Introduction

Our report is based on an effort to develop an archival and preservation strategy for scholarship generated by students in the Entertainment Arts and Engineering (EAE) program at the University of Utah. EAE is an interdisciplinary game development program that draws students from visual arts, engineering, computer science, and business. Students in the program focus on Game Arts, Game Engineering, and Game Production. In 2019, the EAE program was ranked #4 for both its graduate and undergraduate programs by the Princeton Review. 

Despite EAE’s success since the program launched in 2008, EAE is experiencing a preservation crisis. There is not an archival or preservation strategy for the video games produced by EAE students. 

We first became aware of EAE’s preservation crisis in 2015, when a group of librarians met with Jose Zagal, PhD, a faculty member in the EAE program. Zagal identified types of program support for us to explore, from developing collections of contemporary and legacy games to support their curriculum, to archiving and preserving video games produced by EAE students.

To illustrate the archival crisis, Zagal told the story of Erie, one of the earliest games produced by EAE students. Today Erie cannot be played. The few remnants that remain are a handful of Youtube video recordings of Erie’s gameplay. In 2012 the well-known vlogger, PewDiPie, posted two ‘walkthrough’ videos of himself playing Erie. PewDiPie’s videos of Erie, Part one and Part two, have been viewed over 6 million times.

Because Erie’s dependent and executable files are no longer available, it is not possible to migrate Erie to today’s platforms. As a result of being one of its earliest games, and due to the extraordinary popularity Erie enjoyed on Youtube, Erie is regarded as EAE’s flagship game. Today Erie remains marooned on an obsolete operating platform.

The plight of Erie is representative of the preservation crisis facing higher education programs that are at the forefront of digital scholarship creation. Digital scholarship works have unique archival and preservation needs that frequently fall outside of the expertise of the content creators’ program or department. In a recent scan of peer game programs at similar institutions, we were unable to locate an archiving and preservation plan for game scholarship, nor was game scholarship represented in the institutional repositories or library collections of their institutions.

As for the authors of this report, one of us serves as a liaison to the EAE program, and the other author has responsibilities that involve maintaining the institutional repository, Uspace. It is our responsibility to examine how the library might be able to expand support for the EAE program to archive and preserve students’ scholarship. 

In 2016, we began by working with our grants officer to identify potential funding opportunities and sought out the expertise of librarians, specifically the Research Data librarian and Digital Preservation archivist. We also consulted with EAE faculty, staff, students, and alumni. Based on the information we’d gathered, we drafted a project proposal to use the scholarship of EAE as a basis for delivering recommendations to libraries and archives on how to integrate video game scholarship, and, by extension, emerging forms of digital scholarship, into libraries and archives. In the spring of 2018, we were awarded a year-long IMLS Sparks grant in the area of National Digital Platform to conduct this research. This report contains recommendations, based on the outcomes of our research.

In their 1992 article, Scholarly Communication and Information Technology: Exploring the impact of changes in the research process on archives, Michelson and Rothenberg focused on the impact of information technology on scholarly communications, noting technology was “prompting transformations in scholarly practice” and “new scholarly methods will demand innovative services and responses from the archival community” (Michelson and Rothenberg, p.238). As technology became further interwoven both culturally and within academia, the dilemma over how to sustainably preserve digital works had become an area of increasing concern for scholars, archivists, librarians, and digital preservationists. Michelson and Rothenberg’s article brought attention to the immediacy of the digital preservation problem at that tie: researchers were producing scholarly works that, due to their digital form, had unique preservation challenges. 

In 1999, Rothenberg published a second article on digital scholarship, this time focusing on the preservation of born-digital scholarship. Rothenberg suggested that any proposed solution “not require continual heroic effort or repeated invention of new approaches every time formats, software, or hardware paradigms, document types, or record keeping practices change” (Rothenberg, p. v). In contrast to Rothenberg’s recommendations, the preservation of digital content opened up an ever-expanding market of opportunities for developers and vendors. As far as digital preservation has come since emerging as a topic of research focus some thirty-plus years ago, we are in some sense very much in the same position. In Cain’s 2003 article, Being a Library of Record in a Digital Age, Cain recounts attending a meeting of the Council on Library Resources in the 1990s. One of the participants, Jim Haas, had brought up the emerging digital preservation crises libraries faced, Cain observed: “Even back then, the members were well aware of the rapid obsolescence of information technologies… eighteen years have past and we have realized that the issues are more complex.” 

In 2009, Lowood et al. published a white paper that focused on preserving video games. Lowood et al. presented an argument, directed at the industry of commercial game production, that advocated for the preservation of commercial games based on their cultural significance. The preservation risks for video games are formidable; they include media decay, or, bit rot, and the obsolescence of media formats that were employed within the development and production of a video game. Lowood et al. argued the cultural, historical, intellectual property, design form, artform, and entertainment forms video games represented were essential for us to archive to understand and interpret video games in the future.

The 2010 report Preserving Virtual Worlds (PVW), is a nearly 200-page report introducing challenges that arise in preserving and archiving digital works. PVW’s authors comprehensively examined the digital preservation landscape at that time and set forth recommendations for how to archive and preserve digital works. PVW’s authors included video games among the types of digital objects to preserve. Video game preservation should by necessity include preservation of the game experience, to the extent possible, through emulation, migration, visualization, and other forms of re-enactment. The entire point of preserving the object’s files and complex file relationships was to preserve access to the gameplay. While PVW has shed light on technical, legal, and logistical challenges of preserving video games, they were constrained by the fact that there were legal limitations on what preservation interventions could be taken on a commercial game without violating trademark and copyrights.

While PVW and others have helped us to understand the technical, legal, and logistical challenges of preserving video games, they were constrained from taking action in part because they were focusing on commercial video games. The legal limitations on commercial games make it impossible to preserve and archive a video game and elements which Lowood et al. would regard as essential to the archival record. In a 2013 article, Saving Games, Enis wrote about the challenges of preserving video games. For the article, Enis interviewed experts in video game archiving, among them Jon-Paul Dyson, founder of the Strong National Museum of Play. Dyson described video games as digital preservation’s “canary in a coal mine,” because the challenges faced in preserving video games would better-illuminate the challenge of preserving a range of digital objects of lesser complexity. Video games, as an example of a complex digital object, are exactingly managed by an executable file. For the video game to function as intended, the relationship between its dependent and executable files must be maintained; in addition to maintaining the video game’s reliances on software, hardware, and peripherals. Enis also interviewed Henry Lowood, a curator with Stanford University Libraries, who described video games as “a form of multimedia, and almost every other digital media you can imagine is embedded in games… [there are also] all kinds of layers to the software, relating to other kinds of software…” (Enis, p.44).

Game producers have not shown much interest in developing a preservation strategy for their games. In an article on the record-keeping and archiving practices of indie game developers in the UK, the authors found there was little interest in proactively addressing video game preservation (Bachell and Barr, 2014). The role of librarians, archivists, and preservationists in this context is archiving the video game and its supporting documentation in a manner in which “archival documentation reveals, among many other elements of humanity, the thought, time, innovation, toil, and inspiration that go into the making of games” (Lowood, p.5). Preserving a game, to Lowood et al., meant collecting and curating design documents, artwork, versions (from prototype to patches, sequels, and mods), source code, assets, tools, binary executables, gameplay recordings, development documentation, marketing materials, press kits, demos, and source materials.

Researchers continue to grapple with long-term preservation of digital content, particularly digital content that is multi-faceted, composed of multiple file types, and reliant on native operating environments in order to function as intended. Over the nearly thirty-year investment of research and development effort to preserve digital content, the remedies which currently exist do not adequately address complex digital objects like video games. In this report we focus on actionable methods of supporting complex digital object preservation; to that end, we’ve strived to develop recommendations that are broadly relevant to the established practices in most libraries.

The recommendations we offer in this report are based on conversations and consultations with faculty and staff in both the EAE program and libraries. Additionally, we conducted a sweeping literature review that spanned over three decades’ worth of publications on digital preservation in general and video game preservation in particular.

The recommendations are divided into five chapters: collection development, curation, metadata, archiving, and preservation. Our goal for the recommendations was, first and foremost, that they address known preservation and archiving barriers and that they represent realistic, achievable, and implementable guidelines for libraries.

The chapter on collection development suggests additional ways in which library services and the EAE program can more fully support student-authored video games.

The chapter on curation examines the significance of ephemera in creating an archival record for a video game. 

The chapter on metadata focuses on the student community and the importance of including gaming terminology in the keywords and descriptions of EAE video games.

In the chapter on archiving we suggest modifications to the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) framework to more practically address video game archiving.

In the chapter on preservation we focus on decentralizing the preservation of video games, seeking to explore community-driven solutions for their preservation.

Bachell, A., & Barr, M. (2014). Video game preservation in the UK: a survey of records management practices. International Journal of Digital Curation, 9(2). doi:https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v9i2.294

Barwick, J., Dearnley, J. A., & Muir, A. (2008). The barriers to the preservation of digital games: questions on cultural significance. Paper presented at the DOCAM. https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/4988

Cain, M. (2003). Being a library of record in a digital age. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 29(6), 405-410. doi:10.1016/j.jal.2003.08.007

Enis, M. (2013). Saving games. Library Journal, 138(17), 44-47.

Lowood, H., Armstrong, A., Monnens, D., Vowell, Z., Ruggill, J., McAllister, K., . . . Pinchbeck, D. (2009). Before it’s too late: Preserving games across the industry /academia divide. Paper presented at the Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory – Proceedings of DiGRA 2009.

McDonough, J. P., Olendorf, R., Kirschenbaum, M., Kraus, K., Reside, D., Donahue, R., . . . Rojo, S. (2010). Preserving virtual worlds final report. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2142/17097

Michelson, A. & Rothenberg, J. (1992) Scholarly Communication and Information Technology: Exploring the impact of changes in the research process on archives. The American Archivist, 55(2), 236-315.

Neal, J. G. (2015). Preserving the Born-Digital Record. American Libraries, 46, 30-33.

Pinchbeck, D. (2014). Standing on the shoulders of heavily armed giants — why history matters for game development. In J. Delve (Ed.), Preserving Complex Digital Objects (pp. 3-12): Facet Publishing.

Rothenberg, J. (1999). Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a Viable Technical Foundation for Digital Preservation. A Report to the Council on Library and Information Resources. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED426715

Ruan, J., & McDonough, J. P. (2009). Preserving born-digital cultural heritage in virtual world. Paper presented at the ITME2009 – Proceedings 2009 IEEE International Symposium on IT in Medicine and Education.