Saturday, August 10, 2013

Game Walkthroughs As A Metaphor for Web Preservation

Game Walkthroughs As A Metaphor for Web Preservation. Michael Nelson. Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group. May 25, 2013.
Somethings can't really be preserved digitally, such as computer games, even though it would be possible to create emulators. So for some, the best way to experience the game is though walk throughs on YouTube.
"I think game walkthroughs can provide us with an interesting metaphor for web archiving, not simply walkthroughs of web instead of game sessions (though that is possible), but in the sense of capturing a series of snapshots of dynamic services and archiving them.  Given "enough" snapshots, we might be able to reconstruct the output of a black box"

Google Maps is another site that has preservation issues. 

"There are a number of issues to be researched to make this easy enough for people to do (many of which our group is investigating), but the popularity of game walkthroughs and their preservation side-effects suggests to me that the web archiving community should be informed by them."