Preserving Virtual Worlds: Final Report

Jerome McDonoughGraduate School of Library & Information

Science, UIUC

PVW Project Goals

To help develop mechanisms and methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction by

Investigating preservation issues through a series of archiving case studies;Developing basic standards for metadata and content representation;Archiving key representative content; andBuilding community awareness of issues.

You are in a maze of twisty little passages,all alike.

Challenges to Preservation

Hardware and Software Obsolescence

Significant Properties

Third Party Dependencies

Challenges to Preservation

Complex Objects & Lack of Representation Information

Authenticity

Challenges to Preservation

Intellectual Property Law

Challenges to Preservation

Scarcity

Context

Collection Development

Scoping: Chronological, Technical, Geographic, Language, Class (news games, art games, serious games), Social Aspects, Intertextuality

Cross-Institution (library/archive/museum) Collaboration

Developer MaterialsSource Code & Assets

Technical Documentation

Production Materials

Designers’ Stories

Interactions with User Communities

Collection Development

ImplicationsDescription for access and management must be very precise regarding versioning of game materials.

Description for access and management must recognize games’ composite nature and that versioning is also an issue at the component level.

Translation: Traditional Bibliographic & Archival Description is Not Enough.

“Versioning is, in short, a fact of life in the digital world—indeed, one can argue that it is essential to the ontology of the digital at its most fundamental level since (strictly speaking) every time a file is accessed a new copy of it is created.”

Item

Collection Development

Item

Item Item

advf4.77-03-11 advdat.77-03-11

Item

advf4.bin

WorkExpression

Manifestation

Expression

Manifestation

WorkExpressionManifestation Expression Manifestation

FUN WITH

FRBR!!!

Collection Development

Implications of the OAIS Reference ModelContext Information: Developer Materials, End-User Materials (e.g., Machinima, screen shots, video records, fan web sites), game sites (e.g., Kotaku, Moby Games), Literature, Ephemera (instruction manuals, strategy guides, Easter Egg lists/cheat sheets), Promotional Materials

Representation Information: Hardware Documentation (CPU (esp. Instruction Set), Storage, Peripherals), OS Documentation (including 3rd party libraries), programming language documentation, binary executable format documentation

Software Preservation &

The LawAll areas of intellectual property law implicated in game preservation

Copyright – DMCA and TPMs (SecuROM), Emulation

Patents – Vetrex 3D Display

Trademark – My Chemical Romance & The SIMS

Trade Secret – Emulators & Engines

And contract law makes it worse

Emulation & The Law

Generally, the courts have said that reverse engineering an existing system does not directly infringe on copyright, provided that the new system does not directly incorporate code from the original system.

Jury is still out on contributory infringement.

Some fan-produced emulators have played fast and loose with the “does not directly incorporate code” – see most Apple II emulators. Caveat Emulator.

Preservation Strategies

Emulation CriteriaThe emulator is based upon freely available source code and appropriate licensing.

The emulator is actively maintained.

There is reasonable internal and external documentation for the project.

The emulator interface is easy to use by non-technical players.

The emulator supports a wide range of performance and tuning options.

The emulator is robust and provides a believable level of fidelity when compared to the original game experience.

Preservation StrategiesEmulation Performance

Frankly questionable for all of our cases, but for different reasons. Crashes, freezes, audio problems, keyboard mapping, visual fidelity. And maintenance is a major issue for community projects.

And emulation is sometimes emulation+migration.

Preservation Strategies

MigrationSource migration vs. binary migration

Issues of authenticity

Preservation Strategies

Re-enactmentObvious issues of authenticity, but…

Can do wonders for access (Mystery House on the iPad), and

Rabid fan community will actually go the effort of bug-for-bug compatibility, and

Sometimes the only game in town

Preservation Strategies

There is no perfect, one size fits all strategy.

We need a great deal more experience with emulation, virtualization and migration techniques to start making judgment calls on which is best when.

We need to encourage funding agencies to help support/build upon existing emulation and migration efforts.

And now, a brief entertaining

disaster

All hope abandon, ye who enter here.

Work

Expression

Manifestation

Item

SuccessorWhole/partTransformation

RevisionTranslationSuccessorWhole/PartTransformation

AlternateWhole/Part

ReproductionWhole/Part

Representation Information

ContextProvenance

Provenance Metadata

Technical Metadata

Packaging

Packaging<structMap> <div xlink:label="A1" LABEL="Adventure Archival Information Package" TYPE="AIP"> <div xlink:label="W1" LABEL="Adventure, Will Crowther Original" TYPE="pvw:Work”> <div xlink:label="E1.1" LABEL=”Fortran Version Dated 1977-03-11" TYPE="pvw:Expression"> <div xlink:label="M1.1.1" LABEL=”ASource &amp; Data Files" TYPE="pvw:Manifestation"> <div xlink:label="I1.1.1.1" TYPE="pvw:Item"> <div TYPE="pvw:Item" xlink:label="F1"> <fptr FILEID="F1"></fptr> </div> <div TYPE="pvw:Item" xlink:label="F2"> <fptr FILEID="F2"></fptr> </div> </div> </div> </div>

Packaging<structMap> <div xlink:label="A1" LABEL="Adventure Archival Information Package" TYPE="AIP"> <div xlink:label="W1" LABEL="Adventure, Will Crowther Original" TYPE="pvw:Work”>… <div xlink:label="W3" LABEL="Adventure Family Tree" DMDID="DMD3" TYPE="pvw:Work">…<structLink> <smLink xlink:from="W1" xlink:arcrole="pvw:has_context_information" xlink:to="W3"/><structMap> <div xlink:label="A1" LABEL="Adventure Archival Information Package" TYPE="AIP"> <div xlink:label="W1" LABEL="Adventure, Will Crowther Original" TYPE="pvw:Work”>… <div xlink:label="W2" LABEL="Adventure, Russotto Derivative" TYPE="pvw:Work”>…<structLink> <smLink xlink:from="W1" xlink:arcrole="pvw:has_successor" xlink:to="W2"/>

Packaging<structMap> <div xlink:label="A1" LABEL="Adventure Archival Information Package" TYPE="AIP"> <div xlink:label="W1" LABEL="Adventure, Will Crowther Original" TYPE="pvw:Work”> <div xlink:label="E1.1" LABEL="Adventure, Fortran Version Dated 1977-03-11" TYPE="pvw:Expression"> <div xlink:label="M1.1.1" LABEL="Adventure, Source &amp; Data Files, 1977-03-11" TYPE="pvw:Manifestation"> <div xlink:label="I1.1.1.1" TYPE="pvw:Item"> <div TYPE="pvw:Item" xlink:label="F1"> <fptr FILEID="F1"></fptr> </div>… <div xlink:label="W6" LABEL="ISO/IEC 10646" TYPE="pvw:Work"> <div xlink:label="E6.1" TYPE="pvw:Expression">…<structLink> <smLink xlink:from="F1" xlink:arcrole="pvw:has_representation_information" xlink:to="E6.1"/>

Where do we go from here?

Library of Congress National Collecting Plan Recommendations

LC cannot just collect games; representation information and context information must be within their collecting purview as well

Which means collecting activity must be coordinated across internal divisions; it’s not just MBRS’ job

Web archiving efforts should include game portals, game industry association sites, retrogaming sites, emulation development sites, fan sites, machinima archives, mod sites, art & serious games sites

Where do we go from here?

Library of Congress National Collecting Plan Recommendations

Be suspicious of copyright registration as source of games

Selection criteria should include Popularity/Distribution, Novelty, Intertextuality, Industry Impact, Cultural Impact, Creator Prestige, End-User Appropriation, Impact on Game Design & Technology, Geographic/Cultural Inclusivity

Where do we go from here?

Legal InfrastructureContract law is more important than people think, and librarians/archivists/curators need to work with the game industry to insure that EULAs and TOS do not impede preservation activity.

The DMCA exemption process is fundamentally broken as far as Section 108 is concerned, and the preservation community must press for its revision.

Where do we go from here?

Representation Information Repositories & Registries

The amount of representation information necessary for modern games is immense, and the representation networks large and complex.

Library of Congress should consider working with NIST to establish a data standards/representation information library of last resort, and with the UDFR to insure that its data model is appropriate to recording the existence of representation information elsewhere.

Digital Game Canon

Where do we go from here?

Research AgendaWow, do we need packaging tools that are simple and easy to use.

We need a better understanding of how we might effectively open cultural heritage systems (both metadata and data) to gamer contributions, and how cultural heritage institutions might lend support to gamers’ efforts in documenting their own culture and developing emulation technologies.

We also need to investigate how to more effectively collaborate on issues of collection development across a variety of institutional boundaries.

Thanks!For more information, see:https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/17097

Jerome McDonough & Robert OlendorfUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Matthew Kirschenbaum, Kari Kraus, Doug Reside & Rachel DonahueUniversity of Maryland

Andrew Phelps & Chris EgertRochester Institute of Technology

Henry Lowood & Susan RojoStanford University

Preserving Virtual Worlds…

…because a thing of beauty is a joy forever.