Methods and Recommendations for Archival Records of Game Development: The Case of Academic Games

The future of computer game history lies in preservation. Most work has focused on the collection and maintenance of completed games, both digital and physical, but for game history to mature we need to look beyond singular objects and venture deeper into games’ development history. There is a problem, however, in that most development practice and technique is hidden, either by corporate opacity or a lack of basic techniques for preserving game development documentation. Three issues stand in the way: first, while game studies needs access to documentation, and game developers want to see their work remembered (and perhaps later “remastered”), little work has been done to promote this common cause; second, archives and cultural repositories need guidance from game studies practitioners and game designers in strategies for interpreting development documentation; and third, game developers need to organize their process and documentation outputs with an understanding of future preservation (both for their own internal use and for external study). In this paper, we draw on previous archival movements in the history of science and technology to argue for a unified approach to the preservation of computer game documentation. Our work, derived from a case study of UCSC’s game Prom Week, presents a first attempt at a communication strategy between game studies researchers, archivists, and developers in dealing with the organization, categorization, and storage of development records. We outline the development process, discuss numerous issues that surprised us in dealing with its documentation, and present recommendations and guidance for similar treatments of other game development work. This is an initial step towards a more structured interaction between academia, developers and archives in the informed retention of game documentation. Further efforts for other classes of games, like those developed outside academia, is necessary to create a holistic, discipline-wide understanding of the benefits of document preservation and use. By engaging in greater collaboration, game studies researchers, developers, and archivists, can begin to solve the problems facing the preservation of games’ creative history.