Jerome McDonough Interview

How did you become involved in the virtual worlds project? Are you a gamer yourself,

and if so how does that affect how you feel about game preservation

The Preserving Virtual Worlds I project was actually already under initial discussions before I joined the faculty at GSLIS. My Dean, John Unsworth, and one of the PVW partners, Matt Kirschenbaum, had worked together in the past, and had already lined up a set of people interested in computer games and preservation. Previous to joining GSLIS, I worked at NYU as head of the Digital Library Team at Bobst Library, and in that capacity, I was involved in one of the first round of grants from Library of Congress under the NDIIIPP program, the Preserving Public Television project in conjunction with WGBH television in Boston and WNET in NYC. Given my background in digital preservation and moving image preservation, when I joined the faculty here John asked me if I'd be interested in heading up the project.

I'm not actually a gamer myself. I did a little computer gaming when I first got into PCs back in the mid-80s, but just didn't find it that interesting. I wouldn't say that particularly affects how I feel about game preservation one way or another. You don't have to game to recognize the significance of games as a social phenomenon, an economic phenomenon, an artistic genre, etc. Games are important to preserve, whether I enjoy them or not.

When discussing game preservation, was the focus in your group on preserving physical

elements of gaming (game consoles, for example), the code of the game itself (converting

old system games and storing them digitally) or the social aspect of gaming (for

example finding a way to imitate elements of MMORPGs)?

For PVW 1, our focus was on trying to figure out ways of packaging the requisite information necessary for game preservation (both content and metadata), adhering as much as possible to existing standards and approaches. We didn't really have much of an a priori commitment to a particular preservation strategy (although it was fairly obvious early on looking at the experience of computer museums that preserving hardware for modern systems is essentially a lost cause). That left emulation, migration and re-enactment (e.g., Mystery House Taken Over) as viable preservation strategies to examine, and a significant part of our project was trying to figure out under which conditions those various preservation strategies were most suitable. We also looked at the social aspects of gaming, particularly in regards to Second Life (although what applies to 2L can be applied equally to most MMORPGs), as it was clear that preserving just the software for multiuser environments was not actually sufficient to enable scholarly investigations into the culture and use of such games.

Many "vintage" games are considered collectors items and may be very expensive.

How do you suggest that digital game archives overcome this obstacle?

This is one area where games don't differ significantly from any other artifact that libraries, archives and museums collect. If there is an extremely expensive artifact that you want to collect, you have to come up with the money somehow (grants, special donations, collection funds) or persuade someone already in possession of the artifact to give it to you for free. I tell my digital preservation classes that given the expenses involved in digital preservation, probably the most useful skill that can take away from my course is the ability to beg for money, which is why the course includes an assignment on grant writing. If I was going to be complete, I'd have another assignment on negotiating with donors, but that's harder to do as an assignment. :)

After work on this project, what do you feel is the most effective way to preserve

older games?

I think we pretty effectively demonstrated that there is no one-size-fits-all model for game preservation, and that preservation strategy for games will need to vary depending on the instantiations of the game available (do you have source code or only binaries), the legal status of the instantiation (do you have a DRM-protected optical disk), and the community your institution is trying to serve (gamers will be more accepting of changes to source code to allow a game to run on contemporary hardware that game scholars looking at, say, the linguistics of game programming). On the "First, Do No Harm" principle, always try to maintain an original copy inviolate for future access, even if you don't think you can make it run in that condition. Use secondary copies to try to enable access that requires modifications to the game. Collect games as early as possible in their lifecycle so that if you need legal permissions for preservation work the entity that holds copyright is likely to still be around. Collect representation information about the file formats/hardware used in games as early as possible in the game's lifecycle, and collect contextualizing information about games' use on an on-going basis, as cultures surrounding games will evolve over time. Everything else being equal, having source code is better than not having it, but in the modern commercial environment, the odds of being able to collect that are slim.

Moving forward, are there new efforts that should be put in place to catalogue games

Possibly, although I think perhaps even more important at the moment is insuring that some of the existing efforts to catalog games are preserved. Moby Games, for example, provides amazing extensive information on the games it catalogs, and while I have somewhat more faith in its longevity than the average website, that only means I think it's likely to live longer than 6 months. Web archiving of gamer sites with extensive metadata about games (or representation information like hardware schematics) is low-hanging fruit for a preservation program like LC's. Building upon existing catalogs to allow them to benefit from library data models (e.g., FRBR) is a project that might be useful, but I'd be more concerned in the short term with preserving existing databases than constructing a new one.

You mention in your report that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act complicates

efforts to catalogue games. Are there adaptations to the act that you think would

allow for the archiving of games while maintaining copyright protection for game

designers?

Absolutely. Modify Section 1201(d) of U.S.C. Title 17 so that non-profit libraries, archives and museums are allowed to defeat technological protection measures in order to make preservation copies of digital material. I think the chances of that happening under the current Congress (or indeed any foreseeable set of political actors in D.C.) is non-existent, but the necessary modifications to the law are actually pretty minor.

Do you know if the Library of Congress has begun making efforts to preserve games?

Yes, the new Culpeper A/V facility at Library of Congress specifically includes games within the realm of audio/visual materials it's trying to preserve, and the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound division of LC is collecting gaming materials. I'm fairly certain that one of the reasons why our project was funded was so that we could provide some initial guidance to LC on their own game preservation efforts at Culpeper.

Are there any other organizations that are making progress in developing a game archive?

Certainly. If you want a pretty good listing of game collections in traditional libraries/archives/museums, see Prof. Megan Winget's blog at UT Austin (http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~megan/Games/) and check the list of links of videogame archives on the right side of the page.

Finally, where does "Preserving Virtual Worlds" go from here

PVW 2 is centered on looking at the notion of significant properties in computer game preservation. The digital preservation community has for some time been operating on the assumption (a correct one) that both emulation and migration approaches to digital preservation present risks of modifying the experience of digital works. Emulations don't perfectly recreate the experience of the game in all cases (e.g., most emulators have real problems recreating the music in the original DOS version of DOOM correctly), and migration obviously can result in subtle changes to the experience of playing the game (and major changes to the underlying artifact). Given the real potential of modification to the experience of interacting with a game, how should preservationists determine what is significant about a game that needs to be preserved over time and what is more ephemeral and might be subject to modification? Obviously, in the best case scenario you change nothing, but if that isn't an option, how do you make decisions about what you absolutely have to maintain and what you don't?

Christian Bartsch Interview

How did you become involved in the organization?

Most of us in Softpres (SPS) come from various companies in the entertainment industry, like games or movies. It was founder István Fábián who was fed up with seeing the games he made littered with digital graffiti (cracks with intro added and in-game text obfuscated) and therefore decided to develop tools to preserve magnetic media in its original form, unaltered and verified. That was in 2001. Now, ten years later, Softpres is still a bunch of enthusiats striving for perfect preservation.

I did first spot the project around 2005 or 2006, but did not become actively involved until early 2009, when I was working on a technology project that was later taken over by Softpres.

How does the society provide for the costs of the organization?

Softpres is privately held. Softpres started out as a hobby project, it still is, although the scope has very much grown beyond a "hobby". So far we have spent an estimated EUR 100k for soft- and hardware, buying games and developing our technology. Counting in man hours spent for the development of our technology (calculated at the same rates we get paid in real life), we've already surpassed the barrier of EUR 1.000.000,-. Expenses are ongoing. Although a hobby, we take these matters serious. As said above, many people in Softpres come from the entertainment industry. We grew up with these games and / or were involved making them. We want to make sure the dawn of video games does not fade into oblivion. It might sound arrogant (but we just know what we can do and we can do it well), but when you find that some museums actually put digital media on a shelf and call it preserved, someone needs to take the lead.

Why did you choose this method of preservation for the society? Are there any technical difficulties you have encountered due to this system?

I assume you are referring to the technology developed. We do have our own format for storing games preserved called IPF (Interchangeable Preservation Format). It was developed because of the lack of a format being available when the project was started. Ten years later, IPF still remains the only format capable of storing original mastering data for floppy disks. The main problem with floppy media is that about 90% of them were protected using various sorts of copy protection. Such protection usually by design violates recording rules which makes it impossible to store such data in generic image formats. Replicating digital media is a very special niche in signal processing. In mathematics, the number 6 can be the result of various equations: 1*6, 2*3, 3+3, 8-2 etc. To store true remastering information, data ingested must be analysed to find the true equation used for writing (which will trigger the same result). Copy protection sometimes can be very tricky and picky and will only work if the correct equation is stored.

Our technology not only analyses the data, it can also verify integrity and detect modifications that were made to a disk after it has left the replicator. Only authentic, unaltered media qualifies for true preservation.

Because this process is so complicated, we have developed our own floppy controller KryoFlux that can read data off the disk's surface unaltered. All analysation happens in our Analyser, which will create IPFs suited for long term storage. While KryoFlux is also available to the typical end user, the Analyser is currently only available for institutes, archives, museums and libraries.

Please see http://www.kryoflux.com for more information. I also attached two PDFs dealing the the Analyser and our preservation goals.

At the time of writing, our technology has been sold to various large institutes around the world. We set up a company, KryoFlux Products & Services Ltd., which exclusively distributes and markets our IP.

Is all of the information you have stored accessible to the public?

Yes and no. Information itself is available, our web site is a treasure trove in regard to software preservation. Unfortunately, law does not permit distribution of the data ingested. There is no such thing as abandonware, regardless of what other web sites try to communicate. Copyright exists until 70 years after the author's death and it does not help getting permission from your cousin that used to play bowling with the trainee at company XY when the game was released. There is a pretty comprehensive "International Study on the Impact of Copyright Law on Digital Preservation" that was made by the Library Of Congress and others. It is available online and a pretty good read: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/news/2008/20080714news_article_copyright.html

Politics needs to address these problems. We just decided to act now, because it might happen that when politics are ready, all magnetic media already has deteriorated. Until then we have to keep the data ingested safe and sound. We do share data with interested institutes, libraries and museums. These can make the titles available to visitors, in emulation, or by writing them back to a real disk and feeding it into the vintage hardware they have.

Are you working in coordination with any other gaming preservation efforts?

We like to share information with other projects, but our rules usually forbid data exchange. One reason has been mentioned above - we don't have carte blanche from the copyright owners in many cases, and many other projects do distribute the data because they think it is okay to do so. We also think that it feels morally good if no one gets hurt - but it would still be a violation of the law. Another problem is the ingestion method. Many other projects use standard hard- and software and do store raw dumps without further processing. There is no way to tell if these images are genuine or valid. Assumptions are a bad start for preservation. It might be too late to repair something when the original media has vanished.

Many people just want to get their games working in emulation. They don't care about doing it right or perfect. Somehow working is enough, but this is not our philosophy. Saying so does not make you good friends with people from these projects. Telling them to dig a little deeper and broaden their knowledge further complicates things. We have to accept this. The feedback from academic users and libraries clearly shows we're heading into the right direction.

Moving forward, what, if any, changes should be made within the gaming community to prevent the loss of games over time?

France does it right. Like books, records and movies also video games are collected by the BnF (Bibliothèque nationale de France). They are even changing the law to force publishers to deliver unprotected copies to make sure they can be launched in years to come, even if the activation servers have already been closed down.

We have the vision of a centralized data center where institutes from all over the world send their games to have it analyzed and preserved. Once an image is made, this can be shared among other institutions without the need of redoing all the work. It would also ensure that if an image exists in many places, the risk of loss is pretty low.

Henry Lowood Interview

How did you become interested in video game preservation?

The start here was probably when we acquired a very large collection in the late 1990s – the Steven Caberneti collection, about 25,000 software titles in our laps, most of them games, a lot of printed materials with that, books and magazines and hardware. Once the decisions had a local preservation problem, and as this project I’ve been directing here at Stanford has developed I’ve been able to go into more depth more generally in some of the problems of preservation.

The processing of the collection was difficult mostly because of the size of it, about 800 boxes of material. In the top 5% of collections that we have in terms of size. At that time to fairly recently most of what we were doing in terms of preservation was stabilizing.

This collection we have here is all before 1993 so we’re looking at the physical media cartridges, ¼ inch discs, being from the late 1970s-80s. Some of the floppys are now 25 years old. There isn’t a lot of data out there on the longevity of these media, its nostly based on laboratory studies – they throw it in the microwave, throw dirt on it etc.

We could do a study based on real world conditions – we actually had fairly optimal conditions (many games came to us still in shrink wrap) so we could actually study the media that we have. As we started doing that in the last couple ofyears just anecdotally, it looks like some of the media do better than the studies would have suggested but others are doing worse, like the 5.25 inch floppies. Easily the majority of them are not readable at this point.

They’ve been in great conditions since we added them to the collection and yet some of the magnetic media are unreadable. The literature that’s out there not is not particularly helpful because it relies so much on theoretical longevity and lab studies and not on actual real

What elements of games do you think are most important to preserve? Is there a particular kind of game that is in more danger than other types of games?

We each have certain emphases – Rochester Institute does a lot on the emulation side. The Stanford group within Preserving Virtual Worlds focuses a lot on documentation of game play as well as software preservation. That could mean videos, or screen shots, or design documentation. Ithin out project with the four institutions together we mostly were working on extraction of data from the original media and packaging of that data for ingest in a digital repository. Not so much on access, playback, those kind of things.

Is there a focus on providing public information?

What we found out to a certain extent is that the technical issues are less of a problem than intellectual property law. On the documentation side the collections we have are completely avaialbe thorugh the internet archives. That’s a curative collection for which noting is going in without permission of the creator. Even though that sounds pretty good we’re still in a little bit of a gray area because with game content you have this unresolved issue of who actually owns what people do in a games – the creator or the player?

We had a conference in 2009 with Stanford law school in reference to making movies in game worlds. There’s a lot of difference of option as to whether if you go in and capture something on videwo you own that or the game company owns the rights. I’m only asking the creators of the videos and aksing them, which may not be enough. It could be at some point that one of the game companies says that we can’t have that documentary footage available. We got some advice form Stanford law school and they basically said there is no case law, probably you're ok because most game companies aren’t going to pursue this.

When focusing on game preservation are you more interested in protecting the physical

elements of gaming (game consoles, for example), the code of the game itself (converting

old system games and storing them digitally) or the social aspect of gaming (for

example finding a way to imitate elements of MMORPGs)?

Software preservation alone, extending that to replays and proprietary data are not going to tell you very much about what people historically did in games with virtual worlds. Youre going to need other kinds of documentation for that – screen shots, videos narratives like blogs wehre people track what’s going on in Second Life

The problem in that aspect is that they’re not located in the spaces encompassed by the games so you can’t just dealing with the software or whats on the server capture that information.

The scholars who are interested in the technology, authorship, game design are going to want to see source code, game software, things like that, but people who are looking at what people did in games and with games are going to primarily look at external documenation. Its not going to mean much to them other than to get a sense of the geography to open up a copy of world of warcraft and just walk around in it. Even if they got a hundred buddies in there from the year 2050, what they do in that space will not be the

What have your relations with the Library of Congress been like?

Just this weekend there’s a convention in boston and I’ll be on a panel with someone from LoC (Library of Congress) about reviving something called the digital game canon where similar to the list of films that are the masterworks of American cinema (focus preservation efforts) we’re going to try to do the same with games.

The problem is that they’re there for every industry, every kind of person so it’s a real struggle for them to focus in on one medium or one particular area. I think the way they’re approaching it is trying to support areas like the have through the National Digital Information Preservation Program.

Henry Lowood

Henry Lowood is a Curator for the History of Science & Technology Collections and Film & Media Collections in the Stanford Univeristy Libraries. He is a co-Principal Investigator for the Preserving Virtual Worlds project. He also worked as an editor for the "Current Bibliography in the History of Technology." His blog for the "How They Got Game" site is available here, and a transcript of his interview for this project is available here.

Keith Feinstein Interview

How did you become interested in vintage video games?

I basically got interested in it in college – I’m one of the original video game generation kids. I began to have an interest in the old arcade games, they were really disappearing and at that point there was absolutely no interest in preserving them in any way shape or form. Games were not looked upon as an art form. I had bought a Star Wars arcade game for my dorm room – it was great, my friends were all thrilled and we had a lot of fun with it. I wanted to learn a little bit more about who had programmed the game, who had designed it – there was really nothing about it. In those days you were still in the early Atari hide the authorship mode of discussing video games.

When you looked at the books on computer technology video games were not mentioned. I started calling around to manufacturers to ask “who had designed this thing”, trying to get some information. By the time I was in grad school I had amassed a collection of about 20 or 30 arcade games. As I said, I was doing this first-hand, reporting on it by talking to a lot of these people.

People don't want computers in their houses to play spreadsheets, they want them to play games. This is shaping up to be a really important cultural/sociological event, but the way we are being told that this event came about is wrong.

I had the idea to produce a museum exhibit and I launched into that. We got a warehouse and increased the collection to about 400 games and began work on this museum exhibit, which I eventually toured all over the place – it is now a collection in the Strong National Museum of Play.

In the process of doing this exhibition – which was really the first serious and in depth look at the history of video games, we started to figure out what was the first game with a microprossor/3d graphics etc. at that point nobody really knew what they were.

One video game magazine marked Pong as the first video game, which was not true. We spent a whole bunch of money finding and restoring key arcade games. Nobody knew what the full story was.

I collected a lot of tapes and information which I’ll eventually donate to one of these museums. A lot of the seminal figures in the industry contradict themselves now.

Its been interesting and I’ve gone on from there to produce other museum exhibits using video game technology.

What elements of games do you think are most important to preserve? Is there a particular kind of game that is in more danger than other types of games?

The focus on arcade games is because that’s where video games first came to the front of cultures attention. They were the rarest, the ones who had disappeared the quickest. There was an entire culture that existed at the time – there were arcades, there was a different social dynamic there.

The most important thing to remember is to show the game in its original context. You have to give people something – whether it’s a printed plinth or something else – to put it in the context of when it was released, when it was designed, to show it in its original form. Its enormously important that these games are played using the original hardware, especially when youre looking at these games as a resource for designers. Imagine if you had film schools only showing people classic early black and white films on a tiny television set cropped and colorized – its not the same film. Not as much fun to play on a computer – because its not the same game.

You have people saying that they’re preserving the game because they’re preserving the original code, and it's not the same game. Video games are an art form, it’s the very small little things, instances of timing that are completely missing or altered when you remove the game from its original hardware. A lot of the early games produce their own sounds in analog format with analog circuitry – you cannot get that from an emulation. That also alters the timing of how the program runs. I think its very important that the games be preserved and played in their original form as long as that is possible. A lot of the components are no longer available, the differences at least should be documented so when those days do come you can explain how its changed.

Are there any current preservation efforts that you think are particularly strong? What kind of changes need to be made to current gaming culture to improve game preservation?

I can’t tell you that I have any honest comment on what the Library of Congress is doing because I haven’t seen what they’ve done. Again, anything that has to do with the Library of Congress or Smithsonian, it's going to run ten to fifteen years behind what other people are doing anyway. When I was doing the video game exhibit I was in touch with Al Alcourn, he was atari’s first engineer, the guy who built Pong. He had the prototype Pong machine that went into the bar, he still had that in his basement. He goes “I offered it to the Smithsonian a couple of months ago and they turned it down,” the worst part about it was that they turned it down because a few years agot they paid a lot of money to have a replica built. That’s indicative about how I feel about that kind of thing.

I would look at the preservation efforts of non-governmental not for profits. I have a checkered opinion of collectors, but they will grab things and hid them in some guys basement until he loses interest in it, you can’t get good access to things. There were situations where I was fighting with collectors about “why are you bidding on this.” I want to put it on display so everybody can come and look at it. Certain things really do have value, and they need to be preserved in ways that people have access o thtem. That goes for all kind sof video games – early console games, even before cartidges came into being. Very few people have seen a ‘video brain’ that was a machine that came out in the late 70s with cartridges and a key board.

It needs to be preserved for the art form as well. Film students can go and watch projected and restored versions of birth of a nation to see all of the language of modern film. For video games students don’t, what they end up doing is download something and play it on different architecture in a different context and it loses a lot of the message and a lot of the importance. You see people making design mistakes that could be avoided if they had a proper education in the history of their chosen field. It just doen’st exist, there’s no place that they can go check out a copy of dungeons of dagarath when they’re creating a first person perspective game.

Are you planning to continue work within the field of video game preservation? If so, what is the next project you’re focusing on?

I maintain a relationship with both of the museums that I mentioned – I just could not do it anymore because it cost an incredible amount of money to amass these things and to store them – a few hundred arcade games take up a lot of space. I am going to stay involved in it as much as I can, but I personally have moved on. I wanted to try and do somethings on my own.

I formed a company with Eugene Jarvis, designed defender and robotron and stargate, all this kind of stuff – intended to look at educational games and see what could be done with them.

Keith Feinstein

The creative director of Eurek Exhibits, Feinstein is responsible for the remarkable "Videotopia" exhibit. He has appeared before the N.Y. State Senate, appeared as a guest on "CBS This Morning," "Modern Marvels," as well as countless local news broadcasts. His work has also been featured in Forbes Magazine, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and SPIN Magazine.

A transcript of his interview for this project can be read here.

Nintendo World Championships

The 1990 Nintendo World Championships crowned Jeff Hansen, Thor Aackerlund and Robert Whiteman champions in their respective age categories. They won $10,000, a 40'' television screen and a golden Mario trophy.

The golden cartridges were given in a separate contest held by Nintendo Power magazine. You can see a video of the game here.

Nintendo Entertainment System

This 8-bit video game console, released in 1984, was the best-selling gaming system of that period selling 62 million units worldwide. The entertainment site IGN ranked it the greatest game console in history, which falls in line with the game's slogan "It can't be beaten." The NES system also made Nintendo an American household name.