Two years of indifference + and this is what we deserve

King of Posters
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Hello! I’m currently getting my master’s degree in Library and Information Science and I intend to work in an archives after graduation. That article is very accurate. I’d love to get involved in archiving video games, and I’ve even had an article about preserving MMOs published in an academic journal. But there’s currently no viable path for most archivists to make a professional career out of games preservation.

Library and Information Science as a field is predominantly female. I’m one of the only men in my program. Considering current gaming culture is in part defined by an extremely large and active hate group that attacks women and academics, then it’s no wonder that most of my classmates aren’t interested in getting involved with video game preservation. Who wants to orient their career around a subject that will get you death threats just for going to work? I know women who would be really interested in getting involved if it weren’t so damn dangerous.

As for me, I’m planning on working in audiovisual archives, with film and video. I live in a real hotspot for libraries, archives, and museums, but there are no institutions in my city that work with games. These institutions’ budgets are really tight and constantly under attack from austerity-pushing neoliberals and right wing psychos. In this climate, who’s going to stick their neck out on something that’ll get them attacked on all sides, even from the fans of the very media they’re trying to protect?

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Also, as an aside, I’m really displeased at how many games industry professionals have stayed silent on gamergate. The people making games are the ones with the most power to stop this shit, but most of them are too scared of losing sales or being harassed. But that’s craven. If you take these peoples’ money and refuse to refute their destructive actions, then you’re profiting off of hatred.

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One more thing, and this is important. People generally don’t really know what an archivist does and what value they bring to the table. This is what video games archivists would do for us:

-Make games and supporting documentation available to everyone, on a legal basis. Researchers, historians, filmmakers, writers, radio producers, artists, game makers, etc. would all be able to access historical materials in a totally legit, legal, above the board way. There are a ton of professionals out there who could not get away with using a romset on the job.

-Collect original cartridges and disks, packaging, and supporting documentation to put the game in its historical context, making it easier for the future to understand their importance. An archives collecting a game would also collect and preserve things like manuals, strategy guides, youtube videos of speedruns, TV commercials, written accounts of player culture, etc. An archivist is trained to pick out what’s most important from the enormous constellation of information surrounding any given video game, and preserve it and make it available.

-Create partnerships between archives and game creators and publishers. An archives could make a deal with Capcom where Capcom sends them their day-to-day records for potential preservation in the archives. An archivist could secure a donation of Itoi’s papers and preserve the concept art and source code for the unreleased N64 version of Mother 3, making it available to all. There is a ton of interesting and important material sitting in drawers of publishers and creators that might perish without the organized and trained efforts of archivists.

-Keep track of software versioning and mods. An archivist putting together a collection based on Eve Online would preserve various versions of the game across the years it ran, as well as player-created interface mods and such. An archivist working with Starcraft might save its most popular and significant custom maps so future researchers could gain an understanding of where the “Tower Defense” genre originated.

-Document the most ephemeral games that hackers will never be able to preserve on their own – MMOs and always-online mobile games. How will a researcher in 2060 know what it was like to play World of Warcraft, and what the game meant in 2010? An archivist would have created a collection specifically tailored to this purpose. The researcher could play an offline simulacrum of the game and view contextual material that shows what it was like when it was full of people, and explains important events in the player community’s history.

-Preserve the evidentiary value of these games. There’s no guarantee that a random ROMset actually has the completely faithful and 100% accurate versions of those games. Archivists take great pains to make sure that the items in their collections have not been tampered with and accurately reflect the historical record.

-Create robust metadata for their collections, and make their collections accessible to everyone, for free.

This isn’t even everything archivists do! Do you understand better now why this stuff matters?

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Thank you, @OneSecondBefore! I was hoping someone with actual experience would show up to make the case for why archiving/librarian type stuff is important in the overall scheme of things.

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Yeah, thanks for elaborating.

I get kind of mad when people say that archiving’s just “a pile of roms,” and that pirates do the same work. They really don’t. The pirates do a great job of making things playable but the entire culture that is around games, as well as development processes and supplemental materials, is viewed as ‘lol who cares go play games.’

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I work in digital preservation but I haven’t had the mental energy to engage w/ this thread yet

I dated the same woman as frank cifaldi at one point and it made me vaguely frustrated given that he self-identifies as a “videogame archivist” and I am a professionally trained one who does not work with videogames; I also probably shouldn’t put that in a non-axe post

@OneSecondBefore lmk if you need any professional advice!

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Ok just some brief notes:

MOMA is currently doing some really cool work wherein they do in fact just use a romset on the job, because legally a lot of this stuff can be judged to be minimal risk, which in many cases is as good as we’ll ever do in terms of copyright given that publishers are actively uninterested and will retain their rights indefinitely for all intents and purposes. that said, compared to romset maintainers, their stuff is a curio; credit where credit is due.

I’m assuming you keep up with Jason Scott’s work with JSMESS? DOS stuff is generally much more poorly catalogued than console romsets but that’s changed lately.

Also physical digital media is an abyss and generally not the purview of archives; it’s better suited to museum collections if anything

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also, librarian politics can be very good-intentions lefty while being ignorant of practical reality. I really bristle at the dismissal of “illegal ROMs” in the OP article because it signifies a) an ignorance of minimal-risk copyright assessment and b) a rejection of most of the real tangible work that’s already been done in videogame archiving.

I think if there’s a failure to confront gamergate then it’s actually part of a larger issue that’s existed for a long time, wherein videogames have a hard time transcending the perception of basically-comfort-food OCD pleasure boxes – the slavish, fan-catering design of which constitutes a significant chunk of the mainstream market just as it does in film, and enables the gamergate types to empathize with crypto-fascist campaigners as was mentioned above. it’s not like the IGF doesn’t exist; there’s definitely an awareness among developers that there are games and there are games and there’s an understanding of the craftsmanship involved, but the second you start talking about videogames broadly in this context (unless you’re ian bogost) you have to admit that your academic interest mostly stems from liking dragon age a whole lot, and academics almost always make really poor critics.

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I’ve also found that academic interest in digital games preservation is not a space of grant interest at the moment, even if I believe there is still academic interest in it. I think that’s because the preservation organizations that would have previously funded such research are much more likely to be aware of Gamer Gate than they are of the benefits of preservation and that has sadly damaged the ability of institutions to actively fund and work on keeping the materials intact.

And I have worked with organizations in the past and even today to try and keep their materials preserved, including artworks, documentation, and a lot more. But I’m only one person and there hundreds of thousands of games released every year. You also have battle against the general misgivings many in the archiving community have about preserving digital content more generally. I’ve had archivists tell me they would rather be dead than have to archive digital content (of any sort, not just games). So you have to work against both the old guard and new ignorance.

While games continue to soar in terms of growth and spending, the amount spent on their preservation has plummeted just as precipitously.

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You’re overlooking the tools and whatnot that the pirate community has created to rip roms, not to mention coding the emulators that will outlast physical hardware as capacitors continue to leak and original controllers break. They’ve done a lot of the ground work.

P.S. Archivial tech here, so cool yr jets.

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Oh yeah, I don’t mean to knock what they’ve done. Heck, I’ve written an emu once. It’s impressive work.

Just that it’s not everything there is to do. I see a fair amount thinking it is, and that’s false.

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grumbles around. I’m kind of missing the connection though I can make a lot of presumptions around why GG is making it harder for people. Is it that GG will directly harass people? Hardly defending them I just can’t see them going after some person in college archiving games directly, they may not approve but even they I doubt would care. If it’s just that they’re making the whole scene around games more toxic that sure is a factor but it’s not like there aren’t groups in the cinema, music, or literary scene like that even if not to the same extent currently.

While I find it interesting I and I support the idea of archival work, I honestly do still have more respect for the white hat pirates here. IT’s more than just LOL here’s roms. There’s been a lot of work to improve or keep games around, and keep them accessible. No matter how great the archive roms are publicly available and archives have gatekeepers and limits that the other end needn’t worry about.

I find this all interesting and i’m pretty much on board with people here but I can’t just abide straight demonizing of pirates or GG. If they did something wrong hold them to the fire for that.

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Since there is overlap from GG and the folks who went apeshit about Rebecca Watson saying that an elevator where it’s impossible to leave is not an appropriate place to proposition someone and with the folks who dedicated themselves to destroying Adria Richards for complaining about misogynist jokes at PyCon, I’d say that attacks on women in academia are very much a real risk for dealing with them, as evidenced by the post in the OP mentioning the archivist receiving threats of rape in the article linked.

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ROMs are a very small part of what archivists do. To a certain degree I’d call them less important to actual archiving. Historicizing and contextualizing materials by providing documentation, metadata and other information, hopefully from the developers themselves (though good luck with that, I’ve spent years trying to convince larger developers and have largely met with a “maybe later” attitude that seems to permeate the development scene - mostly indies have been interested in taking part in my work), is closer to what most of archival and librarianship work is concerned with. This isn’t just about having ROMs.

However, because many think that’s all there is, we have to battle against that stigma. We now have to also battle against the stigma that the gaming community is full of misogynist dipshits. We also have to battle with the past stigma that games are not a pursuit worthy of archiving because they do not meet academic rigor (though this idea is stupid generally, there are many in the academic community who are concerned with keeping this idea alive). We have to deal with the fact that there are very few funding outlets for videogame research and that the competition to get that small amount of funding is fierce (and often that funding goes towards projects that aren’t related to archiving, as little funding is directly available specifically for game archiving, while movie and book and audio archiving all have funding specifically mandated for their work).

In a museology class at UW which I was a part of last year, nobody said they were interested in preserving video games, and once they found out about the barriers they need to overcome to take part, they were even less interested. These are people who will be future librarians and archivists, and not a single one in a class of 40, aside from myself, had any interest in pursuing it, citing it primarily as being too hard, or “there just isn’t any interest in preserving that stuff.” And I can’t honestly blame them. The competition is difficult enough in a field that doesn’t expand a whole lot to begin with and in many places is shrinking due to the recent politics and shrinking budgets. I shudder to think what might happen to publicly funded institutions if a Trump presidency (basically a true nightmare) comes to pass.

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and that’s all great. My point is who the hell can look at what you do when you’re done?

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For now? Anyone that makes a request, because we don’t have funding to keep a website up that has millions of pieces of content within it and many terabytes of data (that is, it’s kept on local webservers in our lab until we can find a long-term solution, preferably with a library or museum that’s willing to take on the project). And rom sites don’t have such luxuries either; that’s why they put all their content on third-party websites and hope those websites don’t shut down their services.

The closest I’ve seen to a site that’s interested in long-term preservation (and it’s mostly incidental, not intentional) that is currently funded and seems to be successful is modding websites. The various Nexus sites are fairly good about keeping accurate versioning, descriptions, date of publication, affected changes, implementation, etc. Which isn’t something that typically happens for videogames proper (at least, not in any public way).

Good Old Games does some work but is still more concerned with selling games as a product rather than preserved artifact. Games like No One Lives Forever are likely to simply disappear into the ether over time (and right now, such stories are only going to become more common).

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I love NOLF! You must save the NOLF, talbain!

I just Googled it to see what you’re talking about and I see now

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How did movies and other young media transition into becoming worthy of academic archiving? Was it driven by the universities or the industries?

I worry a lot that a big part of our problem is that no one in the industry with money seems to care (and this is an industry where all the money flows to a few hits and everyone else scrounges up beggin’ money for each project so it’s just a few stakeholders); if they could set up a fund they could provide impetus to start the ball rolling. But I’m ignorant as to whether that’s ahistorical.

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I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it was the New Wave movement – critics like Truffaut who went on to make films and developed this whole auteur theory. It was really, I think, aligning films with individual creative perspectives that made them systemically palatable as legitimate artistic works. Previously to around that time, they were just considered consumer products of the meat grinder. No individual perspective, ergo nothing legitimate to say.

I mean, it’s a nice theory. Bullshit in some key ways, but at least it had some good ends.