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Okay one more talk: what’s new in game history.
Phil Salvador, Laine Nooney, Henry Lowood, Kendra Albert, Chloe Appleby

Andrew Plotkin

Crowded room! Albeit this is one of the half-size rooms at thr conference center. Still, a lot of people interested in this.

(I know Phil from Myst fandom — he helped get a bunch of historical video from the production of Riven digitized and archived.)

Phil talking about citizen archivists and fan preservation projects. “The first line of defense”. Wheeler Dealers (Dani Bunten’s first game), found and preserved. Design documents from Donkey Kong. Games for thr Casio Loopy.

(I am part of this too, with my Infocom game file archive.)

There is rising recognition and support for community preservation projects. NCSoft licensing a City of Heroes fan server.

Fan emulation projects get brought on board to re- release old games. (Tomb Raider trilogy bringing in thr OpenLara person.)

Not getting all Phil’s examples — he talks fast!

Now talking about the Yuzu lawsuit. Things are still precarious. The line between piracy and presrvation is fuzzy, and shifts for each example over time. But things are moving in the right direction — the gap is closing.

Laine: scholarly publishing by professional and academic historians. Sort of the flip side of what Phil was talking about

Academic writing isn’t for the general audience. It’s not from a fannish context. Rather it aims at context, history, looking at the bigger picture.

(Not that fannish/citizen archiving can’t do that!)

Trend to decenter videogame topics — expand to tabletop games, arcade games, pinball, other kinds of play. The history that led up to the videogame explosion.

Sean Purcell, the history of jigsaw puzzles as part of 18th century British imperialism! Like whaaa?

Chaim Gingold on Sim City, other books I can’t keep up with

Videogame afterlives: ROMchip, a journal of game and history, repair, maintenance

Research into non- famous game history figures. QA tester, marketeers, etc.

Henry: games are finding a place in cultural institutions. Museums, libraries. Strong National Museum of Play!

(Come to NarraScope this June)

MOMA in New York, SFMOMA, Smithsonian have exhibited games. (I went to the Whitney Biennial a few years ago when they had Porpentine games.)

Japan House in LA had a Pokémon (and -inspired) art exhibit.

Museums acquiring collections (Sid Sackson, Infocom people who have donated their collections).

The Internet Archive. So much stuff. For years and years, starting long before the recent burst of game archiving interest.

Prediction: 2024 will be the year of tabletop game history. (“It had better be!”)

Questions. Oh look, I see Jason Scott in line…

“What can game developers do?” Put your stuff in a box! All of it! Save it and take it home. Photos, memos, printouts. You may well outlive your comapny.

“What can fans do?” Ironically, public comments in favor of video game history get cited as reasons *against* presevation. The ESA says that’s their market for game re- releases.

“Can we support institutions, convince them to keep game material available?” Check out game stuff. Use the collection so the library knows there are users.

“Reverse engineering? Is it a good idea?” It depends. (That’s a lawyer joke.) reverse engineering is incredibly important and also legally risky. Fans don’t have thr resources for legal fights.

Also, document your reverse engineering project! Details on how you did it. That itself will be valuable history in thirty years.

Interesting example of the ongoing shutdown of WinXP activation servers. This is a huge problem for the preservation of some (non-game) software.

Mentioned “out of print” games earlier. What about remasters? Laine takes the positions that remasters are new games, and the original game is still “not available”. But that’s an argument.

@zarfeblong I hadn’t heard of the Strong Museum of Play until recently — @joningold ended up featuring a bunch of their pieces in Forever Labyrinth. I’d love to visit some day!

@iainmerrick @joningold I was there once, ten years ago. But they’ve expanded since then.

@zarfeblong Any chance they've talked about Dark Sun Online, which I hear has had a flurry of recent activity in the server space?

@powersoffour Dont think it was mentioned but these were all condensed talks

@zarfeblong thank you for live tooting them. I'm really curious about this notion of 2024 being the year of TTG history!