[game_preservation] Recreating game development environments

[Vowell, Zachary W]

Oh, I totally agree that the tools would be rather unhelpful without all the other accompanying development components.  I guess that's why I referred to the whole bundle as "environments" in the first place- but that idea probably got lost in my imprecise terminology. :/

Preserving the interactivity - the experience of sitting down to a machine and experiencing the way a certain developer approached his/her task through some set of tools/assets/code/etc. -- would seem to be as important a preservation concern as it is with preserving the games themselves.

Zach


On 8/1/08 3:54 PM, "Simon Carless" <simon at archive.org> wrote:

I'm probably the last person who touched 'dark archiving' at the Internet Archive, two or three years ago. It doesn't really work well with the IA's current system because either an item is COMPLETELY dark (no description or listing page for it) or completely online. Anything else is a hack which is wont to break. So if anything else was done with the Internet Archive it might be best to do it outside of the existing collections system which is used for the game video content:

http://www.archive.org/details/gamevideos

Thanks,
Simon.

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 1:41 PM, Andrew Armstrong <andrew at aarmstrong.org> wrote:

Just to cover this; as far as I am aware starting my work on a "List of places which accept things to preserve" as I discussed previously here, it is important for sure, but has the same problems as anything else; people don't have the things any more, they can't reliably send them in (legal issues, company legal issues, time or money issues), or don't even know they can be preserved or have any value as 3 core reasons.

Since I am not old enough to know however, I could be wrong and there might be a very good reason :) but I doubt it. If you do know anyone with this kind of stuff or can advocate people to get it sent to archives, great :)

While they are also more "ripe" in their way, I'd think personally that the tools themselves are next to useless without the original game assets/code in any case, so if the former can be preserved it is in no doubt the latter can be too.

Would be good to get something sorted on the IA regarding game software/tools/code/assets availability (to put up tools like, say, the Doom ones or others), or see what their dark archive works on and has on this - I've not ever spoken directly to whoever is working on that though, so I couldn't say who to contact for information on it. It might be worth a shot however.

Andrew

Vowell, Zachary W wrote:


Yes, but doesn't the fact that they're in-house make them all the more "ripe" for preservation?  (i.e., they're closer to the brink of oblivion than publicly distributed tools/editors/assets).  I do agree it'll be a stroke of luck to find stuff like this, though.

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