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The first thing I noticed upon entering Simon’s conference was that we insert credit folk were the youngest persons in attendance. This would come into play later on. But it was good to see that some 18 people had showed up, when he was expecting... well, perhaps just us.
The topic was the preservation of videogame history. How should it be done? To what extent can we even attempt such a thing? Simon says the problem lies in that software is often considered ephemeral; a product to be phased out with new generations of hardware and software revision. As a result, there is no proper archive of older software, and the floppies that some of these programs are living on have only a few years of usability left in them.
In addition to the actual software, the design documents are being lost. Without them, it can be difficult to learn what the games might have to teach future developers. Hudson and RED just came up against this problem themselves, recently; over the last few months they have been remaking the popular Tengai Makyo PC Engine RPG series, updating it for Gamecube -- but they had to skip the first in the series; they have lost the source code. This is a problem.
The Internet Archive project is one possible solution; this is an attempt to create a database of obsolete software, properly archived with sources, dates and names. You have already seen some of the results of this work, with The Adventures of Fatman -- a game which might have otherwise been lost. Through what most saw as a recent copyright agreement, it is now possible for these fellows to archive any and all obsolete software, without the need to secure the rights of the original copyright holder.
This is facilitated through an exemption they have received to the portion of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which deals with the circumvention of security measures, opening the door for them to archive the vast majority of software. While the logistics sound a bit fishy indeed, it's for all of our benefit, really.
By October 2006, the Internet Archive has to re-apply for this exemption. So there are two time-sensitive battles being faced: one legal; one physical, as the technology itself deteriorates.
At this point in the discussion, Simon opened the floor to everyone. It quickly became clear that the conversation would be dominated by two forces of academia: Stanford Professor Henry Lowood (curator, History of Science and Technology Collections) and IDGA board member Jesse Schell (Professor of Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon).
Henry has a website of sorts -- Silicon Genesis. It's a video archive of oral history from the semiconductor industry. He has placed a lot of faith in oral histories to retrieve some of our lost data. That, and people's garage collections.
The distinction was made between a collection and an archive: an archive is something that would be available to the public in some controlled form; a collection belongs to a private holder, and takes into account neither access nor preservation.
Jesse was interested in preserving the experience of playing the game to some degree. To this end he is planning to construct a 'game innovation' site, which would be based on user contributions, and would highlight the key elements of specific games that make them unique.
Another professor of game design classes mentioned that he was often annoyed at seeing his students designing their "innovative" systems from scratch, not realizing that they had already been made. A database of these innovations would be a useful tool to educate students in game design without forcing them to just download ROMs left and right, looking for precedents. Of course, the subjectivity of the innovation archival process makes the idea nearly impossible to pull off to everyone's satisfaction, but it is ambitious nonetheless.
Almost all of us agreed that games should be preserved, and that they are an important part of our history. The conference was really about fleshing out a method of doing this. The one voice of dissention in terms of the importance of game history was a developer, surprisingly. He posed the question: How important is it? Can you relate Pac-Man to your marriage? The implication was no.
Simon, Henry and I all answered "yes", simultaneously. If you're going to pick on gaming's influence on people, Pac-Man is a poor place to start. But it is slightly discouraging to see that it was a game developer who brought this idea to the table.
My counterpoint was that he needed to remember, there exists a generation of people who have never known a world without games. Games are very much a part of our history; our development as human beings, and the way we interact with technology.
We spent quite a bit of time talking about the archival of physical games vs. archiving the process of making games. Simon had touched on the point earlier, and this is really where the academics could benefit from archival. It was mentioned that Disney has an extensive archive of all of their notes, processes, unused art and finished products; perhaps they could be a model for game companies' independent archival projects.
The problem was seen as this: game companies need to be shown that there is value in archival. Perhaps if the process were to make ROMs illegal, and keep the system regulated, then they might want in on it.
I proposed that one approach might be to amp up the criticism of games; to create in the general culture an idea that games are important, that they are historical, that they chronicle periods of our lives. Make people realize the importance of games outside of the sphere of entertainment -- as film journals did for movies -- and you will have no problem convincing people of a necessity to preserve them.
I got blank stares. That is to be expected, I suppose.
I also proposed that it might be incredibly difficult to get companies in Japan to share their archives, given that over there, sharing trade secrets is seen as something akin to giving away your entire company.
This was countered with the idea that, at the very least, it is simply important to convince the companies to archive their own stuff. Somewhere along the road, maybe forty years from now, they might share their archives with the world. Of course it is difficult to regulate archival when the companies are so closed-lipped, but it is an idea.
Ultimately it all boils down to a lack of funding, and a lack of an established method for digital archival. The latter can probably be achieved before the former.
We came away with the idea that if we somehow convince museums and private investors, like Bill Gates, of the importance of game archival, we could get the ball rolling on this stuff. The IGDA's mere few thousand dollars of yearly excess certainly isn't enough to start anything. There is much out there that will be lost forever, that we will never be able to learn from. That would be a tragedy for the future of our medium.
brandon sheffield's source code was lost by vincent diamante
[Next: Women Trouble.]
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