1. Preserving Virtual Worlds: Final Report Jerome McDonough Graduate School of Library & Information Science, UIUC

2. 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; and Building community awareness of issues.

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

4. Challenges to Preservation Hardware and Software Obsolescence Significant Properties Third Party Dependencies

5. Challenges to Preservation Complex Objects & Lack of Representation Information Authenticity

6. Challenges to Preservation Intellectual Property Law

7. Challenges to Preservation ScarcityContext

8. Collection Development Scoping: Chronological, Technical, Geographic, Language, Class (news games, art games, serious games), Social Aspects, Intertextuality Cross-Institution (library/archive/museum) Collaboration Developer Materials Source Code & Assets Technical Documentation Production Materials Designers’ Stories Interactions with User Communities

9. Collection Development Implications Description 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.”

10. Item Collection Development Item advf4.77-03-11 advdat.77-03-11 Item advf4.bin Work Expression Manifestation Expression Manifestation WorkExpressionManifestationExpressionManifestation

11. Collection Development Implications of the OAIS Reference Model Context 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 3 rd party libraries), programming language documentation, binary executable format documentation

12. Software Preservation & The Law All 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

13. 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.

14. Preservation Strategies Emulation Criteria The 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.

15. Preservation Strategies Emulation 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.

16. Preservation Strategies Migration Source migration vs. binary migration Issues of authenticity

17. Preservation Strategies Re-enactment Obvious 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

18. 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.

19. And now, a brief entertaining disaster All hope abandon, ye who enter here.

20. Work Expression Manifestation Item Successor Whole/part Transformation Revision Translation Successor Whole/Part Transformation Alternate Whole/Part Reproduction Whole/Part Representation Information Context Provenance Provenance Metadata Technical Metadata Packaging

22. Packaging

23. Packaging … … … … … … … …

24. Packaging … … … …

25. 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

26. 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

27. Where do we go from here? Legal Infrastructure Contract 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.

28. 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

29. Where do we go from here? Research Agenda Wow, 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.

30. Thanks! For more information, see: https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/17097 Jerome McDonough & Robert Olendorf University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Matthew Kirschenbaum, Kari Kraus, Doug Reside & Rachel Donahue University of Maryland Andrew Phelps & Chris Egert Rochester Institute of Technology Henry Lowood & Susan Rojo Stanford University For more information, see: https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/17097 Jerome McDonough & Robert Olendorf University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Matthew Kirschenbaum, Kari Kraus, Doug Reside & Rachel Donahue University of Maryland Andrew Phelps & Chris Egert Rochester Institute of Technology Henry Lowood & Susan Rojo Stanford University

31. Preserving Virtual Worlds… …because a thing of beauty is a joy forever.