[Monthly Preservation SIG Roundup] January 2010

A late posting of the newsletter. At least it is still January - I simply forgot about this after missing it the first week, but correcting that now!

Preservation SIG November/December 2009 Work

Firstly, Devin Monnens has put out the survey featured last month on SurveyMonkey. The blurb is:

The purpose of this survey is to document game preservation institutions and initiatives (i.e. libraries, archives, museums, projects) in order to foster connections between game preservation institutions worldwide. Data from this survey will be used to construct a directory of libraries, museums, archives, and preservation projects specializing in game preservation for access on the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Game Preservation Special Interest Group website ([1]) as well as a bibliography of essays and books on the preservation of games.

Secondly, Henry Lowood has got news of when the IGDA Game Preservation SIG Roundtable will be at the Game Developers Conference 2010. It's on Thursday (March 11th), 9am, in Room 1. Make sure if you are at the event to attend and bring up or report on any preservation and history going ons!

If you are interested in helping the SIG work you can handily volunteer for some projects, or create your own if something is missing!

Future Work for January 2010

Devin will be working on his survey, but apart from people doing their own work there is no planned IGDA SIG work by me or others.

Mailing List Discussions

If you've not joined our mailing list, please do so. We've never tried using our forums it seems :) we stick to old-fangled email. This will eventually change when the IGDA site has some replacement for it, which won't be anytime soon.

December starts with a discussion over the Library of Congress National Game Registry (with some pointers on what is a game?), an interesting discussion authenticating factory sealed games and the main other discussion was on cataloguing standards, ie; the lack of them, the formation of some standards based on normal library and archive standards, and the possibility of creating some from scratch ideas.

Might as well report that among the postings in January are an interesting article on backing up rare games by Frank Cifaldi and the announcement of The Art History of Games symposium being held in February (which I hope we'll post news on if there is anything interesting). There also was a discussion or calling out of the worst game ever made as tends to happen in any group of gamers, and finally before I got this done Martin Goldberg explains how he has been at Ralph Baer's and has started to catalogue his legal archive.

Preservation SIG Blog Updates / Links

Have I missed anything this month? Then email it in to preservation_news @ igda.org !

• No news, I thought to post about the GDC roundtable but otherwise it mainly is news on other sites. If you think I should restart posting interesting preservation news, give me a shout.

Final Thoughts

Just what is the worst game? How do you measure "worst"? is there any point in naming such games? Do we assume a game needs to be properly released to be "worst"? Do we count buggy games as "worst"? All that and more about what constitutes "the worst game" on our mailing list - it's not an easy topic for something that starts out so simply.

Andrew Armstrong

IGDA Game Preservation SIG Site/Blog editor