Welcome!
Hello, and welcome to Thanks for Playing!: A Look Through Video Game Nostalgia. We have curated and constructed this archive in the hopes of furthering the preservation of video games, especially the nostalgic and emotional connections that people have fostered through them. While a relatively newer artistic medium, video games already have a continuously expanding diversity of styles and formats, as well as a growing chronological depth. Because of this wide variation in games, the task of preserving and ensuring accessibility to games is complicated and something not extensively studied. Due to gaming's constant evolution and digital nature, games are often under a state of "planned obsolescence" where new systems, hardware or software, and storage types are created and cycled through in rapid succession, not to mention the fact that existing scholarship and literature is often scattered across disparate groups of information professionals, historians, and fans (Olgado, 2019). This makes the act of video game preservation a nascent and difficult field to work within since so much research has yet to be done. We wanted to do our part and contribute to this field by constructing a digital archive that specifically focuses not only on the collection of games, but the emotional and nostalgic context surrounding them. And so, while we recognize this is a small class project, we wanted to frame the project around personal memories and collect various nostalgic stories to record the games.
Disclaimer: Some of the games recorded here are rated Mature and may contain sensitive or graphic content. While we have tried to keep representations of such content on this site to a minimum, the histories we have collected about those games may contain mentions of mature material. We chose to keep these mentions intact to preserve the nostalgic associations that the players have of these games.
Documentary Focus
This archive is primarily focused on the documentation of nostalgic memories that are tied to a particular video game. The games themselves are diverse, but each one has at least one oral history that was shared with us. Most of the games are during the 1990s and 2000s as that was a significant nostalgic time period for many of the people we reached out to for our initial records. However, there are several games included that were released either before or after these decades as there are no criteria governing the specific chronological focus of the records. The same can be said for platform or format, with many of our initial games being released on Nintendo consoles (Nintendo64, GameCube, Wii, etc.), but many games here do not fall into that category. Our primary documentary focus is on the memories themselves, and the games that ended up being chosen for the archive were decided based on those histories.
Archival Concepts/Practices
This archive is unique in how the records were produced in house. While there is effort to preserve information about the games, the primary focus of the archive is to preserve memories. These memories were collected for the archive from participants and will potentially expand as more testimonials are collected as the intention is for it to be a living archive. Because of this shift from the game to the memories, our archive engages with what Duff & Harris (2002) discuss as the relationship between text and context: the games exist as the original 'text,' with the emotions and memories surrounding them as the 'context,' but our archive is reversing that, placing the primary 'text' as the nostalgic memories. This creates a kind of multi-provenanciality where both the game creator and the oral historian share provenance of the game. And while we have centered the oral historian as the primary provenance in this archive, we wanted to also use our method of description to highlight the provenance of the original game, and do our part to forward games preservation and cultural heritage. We thus chose to use the Video Game Metadata Schema (VGMS) to record each item's metadata, since this schema was not only built specifically to describe video games, but also "...to advance the cataloging and classification of video games as cultural artifacts" (Lee et. al., 2020, 6). And so while our records are unique in how they engage with text and context and in their multi-provenanciality, we have taken care to not only center the testimonials at the heart of this archive, but also to preserve the cultural heritage inherent in the original text of the games themselves.
Record Selection Criteria
Because of the nostalgic memory focus of the archive, our records were entirely created on our own. We began by sending out a brief Google survey form to interested participants, and once they had recorded their initial interest and consented to being anonymously included in the archive, we conducted interviews and recorded them with the intention to create records. These testimonials formed the basic criteria for which games were selected to be recorded. Games were only chosen to be recorded if they were included in a testimonial that we collected, and appropriate metadata was constructed from there.
We were also aware of the copyright and use risks that are inherent with collecting and recording a contemporary medium like video games. The medium itself is so new that all but possibly the oldest of games are still in copyright. However, we were determined to adhere to the soul of this project relating to oral histories and cultural preservation of games, so we accepted a reasonable amount of risk to increase the accessibility of the archive (Dryden, 2014). We worked to select and provide as much content around our records as we could, not using any original records and sourcing media from free-to-use/publicly available places such as Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. Even so, we recognize there is still some risk involved, but we feel that not only are we covered by fair use since this is, as of now, an educational project, but also that the risk for greater record selection and accesibility is worth it for the purpose of this archive's existence.
User Groups
Our primary user group are individuals who have a nostalgic connection, in some way, to video games. Our goal with this archive was to create a record of the emotional impact that gaming can have, and hope that users will want to engage with the histories collected here and possibly submit their own to be recorded at a later date. This includes people who still regularly play games and participate in gaming culture, but also those who may have only briefly played one game when they were younger. Because of this, we have designed the site to be as intuitive as possible with multiple ways of finding games (such as through the timeline module, the drop-down list, and searchable tags with colloquial names and terms), as well as a Glossary page that explains our metadata scheme and jargony words that may be inaccessible for less-knowledgeable users. There is also a form that can be filled out at the bottom of each page where users can submit their own oral histories or memories if they so choose with the hope that these may be added to the archive in the future.
Our secondary user group are professionals or enthusiasts interested in the preservation of games. As stated earlier, the field of games preservation is emerging and decentralized, and so we hope that this archive could serve as a resource for people who are interested in continuing to implement scholarship and methodology. Because of this, we anticipate that this user group, made up of information professionals, historians, dedicated fans, etc., will not necessarily be focused on the oral histories so much as the games themselves (though we of course hope that our collection of contextual information will be of use/interest), and so we recorded detailed metadata for each game, as well as notes about the copyright, legal, and technical aspects of creating this archive on the Works Cited page.
Perspectives
While we aimed to maintain diversity in our records, they were limited to the histories provided by participants who were able to offer their time without compensation. Our initial survey was sent out to university students which was also a limiting factor for our records and the games featured do not include any flash games or non-console games. The testimonies do include some international perspectives of players interacting with American culture through video games, which provide an interesting perspective into how games shape and create culture. Overwhelmingly our records are biased to positive memories associated with video games and do not represent any negative attachments with the games (Caswell, 2016).
Navigation
At the bottom of this page, we have implemented a timeline module that you can use to find games within our collection from a chronological perspective based on their release date. Along the navigation bar, you can find each of the games within the 'Games' tab. This will present a drop-down menu organized by game title, and by clicking on one of those links, you will be taken to a page that presents that game with testimonial and contextual media/information about that game. More detailed metadata can be found by clicking on an individual game, which will take you to that item's record. You can also use the search bar to find games based on metadata and/or tags. Other tabs take you to other pages of the site, including 'Browse' to see all the games at a glance, 'Authors' to find more information about the creators of this archive, and 'Glossary' for help with terms that may not be familiar.
We hope you enjoy your time with this site, and that you come away with an appreciation for the emotional impact that gaming can bring, as well as memories of your own that stay with you. Please feel free to fill out the form below each page to submit your own memories