[SPG_Active_Members] Saving virtual worlds (and video games in general)

[Henry Lowood]

Randall,

FYI, Stanford was one of the project partners, so if there are any 
questions about the project, I can try to answer them.

Henry

On 6/22/2010 8:18 AM, Randall Neff wrote:
> The Opposable Thumbs blog has an interview with Jerome McDonough of
> the University of Illinois, who is involved with the Preserving
> Virtual Worlds project. The goal of the project is to recognize video
> games as cultural artifacts and to make sure they're accessible by
> future generations. Here McDonough talks about some of the technical
> difficulties in doing so:
> "Take, for example, Star Raiders on the Atari 2600. If you're going to
> preserve this, you've got a couple of problems. The first is that it
> is on a cartridge that is designed to work on a particular system that
> is no longer manufactured. And as long as you've got a hardware
> dependency there, you're really not going to be able to preserve this
> material very long. What we have been looking at is how feasible is it
> for things that fundamentally all have some level of hardware
> dependency there — even Doom has dependencies on DLLs with an
> operating system, and on particular chipsets and architectures for
> playing. How do you take that and turn it into something that isn't as
> dependent on a particular physical piece of hardware. And to do that,
> you need information about that platform. You need technical
> specifications that allow you to basically reproduce a virtualization
> that may enable you to run the software in its original form in the
> future. So what we're trying to do is preserve not only the games, but
> preserve the knowledge that you would need to create a virtualization
> platform to play the game."
>
> http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw/
> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/06/the-art-of-archiving-virtual-worlds.ars
>
> Randall.
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-- 
Henry Lowood
Curator for History of Science&  Technology Collections;
   Film&  Media Collections
HRG, Green Library, 557 Escondido Mall
Stanford University Libraries, Stanford CA 94305-6004
650-723-4602; lowood at stanford.edu; http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood