[game_preservation] iPhone Game Preservation

Rachel "Sheepy" Donahue donahrm at gmail.com
Tue Jul 28 12:59:18 EDT 2009




> I don't think we're even near this stage yet. All the archives do have

> some form of working consoles, but not nearly everything is covered :)

> Maybe emulation stuff is more important if this is the main question,

> hehe.


That's true -- for now! But it's important to plan for the future,
especially with electronic stuff. At least to the point of having a plan
in place, keeping up a tech watch, etc. All I'm saying is it's not a
simple, cut-and-dry problem (or solution).



> For certain, popular things, yep.


Even unpopular! The nice thing about collectors is that there's a
collector for most things, and if the thing in question is rare.. they're
fairly likely to be very enthusiastic and proactive (and protective). In
my experience, anyway.



> The community is a good saviour, I just wish some of their sites were

> easier to use (or less political, such as Wikipedia).


Got any examples off-hand? When I think major community resources, I think
of MobyGames, HoTU, C64Preservation, Digital Press, Zophar's Domain etc..
all of which are pretty user-friendly, if sometimes lacking in aesthetics
(especially Moby).


> Even if that is the legally dubiousness you mean :)


That, and the backwards engineering involved in creating emulators. Which
I gather might be more of a problem in the states than elsewhere? Not sure.


> The authenticity of this is problematic - hardware wise especially, and

> is for me the main sticking point. Playing the original Super Mario Bros

> on anything but a NES controller is a bit "wrong", as it is trying to

> play Duck Hunt without the light gun! :)


Hooking up controllers to a PC is pretty trivial.. but that gets into the
argument of what, precisely, makes up the "essential characteristics" or
"significant properties" of a video game. And we have enough trouble
answering that question for "regular" digital records!

Guttenbrunner, M., C. Becker, and A. Rauber,Evaluating Strategies for the
Preservation of Console Video Games, in iPRES2008. 2008: London, UK.

is a paper that starts to address it, pretty good read.



> I also agree with Devin, and also someone else who say that a lot, Jason

> Scott, that at the moment preserving everything (just having the

> physical device, the software copy or whatever) is the first step


Well, it's the first step in records management :) Deciding what to save
comes further down the line. But when you're talking archives
specifically, and not preservation/history more generally,
selection/appraisal becomes important. Yes, I'm very guilty of semantic
arguments, sorry! And keeping the physical devices alive means taking up
valuable space, and is not a long term solution. Media independence is a
key part of fighting obsolescence.


> There is no way to know what is important, since even the closest

> comparison - film - has only in the last decade really pushed their own

> preservation (film registry, archives, and of course now the knowledge

> that all that early lost film was important!).


It's always a bit of an educated guess, unfortunately.


> Interesting clash there with the legal boundaries, although I'd admit as

> much for any platform - especially more recently, even the locked down

> ones have some software, cracking, whatever that is interesting and

> revolutionary, or just have good games made for free, heh.


There's always been -some- homebrewing/otherwise unsanctioned development
going on, but the iPhone seems to have really brought new life/enthusiasm
to that scene.



> I think the main interesting point to discuss regarding digital things

> is always the move of data - the fact that consoles (especially now) are

> tied incredibly to two single points of failure (a specific, locked down

> console, and a single data disk or hard drive with data on).


Luckily with many of the consoles, the community has also developed ways
to create your own carts/disks (or otherwise get software to the system),
making it possible to play backup copies on the original device if
necessary :) Course, the console itself is still a problem, depending how
good current emulation is (I wonder --not having really looked into it--
if the move in modern consoles to basically being specialized PCs rather
than truly unique hardware will make this easier in the future).


> film, which has no issues once permission is granted to get from film to

> digital, or books which can be scanned, the digital data for games is a

> bit more locked down - especially behind legal, if not always physical

> barriers, and has much more limited life spans compared to a book

> (potentially hundreds of years) and film (decades or longer, depending

> on the film type) since there is bit rot in the hardware, which also

> degrades just by use. Luckily the white paper brings this up, might need

> more then that though to convince some I'd guess.


With more movies being taken entirely digitally, they are facing a lot of
problems -- especially because of the MASSIVE volume of data created for
any one movie.

http://www.oscars.org/science-technology/council/projects/digitaldilemma/index.html

discusses that in pretty good depth -- and presents no real solutions.
Like video games, film-making is another field where industry reluctance
gets in the way. They do _want_ to preserve their stuff, but after decades
of being able to store it and forget about it, they're extremely
disinterested in the time and expense involved in active custodianship.



> Fascinating though the mobile space, and as an extension what is

> "acceptable to preserve" or what we even want to. Luckily not at that

> stage just yet :)


I don't think that luck will hold out as long as we'd like it to. :X


Cheers,
Rach


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