Save Yourself: Game History is in Your Hands

[Music] all right hello um I'm Lane NY I'm your speaker for the next 30 minutes I have been uh requested to make some announcements including to please silence your phones uh or anything else you have on you that makes noise and uh to remember to as I understand it evaluations are very important to this process so whether you enjoy this hate this or feel merely lukewarm uh please fill out your evaluations after uh this talk so I'm Lane Noy I'm an assistant professor of digital media at the Georgia Institute of Technology I'm a computer and video game historian uh if you've heard of me before it's probably because uh you know that I'm working on a book on the kind of cultural and Industry history of Sierra online uh which has been uh kind of my primary research project for the past few years it will get done one day I promise uh but I'm here to offer something a little different um I've been sort of circulating around in the game industry as a historian of this industry for some

time and it's it's kind of led me to compile some thoughts about how I think these two in some ways alternate professions can can learn to speak better to one another if we get some foundation in what it is that kind of History involves and what it does so uh all right I'm gonna go okay so I want to begin um by looking at some stuff that we've saved over time okay so uh you may recognize this is the be tapestry and an embroidered cloth 230 ft long depicting the Norman invasion of England by William the Conqueror it was constructed in the 11th century it's made of wool and linen uh and it's been with us for about a thousand years uh this is the code of hamurabi one of the oldest deciphered writings of significant length in the world enacted by the Babylonian King of that name it dates back to 1750 BCE uh and the code still exist today in the form of stone and clay tablets this artifact has been with us for 3,500 years

uh NOP come on there we go sorry gave it away uh this is the Treaty of wangi signed between mayori Chiefs of New Zealand and the British crown in 1841 declaring British rule over the islands this has been with us for precisely 176 years and then we have a five and a quarter floppy disc the uh def in a definitional sense a standard data storage platform of the late 70s through the 1980s the shelf life is 30 years if you're lucky 35 if you're Jason Scott maybe um one laugh all right there we go thank you so all of man's technological might right the end result of Decades of effort in chemistry physics electronics and magnetism got us a disc that any composition notebook could Outlast and if you're imagining here that the floppy disc was just a kind of brief stepping stone on the journey to informational ubiquity and freedom of access where we

can now live in this world where data is never farther away than the cloud where we reside kind of where our Google inbox archives will never be full I would ask how many of you if you walked out onto Fourth Street and got hit by an Uber how many of you could guarantee that your co-workers or your friends or your partner could make any sense of your desktop right could parse your emails uh could print out your slack right what exactly is the historic status of your Kickstarter updates right do you actually think you're going to be able to access Kickstarter in 150 years um so we can't even get past two that factor authentication if our phone's dead right so in this kind of world what hope do you have for history when any email you write will be harder to trace and more difficult to extract from the digital systems it lives in than what Kings carved on a rock 4,000 years ago so every year at GDC there's effs to

honor history there's Barnstormer talks about the Frantic need for preservation and the captivating efforts of folks like Jason Scott at the internet archive to save the history of games there's postmortem on classic games like the one that will be coming up uh on Oregon Trail or kind of eager historical readings on some vintage game or another this is how history tends to flow at GDC and so it would have been very easy for me as a professional kind of computer and game historian to apply to these ranks to give a talk like this right and as I mentioned in the beginning so if you if you have seen me speak in public before uh this is what you know me for right my work on Sierra online uh on the 1980s and 90s Adventure game publisher but I'm not here uh today because I want to tell another story about Canon Roberto Williams Kings Quest or Mystery House I'm here because I want to take this industry's because if we want to take this industry's history seriously as I know every person who bothered to show up at this panel

probably does right I think we need to stop thinking that telling stories is enough or saving our code is enough or throwing up old documents on the Internet is enough which is to say that none of those are necessarily bad tactics but I want to Pivot this conversation I think because we could take this deeper I think we've actually done a pretty okay job getting older stuff saved not great but I'll I'll file it under okay but none of that seems to have done much to raise the bar for the history we consume so so much of it still exists in the realm of blog posts that are surely going to disappear off the internet one day or kind of dazzling forgettable books written by pop journalists looking to transform your Nostalgia into cash and after a while we remember it all kind of winds up sounding alike right so much historical writing seems to rely on us responding to the past with awe rather than understanding or as I've put it in other in other venues good history should make the present strange not the past and so what I want to talk about today is in the service of developing

what I would call a historical literacy within the game industry so not our ability to memorize a bunch of facts about game history or to fight about who invented the first video game as if that was ever an interesting conversation but to address our kind of shared and mutual understanding of what history is what it aims to do and how we can be part of that process so I've divided this talk into four brief Parts uh first is some groundwork to help us understand what historians do how they think and why they care about history for different reasons than industry professionals uh second is a call to expand our understanding of what constitutes history so to think bigger about what the future needs third is to dism dispel the pernicious myth that the digital era solves preservation problems and I'll close not necessarily with a takeaway but something of a decree uh for what the industry at large and possibly some of us were at small could do to take action on the very real problems that face our historical efforts okay

so I would estimate that one of the greatest unexpected threats to the sustainability of historical research within games is the gap and values between individual industry practitioners like yourselves uh who want to see your creative output and your unique culture preserved and the the professional historians who will do the work of writing histories based on such artifacts so the pressure of this Gap is is actually kind of already foretold if you look at domains like film studies where there's kind of a divide at the educational level between people who teach history and critical inquiry and people who teach practice right they're kind of often kept apart um and so right now game history is in this sort of in between space where most of the people associated with historical work uh are themselves first or second generation game designers digital archists journalists uh independent non-fiction authors so we have folks like Frank caldi Harold Goldberg Jason Scott John Romero Warren Spectre right these are kind of the names that might come to mind if you're thinking about who knows about history right

very few of you I could imagine could name someone perhaps besides me now who is sustainably employed right just to do this work uh but film was there once as was the history of computing in fact all Industries go through a phase where the first generation of historians are practitioners and then uh and then come the professionals quote unquote right this is something that has kind of happened historically cyclically over over the 20th century um and so this is what you get if you Google image search historian um apparently sometimes we are cartoons uh we are mostly old white men reading books apparently um although there is I'm really pumped about the image of the uh woman on a laptop eating a giant cookie in the third row so I promise despite what this wall of images might suggest uh that there's nothing really to be scared of in a professional historian uh so long as we understand one another's values and and what I mean by that is if I were to ask anyone in this room why do we care about history there's a few answers I would

anticipate from a room of Industry professionals Educators and journalists so there's usually a big emphasis on wanting historical materials to help teach future Generations uh there's a desire to learn from past failure and success to have access to inspiration to protect legacies and sometimes just that vague no emotion that we call Nostalgia but historians have kind of distinct reasons for being interested in the history of games so we sort of obey different Masters right we have different professional agendas and we take different positions relative to why history matters so much of that has to do with the training and education of a historian uh which may be six or eight additional years Beyond college and the kind of work that is required of us to secure employment so issues of legacy valorization and Nostalgia don't motivate me right uh what does motivate me is the unique kinds of historical problems that exist within the history of games and so like any professional I am interested in the questions by my profession so while many of us might

think that history is an end product right something that we consume or absorb uh historians relate to history is a verb right this is something we do it's a mechanic right it's one part science one part art it's a lot like game design maybe you know um historians relate to history not as this sort of great chain of facts but as a field open to possible interpretation and so facts are actually the easy part once you've done history long enough uh interpretation is the hard part putting things into context determining what is caused an effect uh reading contradictory accounts and deciding you know what might be valid right and so this is what historians do and this is what they love right history is a space of contesting ideas not a platform for some objective idea of the past so when we talk about why we save or who we are saving for bear in mind that person's foremost Allegiance will likely not be to games but to history and the important takeaway here is to encourage patience right in understanding one another's values on all sides sides the

harder we push for expanding our historical Stakes the more these different values would really risk butting heads I think um and cratering collaboration before it could even start and so I think as if we start from a place of kind of awareness of why individual practitioners are drawn to this shared space I think we can get a lot more done so as um as anyone who is taught in undergrad class in game design probably knows having students play old games surely teaches them that old games are are different and strange uh but it doesn't necessarily explain to them why they are different and so game themselves are actually pretty silent on the tensions or forces that created them and often but when we we talk about preserving video game history often we're interested in the elements that kind of loom largest in the history of the the industry or they are most captivating to fans right the games themselves raw code post morms specific assets um and historians however to get back to this point of values have a larger social cultural and and economic

audit and so they're interested in a kind of documentation that I suspect many in the industry would probably be find inconsequential or totally benol and so to illustrate this dilemma I'm going to offer you something that I've I tend to call the tale of two CEOs so in Rochester New York at the strong Museum of play one of the Premier game preservation museums and archives in the world there are two very different collections of documents I've been able to examine and so first is the Canon Berto Williams collection documenting the history of Sierra online and second is the broer bun collection uh broer bun put out choplifter Mist print artists right um a whole sort of and that company was uh founded in this collection donated by the company founder Doug carlston and so as a pair these these two companies actually have a lot of are really good comparatively right they both begin in 1979 they start by making software for the Apple 2 uh they both become Titans of the early computer software world uh they survived economic shakeouts they produce some the

most iconic software for the home computer and they both kind of become defunct around the same time in the early 2000s But Ken Williams and Doug carlston thought about their businesses and their histories differently and that powerful distinction of personality is captured in their comparative archival collections so the Ken and Roberto Williams collection is almost entirely comprised of frontof the house material and marketing item so copies of their consumer magazine publicity head shots newspaper clippings annual reports press releases and also a lot of personal momentos so Awards gifts frame fan letters uh Ken Williams saved the name plate from his door uh which is very Charming in some way um very little of this collection however is design documentation and there is almost no Internal Documentation of any sort uh it is silent to the subject of how games were made at Siera so it's it's kind of an archive of a company's image not of the company and I would say in contrast Doug

carlon's Brer collection is full of internal newsletters and memos company profit and loss sheets minutes of the board of directors right revised orc chart stuff that I imagine you would just want to like throw away um hundreds if not thousands of pieces of paper explaining how a company like broer bun actually functioned behind its curtain so Doug saved copies of his first checks he carefully annotated his profits he sent company employees to Industry conferences and had them type up notes on panels and they attended and then he would filed them and he saved them for 35 years and then he donated them to the strong What doug carlon's meticulous Rich body of documents makes clear is something I've often found myself saying to me to Industry workers which is that the history of games is much larger than your games and so this is disclosed within the broer bump boxes and folders is this is Corporate history it's economic history it's technological history it's labor history right it gives us better than any killer game or source code a vision of what the world was like when the age of the personal computer

dawned and so I like to sometimes I think of uh Ken Williams and Doug carlston as sort of the Goofus and Gallant of game history right which one do who do you want to be right um and I think we can use this comparison to think broadly about what documentation actually documents right uh you could think who can't be seen in your documentation whose work isn't visible who's on your payroll who never makes it into your postmortem right a long time from now reading those absences is actually what will tell historians about your work and your culture than your games possibly will um and and you should also keep in mind that historians are always going to write more about the guy who had the better documents so for most of human civilization we've been able to discern information about the past because materials that humans used for documentation Stone clay Vellum and paper were robust in their own way so certainly uh Stone can crumble ink can fade paper can burn but for the most part I've kept it stable conditions and not subject to catastrophe such

documents are accessible in so far as they don't require any kind of special technology to access right um while many of these documents may be oneof a kind right like the beay tapestry I mentioned at the start and therefore not able to be seen by everyone the flip side of this is that the basic barrier of Entry to the artifact itself is non-existent right you could think a stack of papers or photographs you find in your grandparents attic can be as easily examined today as they could have been 75 or 100 years years ago but if we begin to think that game history is bigger than our games if then we have to reckon with the phenomenal amount of material that we have made inaccessible to Future Generations because we've needed it to be ultra accessible in the present so you can consider for example Steve moretz's phenomenal collection of infocom documents which is housed in digital form on the internet archive and this is part of a larger collection of Moret personal papers that are stored at Stanford in each bundle of papers we find a phenomenal range of doents design notes fan letters correspondents from

other businesses internal memoranda client pitches hand edited documents financial information it's a trove what makes a digital document like this possible is that all of these things were once just pieces of paper right they could be shuffled into a folder easily stored scanned but today we use a different kind of proprietary software for nearly every type of communication we engage in right formats of splintered becoming email slack text tweets right internal correspondence with clients is locked behind God knows how many barriers of software collaborative documents are stored piled deep in your dropboxes and your Google Drives often with no evidence of the changes and edits a document would have undergone and so yes theoretically you can find somewhere in your inbox every exchange you ever had about your last project but when the archist actually comes knocking what exactly are you going to hand over to them and so the point here is not to his Stoke historical Panic although I can see that's maybe the downward slide where this is going um but to kind of push us to rethink the affordances and

limitations of digital formats right and I haven't even kind of gotten to the problem of artifacts that are not easily understood in digital form like three-dimensional objects or materials that have like personally identifying or incriminating information that simply don't belong in the on the internet and so let me be clear this is not a critique necessarily of the internet archive or other online game history initiatives per se it's more so a critique of how we've permitted ourselves to rely on the internet as an infrastructure taking care of what is actually the responsibility of the industry and so it is a critique of the presumption that the real historical work can be offloaded to Anonymous unpaid or barely paid internet laborers and it is a critique certainly of the idea that digital equals saved and that everything belongs in the internet just because it can be oh okay so in 1984 several of the leading public ERS of personal computer software banded

together under the leadership of a man named kenh and formed the software Publishers Association founding members included company representatives from business businesses no less prestigious as broderbund infocom and CBS software they were authorized by no organization they they Grant they granted self-rule by no institution they were their own authorizing organization they granted institutional rule unto themselves their aim was to protect their Mutual interests as an industry and chief among these for them at the time was the prevention of piracy uh they colluded with compute magazine to publish a two-page open letter to User Group presidents and BBs ssops articulating the exact threat unofficial distribution of software meant to their fledgling industry and so as a historical document this speaks to the efforts of entrepreneurs and businesses to identify what they understood as their industry's good right to make a case for its economic health and to establish the legal ramification a of copying it is

through such articulations that Industries have become recognizable to themselves right and so I first learned about the spa as a whisper right in a sheath of documents tucked inside a folder of Doug carlon's broer bun collection uh which I mentioned just a bit earlier so carlston was one of the first industry leaders to sit on the Spa's board and he had kept all of his correspondence with the president with Spa president Ken wash and so letters from wash reveal that the Spa's reveal the Spa's remarkably low tactics uh in which wash himself would organize personal stings of software stores suspected of piracy um and exchange for not turning businesses over to the feds wash would demand a ShakeOut paid to the SBA right he was kind of like the it was like the software Mafia kind of um and so what the spa understood was that expecting each company to individually fight piracy was a duplication of effort and a squandering of resources and so when representatives of the industry determine that they wanted to fix a

problem they self-organized and I bring up the SP as a way to frame questions of collective action and self-de within the context of an industry so whose job is history right yours but I mean that in two senses so first on the scale of a collective an industry's approach to its history reflects its self-regard and in fact its vision of its future not just its past but in the abdication of taking on that profound responsibility the vacuum will fill with whatever is at hand what might a his what might an organized historical Vision have offered the protestations of ethics and game journalism as if the bonds between industry media and Industry production hadn't always been cozy as if the industry wasn't always since its Inception a close-knit extremely exclusive group of peers as if a certain pancy in relations between journalism and Industry producers hadn't actually been one of the qualities that allowed the game industry to survive to grow in the face of a dubious

public so whose job is history when I first proposed this talk I aspired to kind of rally you all behind the idea that somehow this was a problem we each as individuals could solve that we could make some sort of game plan for a distributed archive and while I do believe that the preservation and historicization of video games awaits everyone's contributions I have mellowed in my faith that action here belongs at the effort of the individual so in something of a turn from my original thinking I've tried to consider sort of what video games could learn from older and more established Industries and I thought for guidance uh video games one of the defining media of the 21st century might turn to the defining media of the 20th which was film and so the film industry has long understood that part of its heft comes from the drama of its past but this is not a position driven by Nostalgia alone historians of film have long been supported by an industry apparatus that not only values their work but provides mechanisms to support it uh so you need

look no farther than the Academy film archive the academy oral history projects the Margaret herck Library all part of the historical arm of the International Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences the academy was founded in 1927 roughly 30 years after the earliest commercialization of Cinema it was only one year later that the academy founded its Library which has sustained for 90 years as the chief repository for materials related to this industry so compared to the film industry the game industry self-organized around its commercial interests faster but it's more than 30 years behind in providing for its historical well-being the game industry itself has no historical mandate right and that's kind of one of its problems and so while the Academy of Motion Pictures may offer one of the most Vis visible Testaments to Industry self-organization there are comparable institutions right the history of computing has the uh Association of computing machinery and the i e chemistry has the chemical heritage Foundation graphic design the American

Institute of graphic arts there is no other serious professional industry on Earth that expects its history to be crowdsourced in some sense our enthusiasm to be an industry open to disruption to take on wholeheartedly the possibilities of digital distribution crowdfunding Mobile gaming longtale economics have not served us well in solving our industry's preservation and historical literacy problems we have followed a model of displac ing institutional agency in the same way we rely on distributed consumer networks and so this will not work for history so if we believe that this industry is here to stay we have to punch up I think and and sort of push on representatives of the game industry's organizing bodies and leading Publishers to fund the organization of historical preservation which is not to say that we have nothing to do in the meantime and if you want my low reses solution for the historical memory problem of our present um I would say put your crap in a box so which is like any if I have in

every single instance in which I have been able to acquire historical documents from people who worked in the industry in the 80s and 90s it is because they have some box somewhere in their house that they pull off and they just hand me right that it actually exists in a physical form they don't have to search for it um you know there's no combing through digital documents to find it this is a sincere suggestion right you could buy a box and you can put stuff in it so it's not glamorous and it's not heroic but it's really damn effective and you keep a box under your desk and you could put stuff in it right you could imagine this is a work process if this is something that you're into right so what's your thing right Kickstarter teaching budgets art design documents game reviews right you could print it out and you could put it in a box and it works for other digital stuff too so you could gather up gather up screenshots web clippings code dumps stories my God your photos right I would kill for your photos in 75 years when I'm dead um like organize them into folders drop them on a USB drive or a

hard or a hard drive and put them in a box and so the idea here is that saving does not have to be perfect right it just has to be enough documentation is never a onetoone representation of your experience right it's a gesture and so saving is like this act of trust that a future soul will be able to read that gesture and the reason I tell you to put it in a box is because we need to get this stuff into formats that are accessible off the internet that aren't trapped behind passwords that don't require special software and also boxes are great for programs name tag swag Doodles ticket stops autographs uh you know your program from GDC uh as well as Awards uh if you're not supposed to keep this stuff due to a company NDA I would guess your company probably won't be around in 100 Years anyway so you know I'm not worried about it um if you work at a company and would like to think about how just even just to go through the thought experiment of like how would you address this systemically this is a conversation you could have right with

someone at your company do you own a company maybe we could talk about this right we could figure out something to do but remember that this is a tactic not a solution if we want in the long run something better than a box and certainly better than a history we can't access we might want to think about punching up and what is the best the best industry organization to do this who do we need to talk to I don't actually know which is why I'm here because I would like to think that we could all do this together thank you thank you Rich all right I don't how are we on time I have no idea what time it is a lot of time I have a lot of time oh yeah yeah it's almost 11:30 oh one minute okay we're gobs time okay um

sure yeah please oh okay um I have a question specifically about preserving online experiences things like server code things like just even the experience of playing online with a bunch of other people how might we go about preserving that or what initiatives might be the best for preserving those kind of things yeah that's a that's a real I mean so it's the library of I feel like Jeremy should get up here and answer this question um it's the uh the library of congress's preserving Virtual Worlds initiative has released several white papers trying to figure out this problem I think the general consensus is we don't really know um and I'm I'm not versed enough specifically in Virtual Worlds um although I could probably like point you to some people who know more about that I tend to be more kind of behind the the back of the house right I'm trying to figure out like who was doing the server

updates and that's the person I'm trying to get information from um this is one of the like the culture that exist in these worlds is like one of is also a critical historical problem that right uh I think many other media right are kind of struggling to figure out how to deal with right it's a point well taken thank you that was one of the questions I wanted to ask and comment about because uh the internet archive has started archiving completely runnable emulators for a lot of games architectures that you can't even you know buy anymore um so that might be an institution because they're here and they have a big beautiful Church like building um that I've talked to them and other people have talked to them and I didn't know about the Library of Congress but maybe somewhere between the Library of Congress which might move a bit slowly in the archive which is a bunch of hackers we could get some first online worlds where the servers get donated and not turned off at the end yeah um and my but you already kind of addressed that my other question is um so I've been uh engaged with other game developers you

know in this community but you only see each other at GDC so often and there's the GDC Vault but recently I started doing twitch um twitch deletes video on demand like recordings of the developer work just by default because you have to like pay extra to keep it so I made a $100 donation to memories of a broken Dimension to the developer xra CU he's like a Shader sorcerer said buy a hard drive save the files like stuff you're teaching and like doing on your stream is historic could we do something like that to kind of institutionalize or fund the saving of people who do stream or record their work um I'll so I'll address these questions in two parts one I think a lot of people um I I would go on a limb and say that I'm like decent buddies with Jason Scott who is the kind of guy responsible for a lot of the video game preservation on the internet archive and I think a lot of people aren't aware that like that work is like him and him alone right like there is like one madman in a top hat who is capable of doing this and that is not like for me a sustainable solution um I

think that we have a I mean the man just had a heart attack um you know he's like currently recovering um you know whenever your preservation comes down to like the phenomenal and I would say like hugely in many ways uncompensated labor of an individual that is not actually a solution right and so this is why I argue that and I would similarly say to the twitch problem right one of my I one of my arguments is that we have to get out of a crowdsourcing mentality right and figure out or that like that can work as a a small scale tactic in the immediate but there has to be like a larger conversation and GDC seemed like the most appropriate place to take that question right is that someone needs to be funding this and it actually needs to not be us right it's kind of not our individual responsibility um I think that the industry like could take a stronger role in this right in the way that we've seen with with many other entertainment and Technology Industries

thanks uh forgive me if you um already addressed this I walked into the panel late um um um what is your um view um I know this is a very broad subject but uh for preservation of work where the original holders original creators um no longer exist entities have been dissolved uh rights can't be determined and um often times issues of great time importance because they're on Hardware that's old and failing I've done a lot of preservation of old and failing Hardware myself and there's this kind of legal versus moral quandry that you run into uh what is your uh analysis on that what are my thoughts um I mean i t i do tend to take a I think I tend to be in agreement with Jason that you say first and ask permission later um and I mean that's uh I'm not super susceptible to the legal quandry unless someone is actually able to enforce it right I mean

this is this is I think one of the reasons it's the game industry is equal parts entertainment and Technology right and so it has that the technology part of it is the part that can't answer these questions right the tech industry is also terrible at this right they don't really have this sorted out either and it's that component of I think games that has been slow to move on precisely these kinds of problems whereas I think institutions like film have adopted a somewhat mellower attitude about kind of um you know reproduction rights and these kinds of things cool thank you sure so I know we're out of time but uh uh so someone who's been around a long time and has been part of companies like Sierra an interplay and virgin who to your point we didn't do a good job of historically keeping things um while I appreciate what you're saying and and your note of coming here to try and do that you're also in a room full of people saying crowdsource is not the solution and I am friends with Sealy and

others and have quite a collection myself both from past companies and just games history are the people who are actively trying to be historians the seity the jasons yourself are you guys who's the Mike Walsh of that that's trying to get you guys together to to drive a deeper and bigger conversation um I don't think there is one yet which is what I wanted this and so yeah I'm aware of like Frank literally just launched this two days ago and I was like this is an interesting Counterpoint to some of the I think the argument I want to make is that we don't have one yet right and and I would like to imagine a banding together and I it's I mean Ken wash is an interesting story and I don't know what motivated him to want to operate in that way um buts yeah yeah I mean that in some sense like that's what I'm saying right is that some if we could shift the way we think about this as a problem we might

start to come up with different solutions and I think that is one of the possible solutions right sure anybody else are we overtime I think we're sorry man [Applause]