Nottingham Trent University and the National Media Museum in Bradford have joined up to create the UK’s first videogame archive. To be housed at the National Media Museum, the National Videogames Archive will comprise a broad range of artifacts to address both games themselves and their wider culture. “The industry isn’t doing much to archive its own products, such as instruction books, final retail releases and so on,” says James Newman from Nottingham Trent University’s Centre for Contemporary Play. “There’s nothing that’s doing to games what the BFI is doing for film.”

To take on the wide remit of the archive – which, despite its name, will not be restricted to games associated with the UK – Newman and GameCity videogame festival director Iain Simons have begun a process of public consultation to establish a collections policy. Alongside consoles, discs and cartridges spanning the full history of the medium will be such material as advertising campaigns, fan art, songs, videos of speedruns and photographs of cosplayers.

James Newman

“The challenge is finding ways of interpreting games for audiences – scholars as well as public,” says Newman. “How can you make a 150-hour game accessible? Nobody yet has the answer to that. We’re aiming to do it with writing, performance and so on.” The problem for the team is that it’s difficult to pin down exactly what a videogame is – it’s not just the code that comes on the game disc, but the experience of playing and the social aspect of players reacting to it. “The first question and the subject of the first public display is to ask what is the form all about,” Newman explains.

The project will be kicked off at GameCity 3, which will be held between October 30 and November 1 in Nottingham, with the launch of savethevideogame.com, a website that asks its visitors what they think should go into the archive and will solicit contributions to it. Developers including Harmonix, Media Molecule and Katamari creator Keita Takahashi will also be donating material to go into the archive. Newman says that getting material from developers is proving easier than the team feared: “Getting it is a matter of asking the right questions. We’re confident that we’ll get the likes of back-ofenvelope design documents.”

Paul Goodman

The National Media Museum, meanwhile, is taking care of how to store and display the objects in the archive. Anyone with a yellowing SNES knows that plastics degrade over time, but Newman claims that the museum’s curators know much about preserving them, as well as CDs and DVDs. “The archiving of these important artefacts presents us with some real challenges, not least in the area of preservation,” says Paul Goodman, the museum’s head of collections and knowledge. “We must balance the necessary conservation requirements of these materials with the need to allow the public to understand and interact with them both now and in the future.”

The National Media Museum was keen to take on the archive since it recently rebranded from its former name, the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, and therefore wanted to add digital and interactive material to its collections. The team isn’t clear on how long it will be until the archive is permanently located at the museum, but anticipates a series of touring exhibitions once the collection is large enough.

Iain Simons

The project joins several other major initiatives that aim to archive videogames, including a collection of 25,000 games in Stanford University’s Silicon Valley Archives in California, and a conference at the British Library that considered games as part of a wider discussion on archiving all digitally stored information. “There are many people asking the same questions,” says Newman.

“The industry isn’t doing much to archive its products, such as instruction books, retail releases and so on. There’s nothing that’s doing to games what the BFI is doing for film”