Where are the Game Archives?

Goals for this Week

Our goal is to think about how we access games as historians. How can we access historic games (e.g. 12th century chess pieces), mass production games or digital games? How do different mediums affect our subjective experience as analysts if we play 1980s games on an emulator, or make sense of 19th century boardgames through digital files? Or more practically, are there archives and repositories for games?

Readings

• M.J.P. Wolf and B. Perron, ed. The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, chp. 7, "Preservation". Routledge, 2023. Link to Catalogue.

• R. Guins, Game After : A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife, chp 1, "Museified". MIT Press, 2014. Link to Catalogue.

• A. Spanos, "Material Approaches to Games" in Games of History: Games and Gaming as Historical Sources

• M. Swalwell, "Moving on from the original experience: Philosophies of Preservation and Dis/play in Game History" in Fans and Videogames : Histories, Fandom, Archives. Melanine Swalwell, Helen Stuckey and Angela Ndalianis, eds. Routledge, 2017, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315563480.

• Game Databases:

  • Board Game Geek

  • Moby Games

  • LGBTQ Game Archive

Going Further

P. Salvador. Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States (2023)

A. Shaw. “What’s next?: The LGBTQ Video Game Archive.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 34, no. 1, 2017, pp. 88–94, https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2016.1266683.

Leblanc, Kelly. “The Quagmire of Video Game Preservation.” Information Today, vol. 38, no. 5, 2021, pp. 16–17. Link to catalogue