The NVA very much enjoyed its time at GameCity this year and we’ve come back with some wonderful new donations for the collection. Masaya Matsuura, creator of Parappa the Rapper, Vib Ribbon and Major Minor’s Majestic Marching Band among others, delivered two fantastic presentations. In his ‘Unforgettable’ BAFTA keynote speech, Matsuura-san discussed his thoughts on poly-personal production and showed some sneak-previews of his upcoming mobile games and treated the audience to three wonderful songs with live motion graphics. In his ‘Mr Matsuura’s Marvellous Marching Band’ session, ably assisted by Dewi Tanner, the maestro talked about his work, inspiration and influences and led the crowd in a mass kazoo rendition of ‘Hey Jude’. Na na na nana on sha!

If mass kazooing, previews of unreleased games and an insight into development methodology wasn’t enough, Matsuura-san notched up another couple of GameCity firsts: A standing ovation. And an encore. I wouldn’t want to be doing next year’s keynote, the stakes are pretty high.

Demonstrating his support for the NVA, Matsuura-san kindly donated a very rare copy of Tunin’Glue. Wondering what it is? Let Matsuura-san describe, ‘There’s no need for instruments to make a band! Just connect sound parts from all sorts of genres and put guitars and vocals to it. Now, you’re the composer!’

This game/music sequencer was created for the Apple Pippin was never released in Europe (like the Pippin) so we’re very honoured to have a copy in the collection. Like everybody who saw the keynote, the NVA is obviously very excited and inspired and we’re all busy experimenting with Logic and making plans to deliver the next NVA presentation as a series of vocoder songs.

In equal measures, fun, informative, enlightening, and inspiring, perhaps Matsuura-san said, or rather sang, it best. Unforgettable.

Many thanks to all of the contributors that made our celebration of 25 years of Elite such a success. After some scene setting to transport the room back to 1984, joining Iain and James on stage were Ian Bell, David Braben, Mark Bolitho, Dominic Prior and Robert Holdstock each of whom talked through their specific contribution to the game and its continued meaning to them a quarter of a century on. We were very keen not to simply tell the same story about the game’s development. Francis Spufford’s excellent book The Backroom Boys makes essential reading and Iain and James’ own 100 Videogames tells some of this background. Instead of focusing on the couple of years leading up to Elite’s release, we wanted instead to focus on the 25 years since. This session was all about emotion impact and the place of the game in people’s lives. As such, and in keeping with the NVA’s interest in telling the stories of players as well as those of games, technologies and development, we were as excited to hear Ian and David’s thoughts on the game’s impact on their subsequent careers as we were hearing how GameCity tech genius Matt had somehow managed to get a day off school to play the game for charity.

One thing that struck us all was the sheer amount of joy that the game still inspires. We played a lengthy clip of the C64 game (which Ian and David converted themselves) from the initial flickering colour bars of its bootup via some space travel, a bit of stargazing taking advantage of the various viewpoints right through to the inevitable (and rather sudden) ‘Game Over’, the crowd sat mesmerised. This was not mere nostalgia, however, and many of the audience members were clearly not old enough to have unwrapped their own copies of Elite in 1984. Rather, there was in these vector graphics and chip tune waltzing, an object lesson in game design. In an age of high definition and photorealism, the simplicity of this representational world comes as a sobering reminder of the power and importance of the player’s imagination and the way in which, through its apparent complexity, a gameworld can provide scaffolding and potential for adventure and excitement without having to beat the player about the head with bells and whistles. Of course, in the case of Elite, that gameworld did not only extend into the screen but spilled over into the paratextual materials that literally filled the game’s box. The importance of these ‘additional’ pieces of the Elite gameworld and their function as prefigurative materials that not only round out but mediate and frame the playing and replaying of the game is difficult to underestimate and it is surprising and not a little saddening that the decision to include them has not been a more widely adopted. In an era of digital downloads, these absence of these kinds of materials seems likely to be even more keenly felt. As a reminder, we had produced a limited edition A3 print of Mark Bolitho’s original ‘lost’ origami designs that had been designed for inclusion in the 1984 pack but were cut due to budgetary constraints. The NVA is proud to have been able to redress this even if we were 25 years late.

Once the queue of eager fans had managed to get their commemorative prints signed by the stellar crew of developers, artists and programmers, we all adjourned outside to to the GameCity tent which had been transformed into a paper universe of origami models each lovingly created by Bolitho and the many visitors to GameCity. Dramatically lit by twinkling starlight, it was to this ethereal and otherworldy backdrop that Robert Holdstock read from his Dark Wheel novella. Punctuated by the Nottingham Trent University choir performing a specially commissioned arrangement of Strauss’ Blue Danube, the event transported the audience into space, back in time to 1984 and signalled the future of the NVA and GameCity. Performance and theatricality are two words rarely associated with videogames – even less so with exhibitions of videogames – but these are, without doubt, watchwords for the NVA as we move forward.

Happy birthday Commander Jameson.

For those of us old enough to remember, it is exciting and not a little bit sobering, to think that the space-opera, shoot-em-up, asteroid-mining, bounty-hunting, piratical, trading game Elite is now over a quarter of a century old.

If you’re now overcome by the warmth of a hazy, nostalgic glow, you will need no reminding that Ian Bell and David Braben’s masterpiece changed the lives – and ruined a good deal of the homework and exam revision – of countless schoolchildren when it was released on 20 September 1984. Perhaps less well-documented but equally importantly, it also provided many, many hours of ‘elicit’ entertainment for parents who switched the BBC B back on once the kids had gone to bed and the coast was clear. For many, Elite was the first taste of gaming. For others, already versed in the pleasures of interactivity, it was the first taste of gaming on a hitherto unimaginably epic scale.

With its revolutionary real-time 3D graphics and emergent gameplay, Elite seemed way ahead of its time when it was released. It turned out that the reason for this was, quite simply, that it was way ahead of its time. The extraordinary ambition and scope of the gameworld, the sense of place and being-in-the-world, the clearly-felt and subtly articulated consequences of one’s action and inaction remain high watermarks in videogaming history. Equally, telling the backstory and locating the gameplay within a complex moral and ethical framework via a wholly different medium in the form of Robert Holdstock’s The Dark Wheel novella is as bold and forward-looking an example of transmedial storytelling as any vogueish contemporary media project.

Obviously, The National Videogame Archive couldn’t let this momentous event in British game development and popular culture go unmmarked and so, in collaboration with GameCity, we are delighted to announce a series of events that not only celebrate the game but also celebrate and recognise the achivements of all the people that made Eilte what it is.

All the people? That’s right. ALL the people. Live. On stage. Surrounded by thousands of origami models of the spacecraft (using the original designs that had been intended for inclusion in the 1980s BBC package and discussed and demonstrated by their creator Mark Bolitho), to the strains of a choir singing an new arrangement of Strauss’ The Blue Danube, Ian Bell, David Braben and a host of others come together to toast the Silver Jubilee of this most cherished of all British videogames.

We will, of course, be documenting proceedings so if you can’t make it along on the day, we have things covered for generations to come. But really, what are you doing that could be more important than this? Be a Fugitive just for once…

You can read more about the event – and download the first origami model – at the GameCity Squared site.

Hello to everybody who saw us at the DiGRA 2009 conference last week (and apologies for not making it through all of our slides in the time!). Tom and James presented some thoughts on the importance of game preservation and some of the issues we’ve faced at the NVA. Also on the panel were Andrew Armstrong who discussed the excellent and important IGDA Game Preservation SIG‘s Before It’s Too Late White Paper, Jo Barwick who spoke on the cultural significance of games in the context of digital preservation, Andreas Lange of the Computer Spiele Museum and Dan Pinchbeck of KEEP.

There was/is so much to discuss and so much work to do – not only to do the work of preserving games and the ephemera of gaming cultures but also to work out what the strategies should be, what we should preserve, who should decide, how we go about preserving and perhaps even whether we can preserve the materials at all. As both Dan and Jo rightly pointed out in their talks, it is both encouraging and amazing that 2009 sees the first formal panel convened at DiGRA on game preservation. The first of many, we all hope…and the beginning of what we hope will be some very fruitful partnerships and collaborations.

You can find copies of the papers at the IGDA Preservation SIG’s wiki.

This 9-10 May, GameCity and the NVA will be quite literally driving two junctions down the M1 to do some ‘things’ at the National Space Centre as part of their awesome ‘Space Invaders’ weekend. James and Iain will be saving some videogames, playing some LEGO Star Wars, giving out some prizes and repeatedly staring up into the stars thinking surely there must be some greater reason for all of this…

For those of you who have been to Save the Videogame events before, here’s a chance to see one tailored for the family audience. Also happening that weekend is the brilliant EA Hub, gaming on a HUGE scale, characters from Star Wars (that’s the actual characters, not people in costume you understand) and all set against the backdrop of the UK’s best-loved National Space Centre.

You really should come along. It’s going to be a blast (off). etc. Ahem. Sorry.

The first details of this year’s GameCity have been announced. The festival will take place on 27 – 31 October, 2009 and it will be free. Well, the events will be free – you still have to buy your own food and drink. In fact, to show your appreciation, you could buy us all some food and drink as well. We’re bound to be hungry and thirsty by October ; )

Just like last year where we presented the first of our ‘Director’s Commentaries’ on the N64 classic Goldeneye 007 with the help of the splendid Martin Hollis and Dave Doak, the NVA will be out in force at GameCity Squared. We have a bunch of brilliant events lined up so keep your eyes glued to the sites and Twitter feed over the next few days, weeks and months for more information.

Look forward to seeing you all there.

Iain, Tom and I have just returned back from The National Archives where we had been invited to give a talk on our work on The NVA. As it’s often difficult to judge the experience and games-literacy of am audience, we decided to concentrate on a few areas to give a sense of the motivations and mission of the project.

The idea of ‘supersession’ is always a persuasive one and immediately helps people get some sense of our perspective on games as important cultural artefacts as opposed to suites of technologies or abstract code. Perhaps the most important aspect of our talk, however, was the focus on the ‘cultures of videogames’. The idea that the game is not the only – or perhaps even most important – unit of currency may be a somewhat counterintuitive one but it is absolutely at the heart of our approach and it became clear that this contextualisation and recognition of the wider place of games in the everyday lives of players is a key differentiator of The NVA. Not treating games as extraordinary things but rather utterly embedded in the normal lives of ordinary people is something central to our thinking and I am glad that we got this point across and that it seemed to resonate so well with the folk at the Archives.

We concluded our talk with a discussion of some of the challenges of exhibition and display focusing on issues such as the non-linearity of games and the impact of deliberate and competence-based choices on narrative branches and therefore the extent of the game seen through any single playing. As a means of demonstrating this challenge, we showed some video examples of ‘superplay’. Two in particular we showcased were:

a single-player playthrough of both sides of a two-player game of cult curtain-shooter Ikaruga. Watch for the hands!

and an approx 5-minute Tool-Assisted Speedrun (TAS) of Super Mario Bros. We didn’t explain TAS straight away and let people try to work out what was happening. Surely nobody can be this good? Mario seems to be jumping through the piranha plants…Indeed, nobody can be this good. And that’s the point – playing beyond human ability. Find out more about Tool Assisted Speedruns at the excellent TASVideos.

Examples such as these are really useful for a variety of reasons.

First, they’re enjoyable things to watch. Watching virtuoso performances of videogames is clearly entertaining and the masterclasses we showed off today continue to impress us. However, there is an important, less trivial and obviously populist, crowd-pleasing point to this. We tend to think of videogames as experiences that have to be played to be understood. Certainly, I am sympathetic to this position and have, in my time, been one of those game studies scholars imploring students and researchers alike to play the damn games. Would we feel it acceptable to show up to a Shakespeare studies conference introducing our talk on Romeo and Juliet with the opening line, “Well, obviously I haven’t read the play, but I had a glance at the York Notes on the train…” Why then is/was it acceptable/necessary to declare oneself ‘a gamer’ at a particularly high-profile games conference not so long ago. So, aside from the crowd-pleasing function, showing superplay/gameplay videos really helps hit home the idea that games are often enjoyable spectacles in their own right. Rather than being robbed of their integrity by removing direct player input, they are reinvented and seen afresh as audio-visual media. In fact, as a viewer, one is able to concentrate on things that simply go unnoticed during play. This shouldn’t surprise us too much, though. We’ve long written on the uses of games in social groups and among teams of players who adopt different roles during play (map-reader, puzzle-solver etc.). From an exhibition perspective, the idea that you don’t have to play the games and that there are other ways of making sense of them is an important one and presents an opportunity and challenge for us.

Second, superplay really powerfully demonstrates the difficulty of locating ‘the game’. If videogames are as plastic and mutable as this – as capable of supporting such radically different (and sometime radical is precisely the right word as performances can take the form of reworkings and interventions that disrupt the logic and meaning of the game – particularly when we consider the use of glitch exploits and sequence breaking…), if they can support this range of gameplay performances, then where is the game? The variety and opportunity of these ‘playings’ is at least one of the things that makes videogames exciting and vibrant for gamers. For archivists, it makes them a complete nightmare! This isn’t just a variety of readings or interpretations as we might be used to dealing with in relation to film, television or literature. These games play out, quite literally, in different ways depending on who is playing, what their motivations are, how good they are, how much they know, sometimes how random events manifest, not to mention the influence of plain-old luck. A challenge indeed, but one that we were keen to highlight – along with the fact that we don’t have all of the answers yet.

What was reassuring, though, was that in talking to some of the country’s leading experts in digital curating and conservation, we are at least asking the right questions.