Videogame Preservation: Practices and Approaches, an Online Symposium
Digital Scholarship at Oxford
Join us online for this online symposium that will examine different practices and approaches to video game preservation. We'll have panellists from libraries, archives and the games industry, a lightning talk session, and the opportunity to network with fellow attendees.
10.00-10.15 - Dr Jack Orchard, Introduction
10.20-11.20 - Professor Melanie Swalwell, Swinburne University
“AusEAASI: From Game Preservation to Software Preservation”
Game preservation has always held the promise that the necessary skills and techniques would be transferable to other content domains. In this talk, I will narrate how the two Australian game history and preservation projects I have led first seeded a consortium of cultural institutions collaborating on media arts collections, allowing us to hone a method for researchers working with a distributed GLAM consortium. In turn, this laid the foundations for the ARC LIEF-funded “Australian Emulation Network”, which now supports some 40 organisations learning to use the shared digital infrastructure of EAASI (Emulation as a Service Infrastructure) to emulate a variety of software-dependent artefacts.
Melanie Swalwell is Professor of Digital Media Heritage at Swinburne University in Melbourne. Her research focuses on the creation, use, preservation, and legacy of complex digital artefacts such as videogames and media artworks. Melanie is the author of Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality (MIT Press), editor of Game History and the Local (Palgrave, 2021), and co-editor of Fans and Videogames: Histories, fandom, archives (with Helen Stuckey and Angela Ndalianis, Routledge, 2017) and The Pleasures of Computer Gaming: Essays on cultural history, theory and aesthetics (with Jason Wilson, McFarland, 2008).
11.25-12.55 - Emily Marlowe, Chair - Games and Digital Preservation Practices in Museums & Galleries
- Wytze Koppelman, Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision
In recent years videogames have also found their way into archival institutions and museums. Best practices and ways of dealing with this medium are still being explored. The Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision is both an archive and a museum with an historic focus on broadcasting media, broadeining its scope to videogames. This presentation will dive into modes of and issues of preservation and presentation for games at this Dutch institute. It will provide insights into considerations, curatorial choices and going concerns.
Wytze works as curator at The Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision in Hilversum, one of the world’s largest audiovisual archives. The institute’s collection is constantly expanding to provide an accurate reflection of the Netherlands’ media history and legacy. Based in Hilversum, the heart of Dutch broadcasting, Wytze focuses on developing and broadening the collection beyond traditional media into newer fields, including Dutch video games, contributing to the preservation of the nation’s gaming heritage.
- Patricia Falcao, Tate Gallery
- Manolis Varouchas, The Video Games Museum, Heraklion, Greece
Video game preservation often sits between archives, libraries, and museums that are open to the public. This lightning talk looks at how preservation works in an active video game museum, where games are not only stored but also played and exhibited. The talk presents the development of a custom Collections Management System created specifically for video game collections. The system is used to document and catalogue games, consoles, controllers, and related materials, while also keeping track of their physical condition, location, movement, and background information.
The presentation focuses on practical workflows inspired by library and archival practices, adapted to the needs of a museum environment. It also discusses common challenges such as hardware dependence, software updates, version changes, and the balance between keeping games playable and preserving them as museum objects.
Based on everyday museum work, this talk shows how digital preservation ideas can be applied in a clear and manageable way using simple, purpose-built tools. It aims to share practical experience that may be useful for other institutions working with video game collections.
Manolis Varouchas is the founder and director of the Video Games Museum in Heraklion, Greece. His work focuses on the preservation, documentation, and exhibition of video games as cultural and technological heritage. He has developed institutional cataloguing and collection management workflows tailored to video game artifacts, combining archival principles with interactive museum practices. His interests include video game preservation, digital heritage, museology, and the integration of library and archival standards into living cultural institutions.
12.55–13.25 - Lunch break
13.30-15.00 - Dr Jack Orchard, Chair - Lightning Talks
15.05-16.35 - Will Butler, Chair - Games and Digital Preservation Practices in Libraries Panel
- Neil Jeffries, Bodleian Libraries
This paper will focus on The Oxford Common File Layout, a software and storage agnostic system for storing versioned complex digital objects
Neil Jefferies is an Innovation Specialist at the Bodleian Libraries' Centre for Digital Scholarship and the Executive Director of the Open Preservation Foundation. He is co-creator of the International Image Interoperability Framework and the Oxford Common File Layout, Community Manager for the SWORD protocol, and a member of the Bit List Council for the Digital Preservation Coalition.
- David Carter, University of Michigan Library - Game Preservation at the University of Michigan Library
This presentation will be an overview of game preservation activities at the University of Michigan's Computer and Video Game Archive. Topics covered will include reformatting of older and obsolete digital media; maintaining legacy hardware, and the difficulties of preservation with a collection that is actively used.
- Michael Day, British Library – Working with Legacy Media and Emerging Formats at the British Library
This presentation will provide an overview of digital preservation activities at the British Library that have relevance to videogame preservation. While the collection of videogames is not strictly within the Library’s remit, game software has entered its collections as a byproduct of legal deposit, e.g. attached to computer magazines as cover disks. Over the past decade, the Library has developed services to support the imaging of legacy physical media in its own collections. It has also experimented with emulation-as-a-service infrastructures (EaaSI) as a potential way of providing end user access to our readers. The Library has also, working with the other UK Legal Deposit Libraries, investigated interactive app and web-based publications as part of an “Emerging Formats” activity. Emerging Formats typically have complex dependencies on technical platforms and software, and may thus represent some similar preservation challenges to videogames.
Michael Day is Digital Preservation Research and Services Lead at the British Library. He has worked at the Library since 2013. Prior to that, he was a researcher and research manager at the University of Bath.
16.40-17.00 - Jack Orchard, Closing Remarks and Wrap Up
Organisers
Jack Orchard is the Content Editor for the Electronic Enlightenment project in the Bodleian Library. In 2019 he completed a PhD on reading practices in eighteenth-century women’s correspondence networks, and has published on digital editing, correspondence, and historical reading practices. More recently he has extended his research into historical game studies and the communication of historical emotions and subjectivities. He currently sits on the editorial board of the Multiplay Network and has published articles in Play the Past and the forthcoming Multiplay collection, Games that Haunt Us.
Will Butler is a PhD researcher at Bath Spa University in the School of Design. His research concerns videogame preservation; specifically what role producers and developers of digital media play in the preservation and cultural heritage ecosystem.
Emily Marlow is a creative Curator with a focus on videogames, working most recently as in-house Curator at the National Videogame Museum (NVM) in Sheffield. Emily has worked across the academic, videogame and creative sectors over the last decade, writing for PCGamer, TheGamer and TechRadar, as well as working as Research Assistant for the V&A's 2018 exhibition 'Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt'.
Kat Dickinson is the Programme Officer for Digital Scholarship at Oxford (DiSc). Kat works to deliver DiSc’s events programming and communications.
