Preserving Games

Archiving the Creation Processes of the Video Game Industry

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A Community of Creativity

3 November, 2008 (01:46) | News and Commentary | By: admin

As video games continue to evolve and branch off in new directions, attempting to provide for all tastes, the medium becomes more difficult to define.  Once, video games were considered mainly as leisure time activities, a niche that the Nintendo Wii continues to expand by attracting consumers who are uninterested in the grandly produced games offered by the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.  The latter systems, with their advanced processors and graphics capabilities, now aspire to provide complex and engaging experiences like those audiences expect from films.  Games like Metal Gear Solid 4 have been noted for shifting the emphasis from the player’s interactivity to the designer’s authorial control, which, according to film critic Roger Ebert, is an essential step if games are to be designated as works of art.  Recent hits like Grand Theft Auto IV and Bioshock have even won praise from esteemed, non-gaming publications like the New York Times for offering thought-provoking statements on utopian failure.

However, not all video games are interested in achieving artistic relevance.  In the past few months, two games have chosen to ignore this trend toward authorial control in favor of providing templates for the player to exercise his or her own creativity.  Spore, a game focused on evolution that is itself an evolution of Will Wright’s SimCity and The Sims franchises, encourages players to create their own race of creatures that will eventually evolve and take control of the universe.  More intriguingly, Little Big Planet has garnered a great deal of interest by providing players with the tools necessary to essentially create a new game by building their own levels.  Both games strongly encourage players to share their creations with others, which means that a gamer’s created levels could potentially be as ubiquitous as the studio’s own downloadable content.

As these differing visions of the video game industry continue to complicate the definition of the medium, so too will the policies that govern the collection of video game artifacts become more difficult to define.  Games like WiiSports and Bioshock, considering their emphasis on pure entertainment or thoughtful reflection, suggest that the methods used for the collection of film artifacts might be equally successful for the video game medium.  Preserving storyboards, dialogue suggestions, and models, as we do for films, would contribute to our understanding of how professional video game designers create these experiences. 

However, as games like Little Big Planet remind us, the modern definition of video game creation inevitably includes the player.  Gamers are increasingly being given not only opportunities to make new experiences within a game but also entire toolkits, like Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio, to create a wholly new game.  With this in mind, our research must consider the shrinking gap between professional game makers and amateur game players when determining which creation artifacts ought to be preserved.  What is the difference between the independent game developer and the creative gamer with the XNA toolkit?  How do we react to a game like Little Big Planet that may ultimately become known for its player-created levels while the professionally created levels fade from memory?  When collecting the creation artifacts of MMO games, should we not also consider preserving some of the unique characters created by the users themselves? 

Public institutions like archives and museums are in the business of preserving memory.  When we determine how to go about preserving the memory of this burgeoning video game industry, we must keep in mind that the initial creation materials comprise only part of that memory.  In our new definition of the video game, the community aspect that has always been present within the medium has now extended to the very creation of the medium itself.  As interesting as the decisions behind the parameters of the game are (and players are indeed still creating within parameters set by developers), so too are the ways in which players make their experiences within those parameters unique and strongly individual.

A New Kind of Archive

2 November, 2008 (18:45) | News and Commentary | By: TimA

Unlike books, movies, or even console videogames, the design process of MMORPGs does not have a fixed endpoint. After the MMO is initially released, designers continue to work on patches and expansion packages and game content is updated continuously. This presents a unique challenge to the archivist, especially one who is interested in preserving content created during the design of the MMO. If MMOs, much like living organisms, are never explicitly “finished,” at what time does the archivist stop archiving artifacts developed during the creation process? Would a collection of artifacts that document the development of the “World of Warcraft” software package released in 2005 accurately represent the design of the state of the MMO in 2008? The short answer, of course, is “no.”

While the consistent incompleteness of the MMO presents a challenge, it also presents an opportunity to create a new kind of archive. Alterations that are made to the source code of a particular MMO are recorded by game designers in what are called “living documents.” These documents were originally saved individually as MS Word files on local workstations, however developers are increasingly using Wikis instead of Word files so that multiple developers can update the design documentation simultaneously. Like the design documentation, the source code for an MMO is also updated continuously. Initially, when updates were made to the source code, the code that was being replaced was lost forever. Increasingly, however, programmers archive their source codes in databases so that previously replaced code is retrievable. They do this largely because updates will frequently cause unintended errors, and the only way to determine at what point the error was introduced is to revert to previous code. What this means for the archivist, however, is that it is within the realm of possibility to preserve the design documentation along with the databases that contain the various versions of the source code. One could then, theoretically, examine the updates to the design documentation and access the state of the game content at the time that the design changes were implemented.

This prospect is certainly ambitious. The most salient issue standing in the way of the archivist is intellectual property. Game development companies will not likely allow access to their source code or even their design documentation. One would hope, however, that with time, executives will become less protective of outdated source codes and design documents that are no longer explicitly relevant to maintaining the current functionality of the MMO.

The archivist, as always, has other options. If the source code, for example, is just too valuable for company executives to allow access to it, there are periodic “snapshots” of the current state of the MMO that executives release internally. A “snapshot” includes an executable file and a copy of all of the files in the game at a given point in time. Since these snapshots are released internally to all members of the company, executives may be less protective of them. While they would not allow access to an uninterrupted history of the evolution of the MMO, the snapshots would at least lend some idea, however incomplete, of the various stages in the MMO’s development.

There are certainly some significant challenges to achieving this goal, however to know that it is possible to preserve both the evolution of the game content of the MMO and the documents that illustrate the design changes to that content is nothing short of inspirational.

The Other Side of Games

30 October, 2008 (09:33) | News and Commentary | By: walker

Games can be anything. Implementation is certainly restrictive, but design potential is basically limitless. Because of this potential it’s very likely that a great many game elements are cycled through before a final set is decided upon. It may be then that a game can be better understood by what it is not rather than by what it is. Seeing the other side of design decisions can add immense value to the elements that were implemented. Here are a few categories where the “other side” can be seen:  

  • Alternate or developmental versions of game elements. These could be versions of character designs, plot (dialogue, events, etc.), art, setting, or different design parameters that would change gameplay. What’s key here is that these elements have a counterpart in the actual game, whether it’s a different version of the element or a similar element designed for the same purpose. 
  • Elements developers left out. This can range from game play features to a truncated story to a smaller graphic set. They could come in two forms: elements that had been coded and pulled or elements left out of code but manifested in other creative materials. Key here is that no version or comparable elements exist in the game. 
  • Deliberately disposable elements. These are elements designed to help developers work through ideas, flesh out game dynamics, test functionality, etc. Molyneux’s development model in this interview is a good example. Here he explains the testing modules the development team used to pilot their ideas. 

Keeping an eye out for the “other side” is naturally desirable in collecting and preserving, but it has other benefits as well. It is invaluable in bringing the story of a game’s design into a fuller light. Lost elements are a crucial component of the game-creation narrative in that they complete our view of the decisions that made the final product. You could argue that there is no story without them. 

Lost elements also help in retaining and marking ideas that would otherwise go under the radar. Those ideas are often borne out in player modifications, and in the case of MMO’s, added ad hoc by player-designed limitations and role playing. In this way the story of an idea is more fully recorded.

The ‘other side’ can show up in any way developers talk to each other or to publishers, distributors and fans: conversations, design documents, images, mockups, prototypes, and so on. Materials of this sort could even fall outside certain IP restrictions if an element is deemed not part of the game proper.

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.

BBC Interview – Outcomes

18 September, 2008 (17:55) | News and Commentary | By: Megan

A few weeks ago, the project got some good press from Library Journal and the BBC, with an interview for the Principle Investigator, Megan Winget. This interview garnered a lot of feedback from the player community, particularly four distinct groups of players:

1. First, there were the gamers who had witnessed objectively meaningful events:

2. Then, there were the players who save all of their chat logs to a centralized location, as well as collect chat logs from their friends, generating huge amounts of data;

3. Players who save different kinds historical information (like raid parties, events, stories, narratives) from their guilds or communities – via wikis.

4. Players who are responsible for building different mods of their environments, and want to save those modifications in some way.

These projects suggest some research issues that I think are very interesting: First, while my IMLS funded project focuses on the creation behaviors of industry players, there is a culture of creation within the gaming community itself. Talking to the people in group 4 would be interesting from examining the concept of ‘creator,’ particularly as the creation model is being changed given the opportunities inherent in the gaming process.

I’m also interested in the role of players in the creation of meaning within games. I think it can be argued that gamers, whether they have the ability to explicitly modify their game environment or not, have a greater ability to control their experience than do people who interact with traditional media, like movies or tv. My balywick is preservation, so I’m curious to explore what that difference means specifically in terms of preservation. To meaningfully preserve a game, do we need to preserve that ability to modify and freely interact with the system? Or will it be good enough to use the traditional preservation model and preserve a static, paradigmatic version of the game. How will we need to augment the preservation model to make it more appropriate for interactive systems like games? In order to get at this, I think that the research community is eventually going to have to do a qualitative investigation of user attitudes and conceptions of game spaces, and the importance of the game spaces in their players’ lives. I’d like to fit that in to the IMLS funded project, but am not sure that it’s appropriate to do so.