Film preservation is a huge deal these days, and lots of us in fairly unrelated disciplines reap the benefits of dedicated experts who preserve, restore, digitize, and release rare films for future generations. So it's nice to see that people are already thinking towards the future in regards to preserving games, and attempting to avoid some of the problems encountered by people trying to save old reels of film. Still, new challenges come with the medium:
Mr. Lowood said that preserving video games presented certain challenges. For example the hardware that games are played on changes so frequently that there are already thousands that can only be played through computer programs called emulators, which, while readily available on the Internet, technically violate copyright laws.
“We have to be really careful here because the technology is just going to make this harder for us,” Mr. Spector said. “The game canon is a way of saying, this is the stuff we have to protect first.”
I'll be very interested in what sort of archival plan crops up - and what sort of scholarship will be happening in a few decades. "History of science" is a field that's getting increasingly popular: maybe the next generation of fledgling graduate students will be writing their proposals on the cultural impact of Nintendo, not the development of medical tools in Heian Japan? Stanford already has a special collection of early games & hardware, "which documents the rise of computer games, with a focus on games for Atari, Commodore, Amiga, Sega, Nintendo, and Apple systems." Sounds like a fun way to spend a day in the archives.
Is That Just Some Game? No, It’s a Cultural Artifact [NYT]
Stanford University's Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection in the History of Microcomputing: Video Games archive
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