Q&A: Professor James Newman On Preserving Games For The Future

[In this Q&A, Professor James Newman of the National Video Game Archive discusses the importance of preserving games and their related media for historical purposes, explaining "how important it is that we begin acting now."] Professor James Newman is a core team member of the UK-based National Videogame Archive, operated by Nottingham Trent University and the National Media Museum. Newman provides some insight and opinions on how his team plans to preserve video games in an interview conducted for part two of the Gamasutra feature 'Where Games Go To Sleep. ' Here, Professor Newman provides his stance on many issues facing video game preservation, and how the NVA is moving forward to shape the way gaming history is saved. Newman provides some interesting perspective on how a GameCity "Director's Commentaries" session with Martin Hollis and Dave Doak captured unique historical anecdotes from Goldeneye 007, noting that these stories could not be gathered anywhere else. Newman also describes how video game fandom is an important part of preserving video games, as well as the differences between preservation techniques in the U.S. and the UK. Have present-day video game developers improved preservation and storage protocol for a game title once production is finished? I'm not sure we're in a position to judge across the board, as the situation varies enormously. Similarly, it's probably worth differentiating between a corporate archive and the work of a project like the National Videogame Archive. Preserving the code base is only part of what we're interested in, so our archival work extends beyond this in a number of ways. We're also interested in preserving the physical alongside the virtual. For instance, we might look at material objects like consoles, cartridges, discs, merchandising, advertising and marketing materials, and the like. Ultimately, we're interested in telling the stories of games, game development and gaming culture so, for us, fan produced maps, walkthroughs, art, costumes, are an essential part of our archival work. Similarly, all the stories that developers and players have to tell about their experiences of making and playing games need to be documented before they too are lost. As such, code is one element in the wide range of materials we wish to see preserved. The job of the NVA and other projects interested in preserving the cultural heritage of gaming is partly to start saving material by working with partners like development studios and publishers to acquire assets and place them into conservation-grade facilities so that they still exist for generations to come. However, much of what we are doing at this stage is concerned with raising the profile of media preservation and the plight of games as fragile media that are easily lost forever. That's what the Save the Videogame campaign is about. We really want to highlight the fact that digital data, as well as the plastics that consoles, joysticks and cartridges are made from, are all subject to degradation over time. If we don't act now, this material will disappear so we must begin preserving the objects and recording the stories and histories of creation and play. It's a big project and one of the biggest tasks at this early stage is convincing people how important it is that we begin acting now. One of the issues for us at the NVA concerns the perceived value of the process of making games versus the product. We're interested not only in the final game and the assets that comprise it but also the other materials around it like advertising, box art, instruction manuals, fan art, cosplay attire, and more. From a development perspective, our broad remit means that we're also interested in design documentation, concept art etc. Importantly, we're not only interested in the materials that made it into the final game. For us, there is much to be learned from the path not traveled and often seeing rejected ideas is a really effective way of understanding how and why the final decisions were taken. As an example, a few years ago the NVA began a Director's Commentaries series on videogames. The first of these took place at GameCity Three and was for Goldeneye on the N64. We had Martin Hollis and Dave Doak up on stage playing through the game while they talked us through its creation. Their unique insight into the game and its development was truly fascinating but the material that was most interesting and perhaps most surprising was also the most apparently mundane. So, as well as learning about the hand-coded splines for each level's establishing sequence camera tracks or finding out about rejected level ideas and gameplay styles, hearing about the inter-office politics, which posters were on the walls in whose offices, the noisy air-conditioning, the music on the stereo, truly brought to life the process of making this game. It told you a lot about the influences on the work, the culture of the studio, and the working practices. Because the games industry is quite good at hiding developers behind a cloud of PR, it is often easy to forget that these games are made by people. Preserving and telling their stories is as much a part of the role of the NVA as storing and emulating code. Do larger video game developers and publishers employ or have they ever employed full-time archivists? If not, does the responsibility of storage and preservation presently lie with the IT department of a game developer/publisher? Speaking from a UK perspective, there is a more general archiving and preservation issue that goes beyond the videogames industry. It is something of a generalization, but the US has a far more embedded corporate culture of archiving than the UK and so all manner of organizations will have formal corporate archives. That doesn't appear to be something that we see in the UK to the same extent which necessarily impacts upon our work and that of other archiving projects. Is it true that over time, companies have simply lost track of what video game IP they even own? What we can say with some certainty is that, like much contemporary media, IP and rights issues are often very complicated for videogames. Licensed properties such as music, for instance, all add layers of complication to the picture so it is very often the case that what we think of being a single game contains assets that are owned by a variety of different organizations and individuals possibly on different terms and in different territories. From an archiving and preservation perspective, the law on copyright and IP is different for various territories, and there is some degree of ambiguity at present as to where preservation, exhibition and display might stand. The U.S. Library of Congress has recently taken some strides to ease the process for archival activity and it will be interesting to see how the issue of rights pans out globally. While archives and museums are themselves educational, do you anticipate schools involved in video game design and business to ultimately turn to video game archives and museums for instructional material that they could use in a classroom? That's absolutely our intention. We think it's important that games and the ephemera of gaming culture is saved before it rots away but there's no point in saving it just for the sake of it. We have to ask ourselves who are we saving it for and why? Our position on this has always been clear. There is no point in preserving this stuff unless people can see it and make use of it. As educators ourselves, whether with a museum and heritage or a university background, we are all interested in creating more than just a theme park to gaming nostalgia. We think preserving and displaying games, development documentation, fan-made walkthroughs, maps and costumes, tell us a lot about not only what games were, but also about what they are and will be. All the material we are collecting is part of a resource that cultural historians, sociologists, as well as future game developers will make use of. Our exhibition and publication program will see us producing materials that are expressly designed for this purpose. Is there a strong possibility that video game production materials of one game were made redundant? In other words, could development and production assets thought lost be discovered in another location if that game, and all of its relevant materials, were previously licensed to overseas publishers? Should developers and publishers be making an international effort to "check in" with one another to make sure that all past and present game production assets be accounted for? That seems pretty ambitious. At this stage, I think we're all still working out what needs to be preserved, how we're going to do this both technically and legally, and whose responsibility it is. We certainly want to work with game developers and publishers to make sure games, game development and gaming culture is well documented and preserved so that future generations can learn about it. The series of National Videogame Archive Summits is the beginning of our attempt to work out the answers to questions like this.