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".<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>The other side of the coin is that if the data has already been archived in a library, it's easier to access.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. <br>
<br>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).<br>
<br>-Devin<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 8:12 AM, Rachel "Sheepy" Donahue <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:donahrm@gmail.com">donahrm@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im"><br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Sure, there's the question of whether most of these iPhone games are worth preserving in the first place.<br>
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</blockquote>
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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.<br>
<br>
Cheers,<br>
Rach<div><div></div><div class="h5"><br>
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</div></div></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Devin Monnens<br><a href="http://www.deserthat.com">www.deserthat.com</a><br><br>The sleep of Reason produces monsters.<br>