Moving on from the Original Experience: Philosophies of preservation and dis/play in game history

This chapter begins from the position that game fan preservationists deserve recognition for their efforts in ensuring that historic games and documentation have survived. Retro-game communities grasped the threats to digital games’ longevity before the fragility of digital media was widely appreciated. Fans took the initiative and decided to start documenting and preserving games and games-related artefacts long be­ fore games were on the radar of most cultural institutions. The work of individual fans and communities – assembling collections of games and documentation, preserving these, developing emulation solutions and discussing historic games – represent highly significant contributions, not only to the remembering of historic games and gaming practices, but also born digital heritage more generally. In a chapter essaying the rela­ tionship/s of fans to museums, Helen Stuckey and I (Stuckey & Swalwell 2014) recognise the contributions that fans, collectors and retro-game communities have made to the documentation and preservation of digi­ tal games. We consider what scope there is for collaboration between fans and museums, concluding that there are many possibilities for en­ thusiasts to work fruitfully with institutions, and vice versa. However, as in any relationship, there are some sticking points, points on which the parties differ. In this chapter, I identify the privileging of the ‘original experience’ as one such point of difference, noting that whilst this notion is important to some game fans and collectors, it pres­ ents problems for critical game historians, preservationists and others involved in curating and presenting game history, now and into the fu­ ture. Rather than arguing that one group presents a more enlightened view than the other, I identify several different cultures or approaches that are loosely associated with these groupings, namely the game lover, the retro-gamer, and the critical historian or curator. In turn, I lay out some of the conceptions of history and the philosophies of preserva­ tion and (dis)play with which each is associated, and seek to untangle some of the different conceptions of originality that are invoked. The second part of the chapter argues that the newly emergent subfield of the history of games – and indeed, that of born digital cultural heri­ tage more generally – needs to move beyond the paradigm of ‘original'.