[game_preservation] IGDA Preservation Roundtables at GDC 2008 -- meeting notes

[Andrew Armstrong]

Awesome notes. I'll add these quick things:

1a. At the second roundtable, it specifically was noted there needs to 
be more publicity to even get people to know about the efforts ("Do you 
know the website for the UT videogame archive?"). Joystiq and other 
sites could help in this regard, and if the whitepaper was completed 
it'd be easier to send out a coherent message on why preservation is 
needed, and how it can be done.

1b. Should we be reporting on the historical articles journalists do 
too? If so, I might create subpages of project work for lists - I 
already put up Gamasutra ones, but if we could contact journalists to 
help us (and not have me go through all of 
IGN/Gamespot/Gamespy/1UP/Joystiq/Kokatu/etc.'s sites), and provide where 
the articles are, that'd be great. In the future, it'd be nice to have a 
"google-like" text search <http://scholar.google.co.uk/> of historical 
articles in the press, ala newspaper article scanning, if some 
arrangement with the journalists could be done (where a copy of the 
article text is indexed by a website which can then search all 
historical texts). The validity of this being historically accurate is 
debatable, but it could even go a step further and index all old content 
- even the previews and news items - from a certain date backwards, so 
to allow citations from a central repository ("XXX was released in this 
year, according to IGN/ref/XXXX) and even limited research/fact 
checking. This would be a major task - but something to think about in 
the future! (and if we could ever get a server-side copy of texts, it'd 
be a good backup of what they have. A lot of older sites have gone down 
and the archives don't exist any more annoyingly).

2. Contribution of materials - a quick wiki or web page with direct 
contact information for the major places which will take material might 
be a good way to start this, but I'm not entirely sure. We'd need a very 
good amount of information for this. Add on a quick FAQ until more 
concrete whitepaper material is available would be a neat way to solve 
nagging questions (legality, what is accepted, and so forth). If there 
is at least a note to contact the SIG for it, then people will have 
someone to go to. I can create a base page until the archives are 
contacted if this is a good idea.

3. Pop culture for gaming history got a mention. I'll probably create a 
new wiki section to hold the pop-culture items - the 
"not-really-documentaries", the shows of historical music, the remakes 
and re-releases of games (or sources of them) and so on. Some are 
already under the projects section, so it'll likely be a subpage.

I love the idea of oral histories, I'm in the UK so might be able to 
help with ones here. Once the major history is completed, and major 
figures interviewed (and also; should be added to the Internet Archive 
as well as the other mentioned archives), if it was a part of this we 
kept going, it could lead to histories of game series', 
mini-documentaries and so forth from the collection!

Next year; looking far forward; if we can start the oral histories 
(maybe even the IGDA can help host them or host a website for the media 
to be linked from at least, like the planned DGC website, and we should 
definitely mirror them everywhere possible), doing in-depth pieces on 
the DGC entries, major historical points in time, company profiles and 
timelines should be a lot easier. Wikipedia is actually one of the 
better sources of information for this, but falls down regularly since 
it deletes too much to be of historical use (and there are usually few 
"citation worthy sources" of the information in the first place too), 
and Mobygames is a database, and contains little or no historical 
information (no why, how, what...although it contains a huge amount of 
technical data!).

I'll see about that kind of website while building the DGC one, since it 
should have similar data and presentation I guess (just a lot more of it).

Egad, longer then I wanted. I'll cut it down to core points since all 3 
of these things, plus my next year point, are more asking questions and 
suggesting things then actual action points!

Andrew

Henry Lowood wrote:

> Please feel free to add your own notes. I’ll compile the additions and 

> then add this page to the wiki.