Game Preservation SIG/SIG History/Kieron Wilkinson Reboot

International Game Developers Association

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Computer and video game preservation projects unite!

A call to arms...

You probably know the problem already. How do we ensure that the computer and video games we played in the past will be available in the years to come, not only for ourselves but also for future generations and historians to study?

This question will not, and indeed cannot be answered by this article. The intention is to organise something that might help answer it, and hopefully actually help do it.

This is truly a huge task when you consider the many gaming systems produced over the years, the different technologies in use, and the hundreds or even thousands of games produced for many of them. It is very unlikely that a single entity is able to solve this problem.

Of course, some great work is being done already. There are lots of individuals and organisations out there that are nibbling away at the edges of this massive problem. Many of those entities have their own army of contributors, and there are bound to be many more people who would be willing to join in - if only they knew where to start. Without these efforts we may well have ended up with nearly all games irreversibly lost due to hardware failure of the systems that run them, and more worryingly, the corrosion of the media that the software resides on.

For games that do survive their physical media by these efforts there may still be some doubt over their authenticity since in the vast majority of cases, this can only be reliably verified while the original is still available, and this verification should preferably be done around the time that the game is “digitally liberated”. Since this is often a very complicated thing to do (particularly on magnetic media such as floppy disks), it is likely that most games are still in danger of being lost from a preservation perspective. Some types of computer storage media only last a few years even when kept in the most optimal environments, and so it becomes an increasing desperate situation. The most important fact is that regardless of the life of the media, they will all develop errors and cease to function eventually.

This is the most pressing, but not the only problem. With many disparate projects attempting to preserve these titles, you are bound to get inefficiencies. For example:

• Overlap - duplication often becomes wasted effort that could otherwise be targeted in other more productive directions.
• Patchy use of standards - even though one way of doing something may be generally regarded as better than another.
• Fragmented inter-project communication - projects are bound to complement one another in various ways but may currently be unaware of each other and so are unable to mutually benefit.

The extent of these problems in practice remains to be seen. However it is probably safer to assume they are widespread.

I propose that we, as the computer and video game preservation community kick-start the preservation SIG (Special Interest Group) at the IGDA (International Games Developers Association, http://www.igda.org).

Now before the screams of horror reach my ears let me state that I do not think that all these projects should become members of an umbrella organisation whose purpose is to tell them what to do, and lay down just enough bureaucracy that nobody gets any work done.

This most certainly wouldn’t work.

What would be helpful is to make the SIG some sort of preservation hub. This will hopefully become a place where:

• Various individuals, projects and organisations can connect (via the mailing list, forums, etc) and coordinate their efforts.
• People can find out about preservation-related news around the world.
• New people to preservation can learn about it, what projects are doing, and most importantly, how they can get involved.
• It can be used to help track the progress of the various efforts.
• It can provide hints to projects on where best to focus their efforts to maximise benefit as well as help reduce duplication of effort.
• Discussions can take place on the recommended (though not enforced) way of doing things. This means using standards by general consensus, but hopefully with preference to what is commonly used elsewhere in similar industries such as digital libraries and archives.
• Younger projects can tap the experience and technology of more established ones.
• Projects can coordinate buying power for large quantities of games that occasionally appear on auction sites. Preservation on a global scale may also mean access to auctions that would otherwise be impossible due to geographical location.
• The SIG, as part of the IGDA, has a direct connection with the game industry. This may ease access/interaction between the industry and the various projects, certainly more so than by each project alone.

Having such an entity will hopefully encourage pear-review of project technology and preservation procedures. This is vitally important to help prevent “bad” preservation. This is where a game is thought to be “safe” but is later found (for example) to crash in the later levels or in certain situations because the storage medium has been corrupted or altered prior to its “preservation”. This is serious problem if it is not discovered until a time when no more working versions of the game exist. With such peer review, more advanced projects can help provide pointers on how this can be avoided.

Quality in preservation is paramount. Trying to digitally preserve faulty games is not only pointless; it is also dangerous because it gives people a false sense of security over those items. With a central resource of knowledge and expertise, we have a fantastic opportunity to group together advanced projects that know how to guard against such eventualities along with other projects who can come to learn about how to do the same.

So the question now is, exactly what and who should make up this global preservation effort?

Firstly, and most importantly we should say that anyone and everyone will be welcome to participate and discuss game preservation. The intention is that it be open to all. There should also be a list of ratified projects which make up the core of the entity, which can be listed on the website.

The kind of organisations, projects and individuals that would be good to attract are those that:

• Collect, catalogue and archive physical computer and video game hardware and software. This may include individuals with large collections all the way to full-blown computer and video game museums.
• Collect, digitise and archive computer and video games from the games original storage media.
• Collect and digitise the physical items that come with video and computer games such as scanning of promotional material, packaging, manual, etc.
• Collect metadata on computer and video games. An example project might be a web-based game information databases.
• Specialise in locating copyright owners with a view to allow games and perhaps source code to be archived, or even better publically redistributable (this in no way means relinquishing copyright). This gives lots of free marketing to the copyright owner, and makes it far easier to preserve the item(s) in question.
• Create expert groups who can work with games companies to help put preservation plans in place to protect their older, current and future games from exactly the situation we have now in that most games are still at risk.
• Specialise in the field of metadata standards for digital artefacts. Adhering to standards commonly used by libraries will make it far easier to integrate collections later.
• Specialise in copyright law of various countries. Getting proper legal advice about what exactly we can and cannot do is paramount.

The aim is to get the above types of projects and individuals to work together to build an efficient and cooperative worldwide effort to preserve interactive works. Computer and video games are art, and being mankind’s first interactive entertainment media they deserve to be properly preserved so we don’t lose them forever. It is an immense task, but working together, with enough exposure, we can get this thing done.

If you fit into any of the above categories please join with us to move this official IGDA Special Interest Group forward. We can then take this to the broader public and start discussing the issues as well as actually getting down and doing the work.

For more information, and to get your project or organisation added to the list of proposed interested parties, please email preservation_sig@igda.org.