The Game Preservation Special Interest Group (SIG) of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) recently published a new report called Before It’s Too Late: A Digital Game Preservation White Paper. The report, which was also published in a recent issue of the American Journal of Play, details the possibility that our culture could lose many of the games that have helped shape its development over the last 20-30 years.
“If we fail to address the problems of game preservation, the digital games of today will disappear, perhaps within a few decades. We will lose access to the history and culture of contemporary games and find it impossible to trace their influence on other forms of play, leisure, entertainment, communication, learning, and work,” the report states.
The paper’s authors cite media decay or bit rot, which is especially troublesome with games that exist on magnetic storage and optical discs, as one of the biggest threats. The report points out that the life-span of floppy disks is somewhere between 10 and 30 years, and therefore, many of the thousands of games published on floppy disks prior to the mid-1990s are already 20 years old and “well on their way to oblivion.”
While floppy disks are most at risk, optical discs (CD-ROMs and DVDs) are not immune. Pits and surface scratches or chemical deterioration due to inks, adhesives, and other materials, can damage any optical disc, so there is some concern over their long-term stability. Additionally, ROM cartridges (such as NES, GameBoy, SNES and Genesis) are generally less affected by bit rot but that they also require protection “to mitigate corrosion from moisture and battery acid.”
Besides actual physical damage, the white paper also describes obsolescence as the other major preservation. Older media formats get replaced and it becomes harder to find the hardware needed to play the software (even if the software is not damaged). "...even if the medium on which a game’s data is stored is able to last a hundred years, after only a fraction of that time, its data will be unreadable in the latest hardware and software environments . . . .When VHS (video home system tape) was introduced, few foresaw how quickly it would be replaced by the optical disc. The optical disc, while currently backwards compatible from Blu-ray to DVD (digital video disc) to CD, may not be a viable format even twenty years from now," the IGDA pointed out. ". . . Because of obsolescence, it is imperative that we preserve the hardware and software environments that are required to run the games we wish to preserve: without the platforms to run them, the games themselves are useless.”
The authors of the white paper would like to see the game industry come together to solve the problem of preservation. “There is no single institution within the game industry or in any government that is responsible for archiving digital games,” the report notes, adding that copyright technology and laws could also pose a problem: “information must be transferred, or migrated from one storage format to another, which involves creating a copy. Sometimes copy protection schemes prevent this process and must be overridden to secure a copy of the data. The physical act of simply copying the data may violate contract agreements and copyright laws. Additionally, the software and hardware platforms must be emulated, which can conflict with copyright laws governing hardware and software environments.”
Ultimately, the copyright holders will have to allow exceptions for libraries and archivists because games have become a huge part of our culture and history: "They chronicle the rise of an industry that today rivals that of film, and they document the genesis of an art form of the twenty-first century.”
The IGDA says a second white paper on the preservation of games is forthcoming and will offer up some more solutions to the problem.
