Preserving Games

Archiving the Creation Processes of the Video Game Industry

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Interviewing Within the Industry

18 September, 2008 (21:31) | News and Commentary | By: Megan

For a while now I’ve been concerned about my ability to conduct interviews within the industry. I have been told by someone who would know that very few studios are going to allow me to look at their development process because in many cases, that process is itself a trade secret. I’m early enough in the process to not know if this is true or not, but in an attempt to be prepared, I’ve come up with a few workarounds for this issue:

  1. Collect oral history interviews with pioneers regarding their early experiences building video games, the processes and tools they employed, their needs then and now, and their attitudes regarding preservation of their creations. I figure that many of these people still hold IP on their first games (although I might be wrong on this); and even if they don’t still hold copyright, talking about their experiences during this formative period of development is beyond the reach of industry lawyers. Who would some of these pioneers be? And does anyone have contact information for them? I’m envisioning this as something like the Stanford and the Silicon Valley project at Stanford. I know that there are lots of interviews with pioneers out there, but I’d like to conduct some oral histories as well.
  2. Interview out-of-work designers and developers. I’ve been told that this group is large in Austin specifically. They may or may not be under gag orders, but again, talking in generalities about the development process seems like it should be fair game, particularly if I never mention the name of the interviewee, the companies they worked for, or the games they worked on.
  3. Interview open-source game developers. (both text-based and image-centric) They, by definition, are not beholden to “the man,” and should be able to freely talk about their development process,  their needs, attitudes, and tools. I’m also making the assumption that they work under the same conditions, with the same tools and and work processes as those within industry (but again, this assumption might be wrong – but anything I find will be interesting).
  4. Finally, talk to those players who have the ability to modify their games (this can be related to Second Life, or events like machinima). I don’t know if players have systematic methods or tools for modifying their games, or common attitudes towards creation and modification, but it certainly would be interesting to explore it more deeply. Additionally, interviewing players/modifiers  would be interesting from the “what is a creator when everyone can be a creator” point of view, as well as from a preservation perspective: “what is important to preserve: the original system or the ability to modify the original system in the same way that it was possible to modify it when it was originally available?”

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

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