Day: September 14, 2009

Game Preservation and Remakes

There was a panel at DiGRA’09 about game preservation that asked questions about how to preserve games, what to preserve, what was being done, etc. One thing that struck me then and now is how the trope of preservation is truly opposed in some ways to the logics of the remake that I wrote of previously.

Preservation is to keep an old thing in a usable state: to freeze it. On the surface, this is similar to what the remake does: it takes something and preserves (a part of) it for usage. Of course, the key difference is that whereas preservation thinks to hardware, greater experience (as well as the futility of this due to data decay), remakes take one single element as something worthwhile: they story and general play or rule set as it might be called.

Game preservation efforts and remakes preserve different things. So what about the demake? Well, it seems to preserve the other elements. While a remake preserves story/play, a demake preserves graphics/sound/hardware. Finally, the preservation efforts try to preserve both sides.

Now where does this then place preservation, or I’ll say it simply: museum historicism, on the one hand and logics of repetition on the other? Are they anathematic or related?

Back from Kingdom Hearts

I’ve recently been doing a lot of work on a specific project on the game franchise Kingdom Hearts with William Huber. We’ve been blogging some of it at Gummi Ship, presented some at DiGRA ’09 and I will be continuing to do some work on it, possibly for DAC ’09. The project is quite expansive, but for me it is a means of looking at ideas of translation, transference, flow and interaction between Square-Enix and Disney, Japan and the United States, and the game world of Kingdom Hearts.

The work has consisted of playing through the games and analyzing them as texts, which has resulted in certain problems (other successes) and a definite greater knowledge of what I can and cannot, should and should not say from our analysis. It has also led to a greater understanding of what my work needs in other ares.

Mainly this is currently related to a need for ethnographic work of some sort. Most of my work seems to need the inclusion of user voice, but other parts don’t Really, the question is how to bracket things and yet have the ability to say things. To get to allegorithm must I interview to see if the obvious is there for other people? How much must one play between the field’s factions that stem from disciplinary difference as much as theoretical difference? And such.