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?