[SPG_Active_Members] Saving virtual worlds (and video games in general)

[Randall Neff]

The Opposable Thumbs blog has an interview with Jerome McDonough of
the University of Illinois, who is involved with the Preserving
Virtual Worlds project. The goal of the project is to recognize video
games as cultural artifacts and to make sure they're accessible by
future generations. Here McDonough talks about some of the technical
difficulties in doing so:
"Take, for example, Star Raiders on the Atari 2600. If you're going to
preserve this, you've got a couple of problems. The first is that it
is on a cartridge that is designed to work on a particular system that
is no longer manufactured. And as long as you've got a hardware
dependency there, you're really not going to be able to preserve this
material very long. What we have been looking at is how feasible is it
for things that fundamentally all have some level of hardware
dependency there — even Doom has dependencies on DLLs with an
operating system, and on particular chipsets and architectures for
playing. How do you take that and turn it into something that isn't as
dependent on a particular physical piece of hardware. And to do that,
you need information about that platform. You need technical
specifications that allow you to basically reproduce a virtualization
that may enable you to run the software in its original form in the
future. So what we're trying to do is preserve not only the games, but
preserve the knowledge that you would need to create a virtualization
platform to play the game."

http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw/
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/06/the-art-of-archiving-virtual-worlds.ars

Randall.