researchers' and the public's "access" to be a distortion of the past. This is not to even mention that one playing the game on an in-browser emulator on a modern LCD monitor, is having an experience that is profoundly removed from how one would have played The Oregon Trail in 1990. Access to the content is a good thing, but that is truly all it is: access to the content. I will speak more about this particular subject, but we should be more critical about our notion of "content". After all, if I watch a 360p rip of a DVD copy of, say, a colorized version of Voyage to the Moon, our contemporary mindset seems to suggest that I have indeed accessed the content that Georges Melies created in 1902.
But this is a rather Platonic concept of content that seems to suggest that no matter how many times the "content" has been transferred from one medium to another, the content somehow lies buried underneath, unaltered. As if it were the same painting with a new layer of varnish. But it is not like varnish, it is far more like a photograph of the painting. In the case of duplicating a film like Voyage to the Moon, it literally is. Consider how much detail is lost when you photograph a photograph. That data loss is unavoidable with analog technology. With digital technology we seem to think we can inject the data back in, through various forms of assuming what it should look like. And in a sense, we can. But an understanding of video compression teaches one that frames no longer exist in an mp4 file the way they did in a piece of film. How much can be removed, replaced, assumed, until we are simply no longer dealing with the same content? (…ask me about DPX frames some other time)
How useful is this Platonic ideal of content? All of these assumptions should be continuously reevaluated as we undergo the process of preserving history, and we should never forget the profound changes a thing undergoes when we digitize it, transfer it, emulate it, and, hopefully, access it. Video games offer profoundly challenging considerations in this particular sector, as how exactly do we preserve an object that it changed by its user. The IA copy of the Oregon Trail seems to suggest that this epistemological problem is far more practical than we may realize. For far less famous games which are accessed by inquirers online, what authority can they turn to to know that they are playing an accurate version and not, say, a modded one?
Another problem for game preservation: the problem of “preservational recursion”. In film preservation, as referenced earlier, the derivative copies are always of lesser quality. Therefore, if one wants the best quality, we can go back to the original negatives (presuming we have them). The copy derived from the negatives is known as a master positive. We are rarely granted such luxurious simplicity in the world of the electronic game. What is the "master" copy? If we think to ourselves, let's look at the original executable version of game, which is stored as a single file, and preserve that... are we then safe? Not exactly. Typically a game has certain software dependencies if it is on the computer, or requires console-specific technology, or worse yet, runs using stuff called "middleware".
Okay, here's the best case scenario: We can preserve the source code and assets and all the software dependencies in a version contemporaneous to the game's development, compile it ourselves, play it back on a period-accurate display, use a period-accurate controller. This, for me, should be what video game archives should be attempting, at the very least. However, even this model comes apart at the seams. Consider games which receive frequent online updates, do we preserve the latest version, the first version, or all the versions corresponding to the respective updates? Furthermore, what of games without any code? Such as the first versions of Pong? How many different preservation standards must be developed to accommodate such a field? And compound this with the fact that the video game industry suffers from a malady called supersession, in which the popular distinction between a game being "new" or "old" can be the difference of a mere year or two.
Now that I've given you a bit of what this story looks like, the groups involved, some of the problems, and so on, I think it is time to outline what I think it would mean to establish an archive which will successfully preserve, conserve, and restore video games.
I believe a video game archive still needs to be developed which will address the issue of video game preservation on each level I have articulated in this article. This would mean an archive which collects games in mass, along with the ephemera surrounding said games, and the original technologies used to run them. Such an archive would have to be deeply concerned with preserving the technology and software required to keep these games functional in a state as close to the original as possible. A great challenge will be a lack of video game history. Video game histories are often written in a celebratory manner, appealing to readers as "fans" rather than "scholars". That said, rigorous video game history is being done by numerous individuals, but it will have to increase twentyfold for the curators of museums and archives to be well informed not just of the most famous episodes in video game history (NES, PlayStation, etc.) but of the shadowy, obscured ones at greater risk to disappear (Nuon, Zeebo, etc.).
As mentioned previously, I think source code is important to preserve, as it will allow us to circumvent the "Oregon Trail" issue mentioned earlier, and allow us greater insight as to how the games were created. Of course, as I said, you will also have to preserve entire operating systems and so on in order to preserve the methods of how the game was compiled, play tested, accessed, and migrated. Just as film preservationists not only need to preserve the films but need to maintain and preserve a Kinoton projector to be able to play back the films they have preserved, so too will electronic game preservationists have to maintain a copy of, say, Windows 95. Of course, along with all this comes the general issues of digital preservation which is also a niche but far more researched field.
Finally, video games pose the challenges of being interactable. Is a film preserved if it is not projected? I would say no, it is not even a film. It is a can stuffed with plastics. Similarly, video games are twofold useless unless used. It is simply code stored on some metal until executable, and, by its very definition, a game is not a game unless it is played. Access will always be offered a unique priority (an ultra-Langloisian priority!) in the world of video game preservation. Fans of video games are even hungrier for access than fans of film. In my mind, this aspect will be cumbersome for archives who may sometimes just want to get the preservation work done (ask any film preservationist if they'd want to watch every film they've needed to inspect). But, on the other hand, this offers an opportunity for non-profit archives to mobilize funds from willing fans, rather than just trying to win over rich donors at galas. Although they should probably be doing both.
Some archives are doing bits and pieces of the vision I have just laid out. All the institutions I mentioned previously are playing a part, but none of them are operating in the rigorous, standardized, research-based way that many film archives do. A place like The Strong has got the physical collection aspect down. They have amassed a gigantic collection and have curators and conservationists who maintain the collection. However, as electronic games curator Lindsey Kurano has pointed out to me numerous times, even their collection is limited, particularly to the collecting of games mainly from the USA and Japan. She has expressed an interest, for example, in capturing the history of the Playstation 2 in Brazil, which was not released until 2009 and remains the third most popular console in the country. For a variety of reasons, Brazil goes against the grain in matters of supersession and an obsession with newness in video game culture.
A few more words. I am excited about the world of video game preservation. It is a story which has only begun, but which could be key to retaining an accurate cultural memory of the late 20th and early 21st century. Video game preservationists will find themselves today in much the same place film preservationists found themselves in the 1950s. They will become keenly aware and alarmed by how much history has already been lost. They will attempt to mobilize international efforts to keep this history alive. They will need to make vital mistakes in their pursuit of archival preservation standards for some of the most complex mediums ever devised. Ultimately, in order to ask what has gone wrong with video game preservation thus far, we must ask what went right with film preservation. The time left is decreasing, and the stakes are history.
You can expect more on this subject in the next two months.