Conference Program

9:00-10:15 AM

Zoom Webinar

Collecting More Than The Game

Nick Richardson (Chair), Andrew Borman, Jon-Paul Dyson, Frank Cifaldi & Henry Lowood

What are the relations between game collecting, exhibition and research? How do repositories decide what to collect and preserve? What about historical game re-releases? Panelists will explore these questions and how they inform and shape historical research, drawing on their experience curating exhibitions and collections at ACMI, Stanford University, The Strong Museum of Play, and the Video Game History Foundation.

12:30-1:30 PM

@The Lounge (Discord)

2:15-2:30 PM

Zoom Webinar

Welcome & Introduction

Melanie Swalwell & Helen Stuckey

An introduction to Play It Again: an ARC funded, collaborative project between Swinburne and RMIT Universities, The Australian Centre for the Moving Image and AARNET. Hear of the progress that they are making towards investigating the history and preservation needs of 1990’s digital games in Australia – including the evolution of the Popular Memory Archive.

3:00-4:15 PM

Zoom Webinar

Working Across The Silos

Joanna Fleming (Chair), Heather Brown, Nick Richardson, Helen Simondson

Archivists, a-v archivists, conservators, and librarians are all grappling with the challenges of digital preservation. How can we work across disciplinary and institutional silos to share knowledge and methods? This panel will reflect on the mechanisms that currently exist, where and how they might be improved, and whether the situation in Australia poses particular challenges.

5:30-6:45 PM

Zoom Webinar

Obtain free ticket to attend in person @ ACMI 

Mastering the Preservation of Computer Games is Mastering the Preservation Game

Keynote

Klaus Rechert

Chair: Denise de Vries

Emulation as a preservation strategy and the preservation of computer games are intrinsically linked. Emulation has always been a tool for hobbyists, retro-gamers preserving their beloved games, and the gaming industry needing to fill its new games consoles with known and already popular titles. Beginning in the late 1990s, the digital preservation community started to integrate emulation into their repertoire of tools and workflows to preserve our digital cultural heritage. Games were the most visible “real” born digital artefacts, complex enough that they could not be migrated.

Since then, the preservation of computer games has been a key driver of the development of emulation as a preservation strategy. Accuracy and timing has always been an important tool for quality assessment of emulators. The (original) hardware was always limited; programmers found creative ways to overcome these limitations, which also exposed the shortcuts and shortcomings of emulators.

Today’s computer games present future challenges in digital preservation. The rise of GPUs is not only relevant for computer games, but GPU technology has become a major technological ingredient of many software applications and services. In a similar way, games evolved from cartridges and CD-ROMs to “blurry objects”: artefacts without physical representation, difficult to inspect and capture for preservation purposes.
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7:00-8:00 PM

@The Lounge (Discord)

All times are in AEDST.

9:00-10:15 AM

Zoom Webinar

Software Strategies

Melanie Swalwell (Chair), Adam Bell, Elliott Bledsoe, Seb Chan, Euan Cochrane & Rowena Loo

The Yale University-led EaaSI project has irreversibly changed perceptions of software preservation, from what once might have seemed an unlikely endeavour to a much more feasible means of accessing preserved digital artefacts and records. Panelists will discuss the shift in prevailing attitudes along with the strategies implemented within their organisations.

11:00-12:15 PM

Zoom Webinar

Researchers and Emulation

Melanie Swalwell (Chair), Kevin Driscoll, Stephanie Harkin & James Hodges

Emulation holds significant promise for researchers in a range of historical and cognate fields. Panelists will discuss the role of emulation in contemporary and near-future scholarly practice. What new questions does emulation make it possible to ask? What difference does more accessible emulation make? What considerations are there for institutions offering emulated access to scholars?

12:30-1:30 PM

@The Lounge (Discord)

4:30-5:30 PM

Zoom Webinar

Obtain free ticket to attend in person @ ACMI

In Conversation with John Passfield on The Flight of the Amazon Queen: The Emulation and the Remake

Helen Stuckey & John Passfield

Originally released for the PC and Amiga computers in 1995, Flight of the Amazon Queen is a hilarious graphic adventure in the tradition of LucasArts’ Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer’s The Secret of Monkey Island. Join us for a chat with John to explore the design of Flight of the Amazon Queen with its prescient mash up of robots and dinosaurs, terrible puns and beautiful graphics – and discuss the importance of ongoing access to historical games through emulation and remakes.

6:00-7:00 PM

Zoom Webinar

Obtain free ticket to attend in person @ ACMI

Hollywood and Videogames in the 1990s

Angela Ndalianis (Chair), Dan Golding, David Giles, Christian McCrea

This panel of experts examines the synergies that emerged between Hollywood cinema and video games in the 1990s. Topics for discussion will include: copyright, IP and emerging cross media practices; shared film/game industry productions; full motion video, the CD-ROM and promises of a new cinema; multi-path movies. The panel will also explore the role played by Australian game companies in the 1990s era of media convergence

7:15-8:30 PM

Zoom Webinar

Game History: the 1990s

Angela Ndalianis (Chair), Gleb Albert, Maria Garda, David Murphy, Helen Stuckey

The history of games in the 1990s is marked by a series of transitions. This panel will address the nature of these transitions and some of the regional specificities of this period. Panelists will situate their research relative to dominant narratives about game history and what they tell us about the future of game historical scholarship.

All times are in AEDST.

9:00-10:15 AM

Zoom Webinar

Curating Historic Media Art

Melentie Pandilovski (Chair), Michael Conner, Angela Goddard, Helen Stuckey

What are the major challenges in curating historic media art? Are the issues with access and exhibition purely technological? This panel will discuss how organisations – Experimenta, Rhizome and the Griffith University Art Museum – have approached these challenges and the significance of historical context.

11:00-12:15 PM

Zoom Webinar

Saving Flash Art: Interventions and Mediations

Keynote

Dene Grigar

Chair: Melanie Swalwell

Since spring 2019, my lab––the Electronic Literature Lab––has been involved in saving Flash art. To date, we have preserved over 700 works of born digital literature, net art, and web-based games. This project came out of earlier experiments to save pre-web hypertexts published on proprietary software and under copyright and net art produced with outmoded approaches like iFrames and programs like Java Applets. Methods we use to preserve works created with Flash involve emulation, migration, and documentation––either alone or in various combinations––using Ruffle, Conifer, open web languages, and video.

No matter the approach, however, we are intervening and mediating in a work of art, a reality that is not without its challenges and controversies. This presentation will provide examples of Flash art we have saved using these various methods, focusing on the levels of intervention and mediation they require and the impact they have on the final outcome. The questions I pose are: At what point does a preserved version of the work no longer reflects the original? More specifically, are we really saving Flash in Flash art?

4:00-5:00 PM

@The Lounge (Discord)

5:30-6:45 PM

Zoom Webinar

Conserving Time-Based Art

Carolyn Murphy (Chair), Rebecca Barnott-Clement, Candice Cranmer, Patricia Falcão & Cynde Moya

What are the major challenges for conserving time-based artworks? Panelists will discuss the processes and solutions adopted by specialists and what tactics they have found most useful for digital preservation and sharing knowledge across institutions.

3:00-4PM

Zoom Webinar

Obtain free ticket to attend in person @ ACMI

Howzat! A Brief History of Australian Cricket Games

Arieh Offman (Chair), James Halprin, Ross Symons, Emma Witkowski

Over the years there have been a multitude of cricket videogames, from Graham Gooch’s Test Cricket (1985) to the latest releases by Big Ant Studios – it seems that as gamers we just can’t get enough of digital bats, bails and stumps. Join James Halprin, developer of some of Australia’s first cricket games and Ross Symons from Big Ant Studios, creators of Cricket 22, and sports games researcher Dr Emma Witkowski as they discuss bringing the indefinable appeal of cricket to PCs and consoles.