
15. November 17
Ort
ZeM – Brandenburgisches Zentrum für Medienwissenschaften
Hermann-Elflein-Straße 18
14467 Potsdam
Futility, Futurity, and Junk: Thoughts on the Theory and Practice of Computer Game Archiving
Computer game archives are repositories and incubators. In the ways they acquire, store, and document the game industry, computer game archives become, as poet Ander Monson writes, “letters to a future lover”—each artifact in the collection a communiqué to scholars whose attentions and affections are only yet nascent. In an archival context, each artifact is also a modest cultural experiment, the results of which—in the marketplace, in fandom, and in scholarship—signify how particular playful compositions resonate (directly and indirectly) with players. In this way, every game, no matter how successful or distinctive, is a map and metric for the ways people play together and alone. Similarly, computer game archives become the future’s stories about (and transmutations of) the past, reservoirs for work yet to be done about work that has already been completed. To archive computer games, then, is also to ensure the vitality of games to come, for it is only by recollecting history that future understandings and innovations become possible.
At the same time, computer game archiving is a silly little fart of a pursuit. The medium is as trivial, worthless, and stupid as it is important, invaluable, and deep. It also effuses an astonishing breadth of materiality, textuality, and effect, resulting in a profound pullulation of play that overwhelms even the most serious attempts at capture and categorization.
In this presentation, we will explore these competing themes of import and futility via our experiences over the last two decades building and managing one of the largest research archives in the world for computer games. We will engage with questions of archival theory and practice (including the mechanisms involved in collecting, safeguarding, storing, and making accessible games and their histories), and sketch out how the act of play so important to games themselves may be usefully designed into the process of the archival act.
KOORDINATION
Dr. Tobias Conradi, ZeM
Personen
Ken McAllister and Judd Ruggill co-founded and co-direct the Learning Games Initiative Research Archive, which contains roughly 250,000 game related artifacts. They also have day jobs at the University of Arizona: Ken is Associate Dean of Research and Program Innovation in the College of Humanities, and Judd is Department Head of Public and Applied Humanities.
Tobias Conradi ist Postdoktorand am ZeM Brandenburg. Zuvor war er wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter im DFG-Forschungsprojekt ›Kulturtechnik Unternehmensplanspiel‹ an der HBK Braunschweig sowie am DFG-Graduiertenkolleg ›Automatismen‹ an der Universität Paderborn. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte sind Diskurstheorie, Repräsentationspolitiken und der Zusammenhang von Krise, Kritik und Entscheidung. Letzte Veröffentlichungen: Breaking News. Automatismen in der Repräsentation von Krisen- und Katastrophenereignissen (Paderborn 2015), zusammen mit Rolf F. Nohr und Florian Hoof (Hrsg.): Medien der Entscheidung (Münster 2016, im Erscheinen).