Helen Stuckey
ABSTRACT
Games are one of the most significant cultural forms of our times and yet they are poorly documented in Australia and New Zealand. Knowledge about the history of games is overwhelmingly held by private collectors and fans, with ephemera and other primary sources located amongst the general public. This paper presents and discusses the Popular Memory Archive (PMA), an online portal of the "Play It Again" game history and preservation project. As well as providing a way to disseminate some of the team's research, the PMA taps into what is, effectively, a collective public archive by providing a technique for collecting information, resources and memories from the public about 1980s computer games.
Digital games are more than inert code; they come to life in the act of play. Collecting games and other artefacts and preserving them is thus only part of the construction of a history about games. The PMA is designed to work with online retro gamer communities and fans, and this paper reflects on the PMA as a method for collecting the memories of those who lived and played their way through this period.
- Baym, N. 1999. Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community. SAGE.Google Scholar
- Baym, N. and Burnett, R. 2009. Amateur experts: International fan labour in Swedish independent music. International Journal of Cultural Studies. 12, 5 (Sep. 2009), 433--449.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Carreras, C. and Mancini, F. 2010. Techno-society at the service of memory institutions: Web 2.0 in museums. Catalan Journal of Communication Cultural Studies. 2, 1 (2010), 59--76.Google Scholar
- Galloway, P. 2011. Personal Computers, Microhistory, and Shared Authority: Documenting the Inventor-Early Adopter Dialectic. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 33, 2 (2011), 60--74. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gammon, B. and Mazda, X. 2009. The Power of the Pencil Renegotiating the Museum Visitor Relationship. Exhibitionist. Fall (2009), 26--33.Google Scholar
- Garde-Hansen, J. 2011. Media and Memory. Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
- Jenkins, H. 2006. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York University Press.Google Scholar
- Jenkins, H. 2002. Interactive Audiences? The "Collective Intelligence" of Media Fans. Fans Bloggers and Gamers Exploring Participatory Culture. (2002), 134--151.Google Scholar
- Kelly, L. 2010. How Web 2.0 is Changing the Nature of Museum Work. Curator The Museum Journal. 53, 4 (2010), 405--410.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Kraus, K. 2011. "A Counter-Friction to the Machine": What Game Scholars, Librarians, and Archivists Can Learn from Machinima Makers about User Activism. Journal of Visual Culture. 10, 1 (Apr. 2011), 100--112.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Kraus, K. and Donahue, R. 2012. " Do You Want to Save Your Progress?": The Role of Professional and Player Communities in Preserving Virtual Worlds Risks to Videogame Longevity. DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly. 6, 2 (2012), 1--18.Google Scholar
- Laforet, A. 2007. Models of preservation for net art in museums. Freeside Europe Online Academic Journal. (2007).Google Scholar
- Lasch, C. No Title The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. W. W. Norton and Co.Google Scholar
- Lowenthal, D. 1985. The Past is Foreign Country. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
- Lowood, H. 2007. Found Technology: Players as Innovators in the Making of Machinima. Digital Young, Innovation and the Unexpected. (2007), 165--196.Google Scholar
- Mcdonough, J. et al. 2010. Preserving Virtual Worlds Final Report.Google Scholar
- Ndalianis, A. 2009. Chasing the White Rabbit to Find a White Polar Bear: Lost in Television. ReadingLost: Perspectives On A Hit Television Show. R. Pearson, ed. I. B. Tauris. 193--310.Google Scholar
- Newman, J. 2012. Best Before: Videogames, Supersession and Obsolescence. Routledge. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Newman, J. 2008. Playing with Videogames. Routledge.Google Scholar
- Newman, J. 2011. The International Journal of Digital Curation Player-Produced Walkthroughs as Archival Documents of Digital Gameplay. 6, 2 (2011), 109--127.Google Scholar
- Oudshoorn, N. and Pinch, T. 2003. Introduction: How Users and Non-Users Matter. How Users Matter The CoConstruction of Users and Technology. N. Oudshoorn and T. Pinch, eds. The MIT Press. 1--25.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Owens, T. 2013. Digital Cultural Heritage and the Crowd. Curator: The Museum Journal. 56, 1 (Jan. 2013), 121--130.Google Scholar
- Russo, A. et al. 2008. Participatory Communication with Social Media. Curator The Museum Journal. 51, 1 (2008), 21--32.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Saarikoski, P. 2003. Club Activity in the Early Phases of Microcumputing in Finland. History of Nordic Computing (Berlin, 2003), page 277--287.Google Scholar
- Saarikoski, P. and Suominen, J. 2009. Computer Hobbyists and the Gaming Industry in Finland. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 31, 3 (Jul. 2009), 20--33. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Simon, N. 2007. Discourse in the Blogosphere: What Museums Can Learn from Web 2.0. Museums Social Issues. 2, 2 (2007), 257--274.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Srinivasan, R. et al. 2009. Digital Museums and Diverse Cultural Knowledges: Moving Past the Traditional Catalog. The Information Society. 25, 4 (Jul. 2009), 265--278. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Stuckey, H. et al. 2013. The Popular Memory Archive: Collecting and exhibiting player culture from the 1980s. Making the History of Computing Relevant. A. Tatnall, ed. IFIP Springer.Google Scholar
- Stuckey, H. and Swalwell, M. Retro-Computing Community Sites and the Museum. The Handbook of Digital Games. H. A. and M. Angelides, ed. IEEE/Wiley.Google Scholar
- Suominen, J. 2011. Retrogaming Community Memory and Discourses of Digital History Jaakko Suominen. Navigating Landscapes of Mediated Memory. P. W. and P. McEntaggart, ed. Inter-Disiplinary Press.Google Scholar
- Svelch, J. 2011. Indiana Jones Fights the Communist Police: Text Adventures as a Transitional Media Form in the 1980s Czechoslovakia. Media in Transition 7 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2011).Google Scholar
- Swalwell, M. Moving Beyond the Original Experience: Games history, preservation and presentation. Proceedings of DIGRA 2013: Defragging Game Studies/Art History of Games.Google Scholar
- Swalwell, M. 2007. The Remembering and the Forgetting of Early Digital Games: From Novelty to Detritus and Back Again. Journal of Visual Culture. 6, 2 (Aug. 2007), 255--273.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Swalwell, M. 2009. Towards the Preservation of Local Computer Game Software: Challenges, Strategies, Reflections. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. 15, 3 (Jul. 2009), 263--279.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Swalwell, M. and Davidson, M. Game History and the Case of "Malzak": Theorizing the manufacture of "local product" in 1980s New Zealand. Locating Emerging Media. G. Halegou and B. A. Benjamin Aslinger, eds. Routledge.Google Scholar
- The Way of the Exploding Fist - Comments: http://www.lemon64.com/?name=way+of+the+explodin g+fist. Accessed: 2012-08-12.Google Scholar
- Zooinverse: Real Science Online: 2012. http://www.galaxyzoo.org/.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Remembrance of games past: the popular memory archive
Recommendations
Hardcore casual: game culture Return(s) to Ravenhearst
FDG '09: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Foundations of Digital GamesScholarly attention to game culture has mostly focused on games that cater to gamers that the literature has deemed 'hardcore,' 'heavy' or at least 'mainstream,' games. Researchers doing so have explored how those who put in large amounts of time ...
Massive online games and loot distribution: an elusive problem
SIMUTOOLS '12: Proceedings of the 5th International ICST Conference on Simulation Tools and TechniquesMassively Multi-player Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) and Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs) are complex socio-technical distributed systems. In these environments, a huge amount of players interact to have fun and develop their characters. ...
More Than A Craze: photographs of New Zealand's early digital games scene: exhibition
IE '10: Proceedings of the 7th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment"More Than A Craze" is an online exhibition consisting of 46 photographs of New Zealand's early digital games scene, in the 1980s. The exhibition includes the work of some of New Zealand's best known documentary photographers -- Ans Westra, Christopher ...
Comments