Describing, organizing, and maintaining video game development artifacts

Abstract

Game development artifacts resulting from the creation process of video games, such as design documents, style guides, test builds, and marketing materials, provide rich contextual information about how and why the game was created. Better organizing and preserving these materials will not only enrich our understanding of the history of these media but also educate and inspire the next generation of video game creators. This research aims to improve our theoretical understanding of how to organize and represent game development artifacts by examining the various types of artifacts created and their attendant issues and challenges. We adopted a multimethod approach employing an examination of existing collections and 29 interviews with creators, information professionals, and game researchers. From these data, we analyze the current practices, expressed values, and perceived challenges of these stakeholders, produce a taxonomy of game development artifacts, and provide best practices recommendations for describing them.

Electronic games classification in the library of congress and Dewey classification schemes: a comparative study

“…Throughout the late 20th century, video games have become a popular entertainment media, pushing libraries to acquire them into their collections to satisfy the needs of many library Electronic games classification users (McDonald et al, 2020;Robson et al, 2020). However, despite the increasing number of video game collections in libraries, the literature that focuses on the classification of nonprinted materials such as video games in Library of Congress classification and DDC is scarce.…”

Transcoding authenticity: preserving unreleased gaming software outside of memory institutions

“…In terms of digital preservation more specifically, the development materials examined in this paper illustrate challenges inherent to working with development materials that have never been released in any sort of complete canonical format. While attention paid to digital game preservation has exploded in recent years, the primary focus of most studies has “been on published games rather than game development artifacts” (McDonald et al , 2020, p. 2). While some efforts have been made to introduce controlled vocabularies for describing development assets, “only a relatively small number of game development artifact collections have been accessioned into archives and special collection libraries” to date (McDonald et al , 2020, p. 3).…”

“…While attention paid to digital game preservation has exploded in recent years, the primary focus of most studies has “been on published games rather than game development artifacts” (McDonald et al , 2020, p. 2). While some efforts have been made to introduce controlled vocabularies for describing development assets, “only a relatively small number of game development artifact collections have been accessioned into archives and special collection libraries” to date (McDonald et al , 2020, p. 3). These facts, taken together, mean that relatively few precedents exist for enthusiasts refer to when working with development assets related to a game project that they hope to preserve.…”