For this semester’s project, I’m tackling piracy as preservation in the video gaming sphere. We’re living through a rapid and all-consuming technological shift from physical media to digital only media. In this project, I would like to analyze the commercial and pirated methods of archive for video games, what this means for consumers and developers of video games, and what alternative methods exists.

Currently, piracy in gaming has offered a means of access and preservation where corporations could not or did not feel compelled to maintain support for older games or make them available through other means. A game’s quarterly or yearly success determines whether future generations would even have the opportunity to experience it, in the process potentially erasing the historical significance of a game or the communities that developed around it.

I’d like to share the landscape for video game archives and preservation with readers and contribute to creating a more informed user base that can get behind methods that of preservation that rooted in more accessibility.

I’m leaning into showcasing this exploration as an interactive, visual essay or a website.

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What tools do you think you will need – pain point and choices to make?

I’m thinking to make the visual essay in InDesign or making a website with WordPress/GitHub Pages, or a GitBook.

Tools – I’ll be using notion and google doc/word doc for drafting and writing, Adobe tools for image creation or editing.

Pain Points

• Narrowing down an audience. On one hand, it’s to the DH community, but I think this is also valuable to folks who enjoy games and preservation, so a greater movement can emerge to support sustainable methods for preserving video games.
• How to make this a visually interesting project. I don’t love the idea of a full website since long term hosting ect. In the spirit of making this more publicly engaging, it needs good visual intrigue. On the fence on how well I can do this with a visual essay when the more public audience is probably easier to reach through video, audio, and yeah, an actual game.

What is the final deliverable?

An engaging visual essay that blends analysis and narrative storytelling with multimedia (photos, videos, etc). Also taking inspiration from publications like The Pudding, or other digital magazine/ zine-like creations.

Timeline