Associate Professor Jerome McDonough recently was a guest on CBC Radio’s Spark with Nora Young. McDonough spoke with Young about digital preservation and gaming, emphasizing the importance of preserving not only the software and the servers, but also the nuances of gaming culture and history.
“What do we need to preserve about the game, that isn’t the game? What do we need to document in terms of social history of games…because if we don’t have that history, how are scholars really going to interpret this game in the future? It was a particular problem for us when we looked at Second Life because I can preserve the server software. I can preserve the databases. I can preserve the client software used to interact with Second Life. But I can’t preserve the people. And if I don’t have a record of the social activity and the social interactions that occurred there, what I’m going to have in 50 years is basically the neutron-bombed version of Second Life. I’ve got a lot of architecture, I’ve got a lot of landscape, and no people and no history.”
The full podcast is available here and McDonough’s interview begins at minute 42:45.