Museum presses save button on gaming history (interview)

GamesBeat: That’s the goal, to get all 7,000 of those eventually play recorded?

J.P. Dyson: Yea, so we’re doing usually a final cut of between 10 and 20 minutes. So it’s not comprehensive, it’d be impossible to do that for every game, a complete play through. But at least it gives you a record of the game. And then eventually we’d like to link that with our online record of that artifact. So video capture is the 4th thing.  Games and Hardware, Mass Manufactured Printed Materials, unique Archival Records is the 3rd one, Game Capture is the 4th one. Now you get to the fifth one, which is Emulation and Migration of Code. And that’s where it gets real tricky. That’s the one, to be honest, we’ve done the least with.  We’ve built up slowly, we know we need to be dealing with that, and we have plans to be dealing with that in the future.

GamesBeat: So it’s really something that’s been given a lot of thought, and that’s actually closest to its infancy as far as how best to do it, and what direction to go in.

J. P. Dyson: Yea, and there are other groups, such as Preserving Virtual Worlds, which I’m an advisor to, that are looking at these issues. And again, there are all sorts of issues, from digital rights management, to property issues, to technology issues for doing it.

GamesBeat: What has ICHEG’s success rate been in getting companies to donate other forms of gaming items such as production records and source code?

J.P. Dyson: We’ve had the most success working with private individuals. Often people who have been in the gaming industry for a long time have materials that are their own personal records. Companies, there are a couple of challenges here. One is companies’ concern over intellectual property; we want to be careful with that. Second is just a matter of focus. Companies often are so focused on the next product and meeting the bottom line that they’re not as either able or willing to spend the time to really concentrate on preserving the past, what they’ve done as a company. I’d say it’s less unwillingness than just a lack of time usually.

GamesBeat: What gaming ‘luminaries’ are represented within ICHEG’s collections?  What artifacts represent these individuals?

J.P. Dyson: So things like the notebooks of Will Wright, Ken and Roberta Williams have donated things like a lot of Roberta Williams’ design notes for games, for the Sierra games. Dan Bunten, also known as Dani Bunten Berry later in life, we have Dan Bunten poems and that sort of thing, personal items. Ralph Baer, we have a great collection of stuff related to his later career, developing electronic toys, including Simon.  And there are collections from companies like Westwood, for instance. And we haven’t announced this one, Joel Billings who was the founder of SSI, has donated materials.

GamesBeat: Are there any collections you’d like to get here at the center?

J.P. Dyson: You know, the games themselves are the easiest things to get. It’s more the things that either reflects the creation or the business of the games themselves. More of the personal design papers I think from key figures, along with more stuff representing Japanese gaming experience. Again we have that, but we tend to have the end products, the games themselves, as opposed to the design documents or other things. And then one thing that I’m very interested in is, which is not something at the top of the radar for most gamers, but development of gaming in the 60’s and 70’s on mainframe computer systems. Because what you see is laying down a lot of the foundations for the type of games like simulation games or sports games. So more things from game developers themselves are key. More international representation. And then some of the early history, which is often buried in newsletters and often obscure places.

GamesBeat: Might ‘Homebrew’ games be accepted into the Center’s collection?

J.P. Dyson: Yes, and I think that they are part of a longer history of gaming and game development. To me what’s interesting is that we’re in a ‘Back to the Future’ mode in some ways. If you look at the early years of the development of computer games, you saw that there was relatively little separation between the developer and the user. You quickly realized that if you were any good at programming and had the confidence, you could often create a game that was as good or almost as good as the games you could buy commercially. And that’s how so many developers got started. “Oh, I can create a Dungeons and Dragons game on the computer”. And you could hack games. The code was right there.  So there’s been the hacking/homebrew ethos from the very beginning.  But then when you get into, I feel the 90’s especially with CD-ROMs, there was often a real separation between what the average user could do, versus what these AAA titles were.  In recent years with the internet and more tools to create games, whether it’s hacking games or creating games in Flash or anything else, you don’t need to invent all of the tools. So you see the whole rise of independent games. A game like Minecraft for instance. Twenty years ago there wouldn’t have been a distribution network. You had Doom and the whole shareware thing going on, but generally a distribution network was much harder to get into. Now you can create a game that’s very popular. I guess the short answer is that we feel the user modification of games is part of a long history of video games. And so, yes, that would be a legitimate part of what we collect, and I think an important part of the whole story.

GamesBeat: What role, if any do institutions such as ICHEG play in educating the public about electronic games?  Does this role go beyond presenting the history of the medium?

J.P. Dyson: Well I think we do a number of things. One is what we do, and the other is what we enable others to do. So first of all, we, by gathering materials, make them available to scholars. We’re able to encourage the broader discussion on video games and research of video games here.  So we enable a scholar to do his or her work better because we’ve gathered these materials. We ourselves, I think, play a role in raising some of these issues around games and discussing the broader history of games. So that’s both in terms of exploring individual history and individual themes, but then also presenting viewpoints on scholarship related to other issues, such as violence. And the Strong’s other partners play a role in this too, especially the American Journal of Play, will publish articles on games and their impact on learning from authors such as James Gee. Or we published an article on aspects of play in MMOs.

GamesBeat: So really it’s both presenting the history from maybe a pure historical standpoint, presenting some of these questions to the museum-goers, and then also acting as an enabler for other researchers and other individuals to explore.

J.P. Dyson: Right, and so by preserving the materials, individual scholars can bring their own questions to this, that maybe we don’t think of, or their own perspective. But we present the materials that provide good scholarship and that make good scholarship possible on these subjects. We also want to interpret it ourselves, but again gathering the materials is not for our own benefit.  Part of our educational mission as a museum is to not only explore it ourselves but to encourage this. (Often) people gather incredible collections, but their goal is not to share it.  And in some ways they’re serving a great purpose.

GamesBeat: At least it’s not getting tossed in the trash, which is good.

J.P. Dyson: Exactly. But ultimately, to be really useful to society, you need to make this stuff available as well.

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