[game_preservation] Game preservation videos?

[Melanie Swalwell]

Hi all,
 
Having documentation of a game running, as with other kinds of ephemeral or variable media, is recognised as important, I think.  While its not the same, I seem to recall that Henry has made a version of this argument in terms of machinima -- i.e. that it shows what else people do with games/did in game worlds, etc.
 
The downside of not having such documentation is seen in the eg of a New Zealand made arcade game, called "Malzak", that I've written about with a collector.  Dumped to MAME a couple of years back, the colours etc aren't correct in the version that you can play because no one has seen it running for 20 years; this also means that no one will know when they actually are correct...  (I will put our essay up on our research webpage this week, in case anyone's interested -- http://nztronix.org.nz/publications.php.)
 
I know that video documentation is a part of the game preservation work (or planned work?) of the Berlin Computerspiele Museum.  Andreas can no doubt chime in here, but I gather from discussions with him that the plan is to have fairly thorough video documentation, playing through as many of a game's various levels etc as possible.
 
Making video documentation of games, as they are played by people, is something that my colleagues and I are also planning to do, as part of our pilot Sega SC3000 project this year.  As one of our team is a usability guy, and we are planning to port an historic software title to a more contemporary (mobile?) platform, we will take footage of gameplay on both sets of hardware, enabling not just the documentation of a title running on original hardware, but also the chance to reflect on and compare the gameplay experience on original and newer hardware.
 
But I like the idea you've proposed, Andrew, of having video of someone playing, together with them commenting on a game.  From some of my other research (with LAN gamers), I've found that even having very casual conversations with ppl whilst they are playing can convey meaning in an extraordinarily rich way.  Interviewing whilst playing is also a very handy methodological trick to get past peoples' self-consciousness.
 
Melanie
 
p.s. great discussion!
 
 
 
Dr Melanie Swalwell 
Media Studies Programme 
School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies 
Victoria University of Wellington 
New Zealand 
 
melanie.swalwell at vuw.ac.nz 
 
VUW homepage http://www.vuw.ac.nz/seft/media-studies/staff/melanieswalwell.aspx 
"Cast-offs from the Golden Age" http://www.vectorsjournal.org/issues/03_issue/goldenage/recollection.php
NZTronix, the blog http://www.nztronix.org.nz