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Video game preservation is about far more than a finished video game: a thread
People think of video game preservation as the preservation of a playable video game. If they stretch their minds a bit, they might consider preservation of hardware, controllers, maybe marketing materials. That makes sense, players see player-facing materials.
But much like film preservation isn't solely the realm of finished films, video game preservation has to consider the pieces that go into a video game as much as the game itself.
Let's start by considering what goes into a static video game, that is, a video game that does not receive continuous updates. So we're looking at games before the internet right?
How is a video game designed? There's the code itself, the source code w/ comments. There are design docs that tell you why those choices were made. Wouldn't those be of use to future designers, to see why a designer made the choice they did or how they met technical restraints?
How is video game art created? There are concept art pieces for characters, mood boards for settings, level maps that chart how a level will happen. A great deal of art goes into even the smallest of video games.
Does the video game have a story? Who wrote the text? Were their bibles created to chart the world outside the game? Are there character histories? Writers generate a lot of content to create stories, not all of it is seen in the game itself.
How was the video game marketed, both at home & internationally? What do those marketing materials say about how the game was perceived worldwide? Art, text, audiovisual content, all of that is marketing material to keep.
How was the video game used? Did it have a cultural life that extended past the game itself? How was it reviewed & discussed in game magazines? Were presentations made at conferences? All of that matters, too.
From a purely monetary standpoint, all these materials matter b/c beloved games are often remade or receive sequels. This stuff is important to create those new incarnations. But it's important to scholars, too.
Now let's consider video games now that online patching is possible. Which version of a game is The Game?
How a designer solved a particularly nasty bug is something that's helpful to that game's designers, the designers of anyone using that engine, or even designers of any game in that genre. And that's essentially text preservation but it's critical.
What is the difference between the alpha & beta versions of a game & the first released to players? Not just a list of changes, WHY were those changes made? That's institutional knowledge, & institutional knowledge is rarely written down, which means it's quickly lost.
What about all the ideas discarded before they entered a game? Content isn't discarded w/o reason. Every "no" before a "yes" still has value whether it's text or art or code or whatever else.
Then you get into live games, those constantly evolving ecosystems. On top of all we've discussed, those worlds have histories! They're cultural objects. The histories created internally by players have as much value as the game itself.
The histories of the great Eve Guild Wars, or the players that met after Uru was shut down, or the WoW Blood Plague virus, now we're looking at ethnography, at social history documentation.
Think of everything I've mentioned in this thread, Then consider the disciplines needed to preserve every facet of that.
Video game preservation means preserving a video game, sure. It means hardware preservation & conservation. It means maintaining the ability to access executable code from long-dead platforms. All of that is true.
But video game preservation also means art preservation, both physical & digital. It means text preservation, lore preservation really. It means the skillset needed to take institutional knowledge & write it down. It means audiovisual preservation.
Video game preservation means combining the skills of digital, physical, audiovisual, photographic, & paper-based preservation. It's not a single profession. It's a header that covers so many other professions. And it needs to be seen that way.
The image of a video game preservationist as a nerdy dude on YouTube taking executable code apart needs to die. A video game preservationist can also be a folklore scholar taking interviews of players, or a conservationist maintaining yellowed paper fragments.
Preserving video games is simply too big to be about one niche dataset. Just as film studios have film archivists but also preservationists dedicated to props, costumes, photographs, etc, video game preservationists need to branch out & specialize, too.
Video game preservation is the preservation of anything that goes into a video game's creation, enjoyment, existence, any of it. Which means, video game preservation isn't necessarily a skillset. It's a decision about what medium to focus on.
Video game preservation simply means: the preservation of the ecosystem of gaming. And that description will only increase in complexity over time. It's an uncharted medium. We have a lot still to learn.
