extending play conference
TRANSCRIPT
Preserving and presenting games through Let’s Play video’s
Jesse de Vos (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision)
René Glas // Jasper van Vught(Universiteit Utrecht)
Game On!
“The research project sets up the first unified effort between game research, cultural heritage institutions and the Dutch game industry to define, preserve, archive and exhibit the history of Dutch digital games and game development”
Institutional Context
• Biggest AV-archive in the Netherlands, with– 1,000,000h of audiovisual heritage
– 2M pictures
– 20K objects (Take a look in depots!)
– 25 petabytes of digital storage
• Safeguards collections of public broadcasters, organisations and private persons.
• Makes its holdings available to media professionals, researchers, educational users and the general public.
Video documentation as a preservation strategy
“Audiovisual recordings provide us with a unique perspective on the history of art, a perspective that moves beyond the image in a book, words on paper, or abstract notations. They provide us with a fuller sense of what it was like to be there and then.” (Dekker in Noordergraaf et al, 2013:155).
Video documentation as a preservation strategy
“The capturing of games in and at play could and, I would contend should be the core objective of game preservation” (Newman 2012)
Preserving gameplay
“What about putting up a Let’s Play recording studio in the museum and inviting game hobbyists, researchers, cultural historians or complete outsiders to play a game and voice their reactions to it?” (Nylund 2015)
Our project: What kind of game is it now: adding new interpretative frames to these games, potentially highlighting or negotiating the social, cultural, and technological significance of older Dutch games from a contemporary perspective.
Added layers of meaning
Reflections on development of games
Information about languagethe perception of the machine itselfInformation about original contextInformation about the emotional
reception
From preservation to presentation
Let’s Play videos offer an alternative form of access
Let’s Play videos constitute a familiar and popular contemporary media practice
The often individual experience of gameplay becomes a social event
A self-conscious, reflexive attitude is encouraged
Final comments
Preservation of Let’s Play video’s and metadata
Making Let’s Play video’s of the same game every ‘x’ amount of years
The popularity of Let’s Plays as a media practice
Questions?
Jesse de Vos [email protected]
René Glas [email protected]
Jasper van [email protected]
Further results will be published in:
Ariese-Vandemeulebroucke, Csilla, Krijn Boom, Angus Mol, Aris Politopoulos & Vincent Vandemeulebroucke (eds.).The Interactive Past. Leiden: VALUE/Sidestone Press. forthcoming.