The Future of Gaming Past @ IGN

magerette

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IGN takes a look at the fragility of game media and the difficulties involved in the preservation of old games in this article based on the International Game Developers Association report entitled "Before It's Too Late: A Digital Game Preservation White Paper."
The IGDA argues that digital media has a shockingly short lifespan and, because of its fragile nature, requires the preservation efforts of professionals. For example, digital media created as recently as the past decade must deal with all kinds of threats to their longevity, such as "bit rot", which is the gradual and natural decay of digital storage devices. Storage media that were once used to hold our games and digital data – like floppy disks – face losing their magnetic properties over time, thus rendering the disks unusable. Optical discs can be physically damaged and, as anyone who has ever used a CD or DVD before would know, it doesn't take much to scratch the surface of a disc and affect the content on board. Then there are ROM cartridges, which can be affected by moisture and battery acid, and a plethora of other storage devices that can be easily damaged and not so easily replaced or repaired.
The article goes on to look at some of the ways games and gaming history are being preserved:
Dr. Swalwell says that there are several approaches to games preservation that have been adopted by cultural institutions internationally. For instance, the US project "Preserving Virtual Worlds" focuses on preserving virtual worlds, while others focus on emulation – making older games playable on newer systems so that they remain accessible, even when the hardware becomes obsolete – and others still focus on maintaining a historic record of game documentation.

While repositories like Stanford University, the University of Texas Videogame Archive, and the Berlin Computerspiele Museum are doing their part to preserve digital history, the lack of a local games preservation scene is a cause for concern. Many games that were produced and consumed locally in the 1970s and 1980s have not been documented by overseas preservation groups, and what we do have documented mostly lies in the hands of private collectors who have taken matters into their own hands.
More information.
 
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Uh, the Berlin Computerspiele Museum ? It still exists ??? O_O

The last thing I heard about it was that it never got money for a museum and therefore went into some kind of hibernation.

I've been where it once was, I mean the adress in Berlin, but they moved from there on.

Edit : I just found out that I'm right. There is no museum, no exhibition, nothing of this kind yet.

I do know that in Munich there was once a similar thing ...


Apartt from that I'm very surprised that they needed such a looong time to realize all that ! I mean the decay of media and the loss of the games therefore ... I would've thought this would have been so obvious for almost 10 years now, at least ?

Plus, here comes the copy protection thing : They won't be able to save them all, just because of the copy protections ... And even worse, because of that, the companies wouldn't even want to give them games for preservation , bcause they fear they might get stolen ...
 
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good lord of the tigers, the very thought of my archive of games perishing fills me w/ the utmost dread. We're talkin heirlooms here!

Seriously tho, games are an important part of our popular culture(s) that need to be preserve
 
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This article would have been more effective if it had cited examples of games that have actually been lost forever. I would be interested to know. Software is so easy to duplicate compared with nearly anything else, that none of it should ever be lost.

I gave away all my old DOS and Windows 95 games along with the computers I played them on. It never occurred to me that I might miss them or that there might be emulators available later. I considered them obsolete and just assumed games would get better and better.

Live and learn. Now I save everything.
 
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Call me crazy, but isn't that what the internet is for? So some copies somewhere might decay, pretty much everything ever made that's remotely worth preserving is in a number of places on the internet.

File sharing & p2p may cause other issues, but at least it means that things are preserved somewhere.
 
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