[game_preservation] iPhone Game Preservation

Jerome McDonough jmcdonou at uiuc.edu
Tue Jul 28 13:07:20 EDT 2009



On Jul 28, 2009, at 11:29 AM, Andrew Armstrong wrote:


> Rachel "Sheepy" Donahue wrote:

>> Because what good is having a backup copy of a game, if you can't

>> play it?

> 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.

>


It depends on the game, the instantiations of the game available
(i.e., source code vs. binary executable), and the resources available
to enable long-term access. For the Preserving Virtual Worlds
project, our working assumption is that long-term preservation is
probably not realistic unless you have preserved both the game *and*
either A. sufficient information necessary to port the game forward to
new platforms or B. emulations which support running the game as is
(and emulations which you can port forward). Since we're actually
planning on trying to archive some content for the project, I think
we're nearer to this stage than you might suspect. I'm in agreement
with the Brewster Kahle-ian philosophy of 'grab the stuff now before
it goes away forever and we can sort it out tomorrow' but what we grab
has to be more inclusive than just the games themselves. Without
additional documentation of how they work and how people use them,
there's not much point. Fortunately, the gaming community has proved
itself again and again to be remarkably agile in grabbing
documentation on how things work and how people use them.


Jerome McDonough, Asst. Professor
Graduate School of Library & Information Science
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
501 E. Daniel Street, Room 202
Champaign, IL 61820
(217) 244-5916
jmcdonou at uiuc.edu





-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/game_preservation/attachments/20090728/4e625541/attachment.htm>


More information about the game_preservation mailing list