The most basic function of a museum has been to preserve things --be it history, culture, art, or things that combine all three. Withvideo games, this simple task can become massively challenging in anumber of unique ways. "It can be very complicated, because the original medium orhardware are no longer accessible or in the case of more moderngames there might have been numerous revisions or patches, or inthe case of online games the fact that the game really existed on aserver somewhere," said Henry Lowood, curator for History ofScience and Technology Collections at Stanford, one of the world'sbiggest video game archives. "The main problem we've had so far is because of formats -- themedia on which the game exists. Almost every solution we're talkingabout nowadays involves extracting the content from that medium --so it would be like the installation package that was on the disc,or cassette tapes or cartridges -- and moving it onto anothermedium that we can store on a long-term basis." Lowood and his staff seek out old cartridges, floppy disks, compactdiscs, tape-based games and attempt to extract the data exactly asit was recorded. It's then transferred to a storage server forposterity. "To do that work of the data extraction we have aforensic workstation -- to my knowledge it's one of only three inthe world that are used in research libraries," Lowood said. "Thereare two libraries in the US -- Emory and Stanford -- that haveforensic workstations. So we do the whole business with write blocking to make sure that nothing is changed." In cases where games are damaged or data has been corrupted, Lowoodand his team will sometimes hire data recovery specialists to seeif they can salvage things. In other cases, there may be a need tosimply recreate data from scratch. "The strategy of 'recreation' has been developed most strongly inthe area of new media art and digital art with museums," Lowoodsaid. "There have been installations in the past that were set upand you can't really install things in the way they were in thepast. It's impossible. Let's say someone did something in 1989 thatinvolved drawing data from a stock market feed. You're not going tobe able to do the same stuff that they did. The technology isdifferent, the stock data is different." "So there's a group that's been working on new media art that'sdeveloped an approach to that. They use a questionnaire with theartist to learn what the artist's intentions were, what kind ofequipment they used. They basically put together a package so thatin the future somebody could recreate that exhibit. What youpreserve is more about information about the artist's intentions,photographs of what it looked like, or video." If the idea of preserving video games as cultural and historicalartifacts is uncontroversial, the question of whether or not videogames should be treated as museum-worthy works of art is lessstraightforward. I asked Frank Lantz, Zynga New York creative director andInteractive Telecommunications professor at NYU's Tisch School, if Doom belongs in a museum. He compared it to heavy metal. In the sameway that bands like Black Sabbath intended their works to live inthe world of everyday people, to place them in a museum would be"silly," a curator co-opting the intent of the artist. In the sameway, most video game developers have intended their works to beenjoyed in the living room or the arcade, and not the white cube ofthe museum. But even so, there is a real history of games and digitalinteractions that intended to be art. In 1966 Robert Rauschenbergcombined digital art, music, and physical gameplay in "Open Score."The interactive artwork was a kind of tennis game meant to beplayed in a dark room. The only light was to come from the racquetsheld by each player and the balls they'd hit back and forth. Everytime a player hit a ball a musical note would be emitted over asound system and so the traditional form of two people competingwas transformed into an abstract collaboration of color and sound. We are high quality suppliers, our products such as China Liquid Filling Machines , Feed Stabilizer for oversee buyer. To know more, please visits Pellet Crumbler.
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