Revered videogames news channel GamesIndustry.biz has just published an interview with Iain and James about the work of the NVA. As well as running through some of the backstory of the Archive and how and why it came to be, we talk a little about some of the forthcoming projects that we have planned – in particular, the ‘Director Commentaries’. Those of you at last year’s GameCity Three festival will have an idea what these are all about – brilliant and interesting people talking about their brilliant and interesting games while playing them and showing you all the brilliant and interesting things that you might have missed or could never have known. Want to hear how Goldeneye 007’s built environment wouldn’t pass current disability legislation for accessibility, or in which level you can find Martin and Dave’s virtual offices, or perhaps just sit back and enjoy the multiplayer gaming masterclass and find out whether Martin Hollis can beat Dave Doak…? All this and more, will be revealed soon. We’re busy editing and filming more Director Commentaries right now (in fact, we’ll be at a secret location in the North West next week…). Watch this space.

But for now, head over to GI.biz and read all about it.

Robert Zacny has an interesting piece on the issues and challenges of videogames preservation over at The Escapist. There’s a lot on the work of The National Videogame Archive in the piece as well as the Good Old Games project.

On a personal and professional level, one section really resonated with me:

The game room meant more to me than I knew at the time, and so I didn’t protest when my parents cleaned it out. I couldn’t articulate why I wanted to hang onto the boxes for all my old videogames, including ones I hated.

As a gamer, my house (and loft) is full of games (all in pristine condition, being something of an obsessive) and while a good number of those games are things I truly love, some of them I cannot – and never could – bear. Bringing me nothing but frustration, annoyance and a sense of wasted time and money, they are nonetheless as treasured a part of my collection as the films I don’t like and the clothes I never wore. On a professional level, it does raise an important point about the ‘canon’ of videogames. Iain and I thought long and hard about including ‘bad’ games as well as ‘good’ in the 100 Videogames book (where good and bad are hugely subjective terms once you remove issues like crashing and buggy code). We want to find ways to carry forward the idea of a balanced canon into The NVA. This is not a collection of ‘the usual suspects’ and you can often learn an awful lot from flawed design (and lot of awful). Our imperative is to tell the stories that represent the past, not to sugar-coat it or write a revisionist history where only Super Mario Bros., SFII and The Legend of Zelda speak for our cultural heritage.

Read what Iain and I have to say on the challenges and opportunities of videogame archiving and exhibition in a feature on preserving digital media in the March issue of Edge magazine. The piece Lost in Transition looks at a range of game experiences from Richard Bartle’s work on MUDs to the creation of videogame articles on repositories such as Wikipedia. The challenge of combining ‘expert’ and fan/novice editors on Wikipedia is particularly interesting and draws into sharp relief the difficulty of operating folksonomic classifications and collaborative authorship. The collective intelligence of the group is a powerful tool if it can be successfully harnessed and the passion, interest and knowledge of videogame communities is, without doubt, a rich resource, but as Wiki admin Matt Kellner points out on the article, finding a workable solution that accommodates often wildly different opinions is an interesting challenge.

It seems that the preservation and conservation of digital media is fast becoming a hot topic with more and more attention centring on the ephemeral nature of much electronic communication. Coupled with the realisation that so much of our communication, as well as the media we consume, are electronic, it’s hardly surprising. In addition to the issues of capture (and even discovery as the good people at The National Archives pointed out – does the rapid emergence of Twitter as a channel of communication demand a reappraisal of the capture strategies as new platforms come (and go) with alarming speed?), we have a particular additional challenge at The NVA in relation to exhibition. From a game studies research and development perspective, this is one of the areas that The NVA is most likely to prove influential. It comes back to locating the game again. So, even if we get to the stage where we can reverse – or at least arrest – the deterioration of plastics and save the code, what of the performances of play? How do we begin to codify them, let alone demonstrate and display them?

Obviously, make sure you read the whole magazine, but you might want to start on p74…