an ARC supported project researching the history and preservation needs of 1980s digital games in Australia and New Zealand.
Here is the list of games we are targeting for collection and preservation. We have some of them, but would love duplicates, and others we haven’t been able to find. Can you help at all?
There is currently a position open for a Research Associate who will work on the “Play It Again” project, a multi-disciplinary project to create a playable history of Australasian digital games, for industry, community and research purposes. The focus of this research is in porting original legacy game code to run on a new hardware and software platform and developing automated techniques to do so.
See Jobs@Flinders position 15186 for details.
Game history did not unfold uniformly and the particularities of space and place matter. Yet many digital game and software histories are silent with respect to geography. The orthodoxy that the U.S. and Japan – and to a lesser extent the U.K. – constituted the ‘centres’ at the outset of the industry has enjoyed such legitimacy that many accounts do not even bother to mention the ‘where’ that their material or statistics pertain to. That many histories have been written by journalists and ‘insiders’ – comprising what Huhtamo calls the “chronicle era” of game history – largely accepting the game industry’s ‘global’ rhetoric has no doubt contributed to this situation. However, it means that locality has largely been left out of game history (with some notable exceptions), at least until recently. Given the great historic diversity of games and contexts for their play, an appreciation of socio-cultural and geographic specificity is important to develop, particularly if other histories are to be told, for instance, from the ‘periphery’ rather than the ‘centre’.
There is a burgeoning interest in discussing locality with respect to game history. Whilst this degree of interest is welcome, the local needs to be critically-situated if it is not to simply become a new orthodoxy, celebrated for its own sake.
This anthology is intended to bring together scholarship which addresses the critical potential of the local for game history, asking how this might encourage a maturation of historical work on and around games.
Please send abstracts (300 words) and a brief bio to melanie.swalwell@flinders.edu.au by 31st August, 2015. Full papers will be due in February 2016.
In early March, Melanie Swalwell gave an invited presentation on Play It Again’s Popular Memory Archive at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. GDC is a huge annual gathering of the games industry, comprising multiple conference tracks, an Expo, career summit and many other features besides.
The panel “Saving It, Showing It: Collecting and Exhibiting Video Game History” was convened by William Huber (Abertay University, Scotland) and featured noted game preservationists Jon-Paul Dyson (Strong Museum of Play, Rochester, New York), Henry Lowood (Stanford University Libraries) and design curator, Kieren Long (Victoria and Albert Museum, London). The panel is available to view here.
Craig Harrington, a PhD candidate in the School of Computer Science, Engineering and Mathematics and a valued member of the Play It Again project team, died 7 October 2014.
After completing a BSc and BSc (Honours First Class), Craig was awarded a scholarship to pursue research in Computer Science . As a doctoral student, he was developing techniques for transferring data from old tapes (Commodore), decoding, verifying and correcting errors to produce error free TAP file images that are compatible with current emulators. He was also developing software for the automatic migration of BASIC code to HTML5 and JavaScript to enable legacy games to run in a browser.
Craig was a gifted scientist, had the most wonderful sense of humour and was also very good cook, especially of cakes and biscuits. We miss him immensely and do not want all his hard work to vanish.
We would like to hear from a post-doctoral researcher who has the skills and passion to continue his research. Please contact Dr Denise de Vries (denise.devries@flinders.edu.au) for a more detailed description of the work to date.
Over the last two decades, a substantial amount of research has addressed the fan culture phenomenon, particularly in relation to film and television; the focus has centred on the impact that fan communities can and have had on the ‘official’ creative works that are released by film and television studios. More recently, researchers have examined the impact that the internet has played in empowering and expanding the fan network and fan communication structures, and in affecting the production, marketing and audience engagement with the fan object.
Games are now central objects of study within Fan Studies, yet to date there has been only isolated consideration of gaming’s long history of fandom, and fans’ important roles in game history and preservation. Little academic writing has focused on the impact and centrality that fan communities play — as a collective intelligence, as a pool of individual creators of games, and as interested and engaged parties in the collecting and remembering of game history.
For this anthology we seek essays that address issues that come out of the various possible configurations of the terms: fans, games, and history. We invite proposals for chapters addressing one of three broad axes:
• Historicising game fandom
• Fan contributions to game history
• Methodological reflections on studying historic game fandom
We invite abstracts of 500 words that address the relationship between game fans and history. Possible themes and issues may include but are not limited to:
• Fan communities and the preservation of games • Online communities and gamer memories • Digital fandom before the internet • Nostalgia and history • Historicising fans’ creative output • Magazines and fanzines as sources • how to ‘do’ fan history • Fans as authors of game history
Please send an abstract and brief bio to the editors by 30th April, 2015. Full papers to be submitted by 30th August 2015.
Email: playitagain@flinders.edu.au
Editors – Melanie Swalwell, Angela Ndalianis, Helen Stuckey
Nick Richardson, from ACMI, presented a paper on the Play It Again project at the 2014 Association of Moving Image Archivists conference in Savannah, Georgia. The AMIA conference is the world’s largest attended gathering of moving image archivists and his paper was received with great enthusiasm. The project was recognised as being world-leading in the field of games preservation and there was a lively discussion following the presentation of the formal paper. This is the second time Nick’s attended AMIA and the professional relationships developed by such attendance are invaluable to ACMI’s broader preservation work as well as specific projects like Play It Again.
The text and presentation of Nick’s paper are available from the AMIA website here.
On 18th June, 2014, we held only our second ever face to face full team meeting, at the University of Melbourne.
Being in the same room is particularly important for a multidisciplinary team such as Play It Again, which consists of a cultural and a technical stream, as well as cultural institutional partners.
In the morning, we hammered out plans for the 3rd and final year of the project. In the afternoon, we ran a Knowledge Exchange Event, where we shared our learning from the project thus far with a diverse audience.
The International Born Digital and Cultural Heritage conference will be held on 19-20 June, 2014, at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. The event is one of the outcomes of the ‘Play It Again’ project, which is focused on 1980s Australian and New Zealand game history and preservation. It is a collaboration between Flinders University, University of Melbourne, Victoria University of Wellington (NZ), the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the New Zealand Film Archive, and the Berlin Computerspiele Museum.
The program features an exciting line-up of papers from scholars, artists, and practitioners from Finland, U.S., U.K., Germany, Poland, Japan, Samoa, New Zealand and Australia on topics from: demoscene history to manuscripts, archiving tweets to the ‘right to be forgotten’, Japanese game preservation efforts to artist’s apps, and much much more.
Our two keynote speakers — Dr Henry Lowood (Stanford, U.S.), and Dr Anne Laforet (ESADS, France) – are experts in digital game and net art preservation, respectively.
All the program details, plus abstracts and speaker’s bios are on the conference website: http://playitagainproject.org/conference
Registration:
Full $210 (early bird is $180, valid until 18th April, so be quick!), $110 single day.
Student $100 ($80 early bird), $50 single day.
We are pleased to post up the latest draft of our New Zealand and Australian 1980s microcomputer games lists. These now have 236 and 822 titles on them, respectively (the last time these went up on the blog was in Oct 2012, when we had 200 New Zealand titles and 710 Australian titles). Please send any corrections, suggestions, additions and anything else that’s relevant to playitagain@flinders.edu.au.
New Zealand Games List February 2014
Australian Games List February 2014