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.