[game_preservation] iPhone Game Preservation

Devin Monnens dmonnens at gmail.com
Tue Jul 28 11:13:38 EDT 2009


This sounds like it goes back to two issues in preservation. First is the
ability to actually go through the data you have to find what you're looking
for (an issue cited in Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think"). I think the
solution here is usually chalked down to search algorithms and metadata. The
second is the question of how many people will access the data. In the
ecology of iPhone games, this is determined by how good the app is, but it
goes back to the old 'If you tell me what 10% people will access in the
future [or that will be historically significant], then I will preserve
that, but until then, we're saving the whole thing.' A similar quote comes
from a book on Digital Preservation (2004?) with the chapter "Key Issues in
Digital Preservation".

One thing I noted in the first paper I wrote on preservation was that
independently produced games are in greater danger of loss than commercially
produced ones, simply due to the fact that it often relies on the
preservation abilities of individuals and indy games tend to have less
distribution. The paper admitted it was impossible to save everything, and
this holds true for the library of the iPhone.

The other side of the coin is that if the data has already been archived in
a library, it's easier to access. There are romsets for the entire NES and
Atari games collections, something that would be unwieldy - if not
impossible - for an actual physical archive to own every copy and variation
physically. The size of these collections is measured in mere megabytes.
They include historically significant titles like Adventure, Combat, Super
Mario Bros. and Zelda. But they also contain titles like Custer's Revenge
whose importance is determined more by their infamy. In a case like this,
the work has already been 'done' by an indy community. All these titles,
along with their hacks and variants, are archived and catalogued. Whether or
not they are archival-proof on the other hand is a different question
entirely, but the point remains: the task of archiving one of these is as
simple as acquiring a copy and saving it to backup media.

If you have a collection of every single iPhone app ever made
(hypothetically, though I don't doubt you could find a decent torrent
online), it is much easier to copy the whole thing given cheap storage than
it is to pick and choose. The rest comes down to metadata (and the problem
of creating the archive in the first place - those rom sets weren't built
overnight but over the course of more than a decade by many people).

-Devin

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 8:12 AM, Rachel "Sheepy" Donahue
<donahrm at gmail.com>wrote:


>

> Sure, there's the question of whether most of these iPhone games are worth

>> preserving in the first place.

>>

>>

>

> I think that right there is what gives us a -little- bit of time before we

> start worrying about iPhone apps. Not that there aren't some that are or

> will be worth preserving -- but if a game has "died" so early in the

> platform's life, it probably isn't one of them. It's difficult to accept

> sometimes, especially in a world of sub-$100 TB hard drives.. but we really

> can't preserve _everything_. Nor should we.

>

> Cheers,

> Rach

>

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>




--
Devin Monnens
www.deserthat.com

The sleep of Reason produces monsters.
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