"Computer games are among the most complicated forms of software one can imagine. If we can preserve games, we can preserve everything." This is the opinion of Janet Delve, researcher at the School of Creative Technologies, University of Portsmouth. She participated in an exciting conference at the Tekniska museet on April 28 about how we should handle the new form of digital cultural heritage that computer games represent. "Save Game!" was the headline for the day, organized in commendable cooperation between Tekniska museet and Datamuseet IT-ceum.
Peter Du Rietz at Tekniska museet started the day with the reminder that memory institutions are facing unique challenges – you cannot preserve games as you preserve books. Imagine a library where the words on each book page fade away within thirty to forty years. This is the future perspective of digital memory, and we must find ways to handle this condition.
For Jason Scott at the US non-profit organization Internet Archive, the solution is emulation: copying older games into new formats, decoupled from consoles and hardware. So far, Internet Archive has made 26,000 older games available for free use online.
The law on mandatory delivery has been revised to include, among other things, computer games, but this is not enough. In Sweden, the Royal Library is therefore working with new methods – contacting publishers, actively collecting, and trying, as Bengt-Olof Ågetoft put it, to "think ethnographically" and place the games in a holistic context. However, the collected material is only a fraction of all games.
In Finland, Niklas Nylund told, the Tekniska museet in Helsinki, the new Game Museum in Tampere (opening 2017!), and the Esbo museum have formulated a joint strategy for preserving Finnish gaming culture. Collaboration will undoubtedly be needed, also in Sweden. But for that collaboration to succeed, there are two key groups: one is the game developers, the other is the players themselves. Fredrik Wester, CEO of the game developer Paradox, and Per Strömbäck, spokesperson for Dataspelsbranschen, were both somewhat surprised to hear their business referred to as cultural heritage. But at the same time open to cooperation: Contact us, and let's see what we can do!
It's fun to note that the Centre for Business History has already made that contact ahead of our planned project to document the history of the game industry!