Rethinking game heritage – towards reflexivity in game preservation

ABSTRACT

While games and the cultures that have sprung up around them are diverse and vastly different from each other, most exhibitions dealing with them are based on a limited understanding of games that relies on symbolic brands on one hand and on the centrality of playable experiences on the other. This bias is potentially replicated by heritage institution collections starting to define how games become cultural heritage. While games research has shown that games are firmly nestled in a participatory grassroots culture, these kinds of perspectives are curiously lacking in exhibitions. By connecting previous work on critical and intangible heritage with game studies literature, this paper emphasises the importance of various productive communities for game heritage. The concepts of intangible and critical heritage suggest that the inclusion of players and communities into the game heritage process could offer a more diverse heritage discourse. But participatory practices in collector run museums tend to produce game heritage which is implicitly working towards the same kind of one-sided understanding of games that has been criticised heavily in game studies. The critical expertise of museum professionals is needed in order to start incorporating the varicoloured practices of communities into our understanding of game heritage.

KEYWORDS:

• Game preservation
• intangible heritage
• participatory heritage
• critical heritage
• game culture
• game studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Triple-A, as in AAA, is an informal classification for digital games which is analogous to the film industry term of ‘blockbuster’. Triple-A gamer are produced and distributed by a well-known publisher and have higher development and marketing budgets.

2. The Game On and its follow up Game On 2.0 have been on display in institutions as varied as the Helsinki City Art Museum, the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology, Blooming Investment in Shenzhen, the Science Museum in London, VAM Design Centre in Budapest, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne. Game On initially included many features exploring the social condition of games production and reception, which were dropped from touring versions of the exhibition (Stuckey 2012).

3. Located in Frisco, Texas, the National Videogame Museum was founded with the help of a Kickstarter campaign in 2011, and it is based on the personal collections of its three founders.

4. The Nexon Computer Museum, located on Jeju Island in South Korea, is partly funded by South Korean online game developer Nexon, and it deals primarily with international game history.

5. Stockholm Game Museum is a privately run game museum focusing on playable games. The museum deals with international game history and its symbolic consoles, characters, and brands.

6. Gamergate refers to a harassment campaign that was mainly conducted through the use of the hashtag #gamergate. Gamergate is still ongoing (Mortensen 2018), targeting women in gaming and in the games industry.

7. Rogue archives are understood to cover the practices of non-professional archivists, who preserve various forms of media culture, including games, on the Internet (De Kosnik 2016).

8. Suominen, Reunanen, and Remes (2015, 77) define retrogaming as ‘the practice of playing and collecting original (“classic”) video and computer games of the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, or using, for instance, emulators for playing them’, but also as a cultural form consisting of ‘other activities, such as the production of a broad range of consumer products, textiles, accessories, game related music videos, literature as well as various artistic, museum and academic practices, and the online circulation of game-oriented information and discussion’. Retro-gaming thus becomes both a player and consumer stance, but also a cultural production stance which deals with ‘aesthetic expression, experiential arts and research, institutional game preservation, discourse of taste’.

Additional information

Funding

Olli Sotamaa’s work was supported by the Academy of Finland project Center of Excellence in Game Culture Studies (CoE-GameCult, 312395).

Notes on contributors

Niklas Nylund

Niklas Nylund is a museum researcher and curator working for the Finnish Museum of Games in Tampere, Finland. He is also working on a PhD on videogame heritage issues at the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies at the University of Tampere. His research interests include game preservation, game history, exhibition design and questions of cultural heritage and inclusivity.

Patrick Prax

Patrick Prax is Assistant Professor at the Department of Game Design at Uppsala University. He has a PhD in Media Studies from Uppsala University and wrote his dissertation on the co-creation of digital games as alternative media. In a research project at the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology Patrick investigated the preservation and exhibition of digital games and appears in the newly opened exhibition Play beyond Play as an expert on participatory media and games. He is also serving as board member for the Cultural Heritage Incubator of the Swedish National Heritage Board.

Olli Sotamaa

Olli Sotamaa, PhD, is Associate Professor of Game Culture Studies at Tampere University. His publications cover user-generated content, player cultures, player-centred research methods, and cultural and historical analysis of game industry. His work has been published in several scholarly journals including e.g. Convergence, Fibreculture, First Monday, Games and Culture, Game Studies, International Journal of Arts and Technology, International Journal of Cultural Policy, and Simulation and Gaming. He’s a co-lead of Tampere University Game Research Lab and a team leader at the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies (20182025).