{"id":6364,"date":"2011-10-27T13:59:51","date_gmt":"2011-10-27T17:59:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/?p=3949"},"modified":"2020-10-08T16:02:48","modified_gmt":"2020-10-08T20:02:48","slug":"videogames-as-objects-of-cultural-preservation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/videogames-as-objects-of-cultural-preservation\/","title":{"rendered":"Videogames as Objects of Cultural Preservation"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve had the good fortune of being the graduate assistant for the Preserving Virtual Worlds (PVW) project for *mumble* years. The project is a partnership between MITH, The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Stanford University, and the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). In the first phase (2008-2010) we focused on fairly practical matters: getting videogame data into a form that could be transferred to and stored within a digital repository, packaged with enough descriptive information that a user in the far future might<\/em> be able to access it meaningfully. You can read the final report here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the second phase (PVW2), we’re focusing on what exactly accessing a videogame “meaningfully” entails. What features need to be preserved (and how faithfully) to maintain an authentic experience of gameplay? Within the cultural heritage community, those features essential to authenticity are called significant properties<\/em>. The InSPECT project<\/a> says of significant properties:<\/p>\n

Significant properties are those aspects of the digital object which must be preserved over time in order for the digital object to remain accessible and meaningful. An institution with curatorial responsibility for digital objects cannot assert or demonstrate the continued authenticity of those objects over time, or across transformation processes, unless it can identify, measure, and declare the specific properties on which that authenticity depends. Nor can it undertake the preservation actions required to maintain access to those objects, unless it can characterize their current technical representations with sufficient detail.<\/em><\/p>\n

With some items, these properties are fairly self evident. Structure and content are essential to maintaining an authentic copy of an inter-office memo, but aesthetic details like font style and color (with rare exceptions) probably are not.\u00a0 Knowing that we will never perfectly replicate my first experience playing Oregon Trail on a classroom Apple ][, looking at the significant properties raises many questions, few of them with anything approaching a definite answer, most of them with different answers depending who you ask.<\/p>\n