Preserving the Games

It was the obvious thing to do - they used to be the Museum of Photography, and the DCMS gave them a broader remit to collect across a range of media, new media being one of them. So they're in the same sort of place that we are, and videogames fitted in perfectly.

So now the National Videogame Archive is part of the New Media Collection at the museum. It's quite a significant thing in that it's kind of a legacy project, and assured for all time. It's not a time-limited thing that's got a bit of funding to throw a load of dusty old consoles into a warehouse somewhere. It's got the weight of part of the Museums of Science and Industry behind it. It was essential that we had that level of museology experience.

The big thing for us at the moment is that there's a whole bunch of research projects really, trying to find out what you do with games to make them meaningful. So this is partly a bunch of issues about how you preserve stuff, but we didn't want to just create a collection. There's no point in having a collection if you're not going to do anything with it, if nobody can see it - exhibition and display is a key part of what we're about.

But exhibiting videogames is really difficult - if we're just talking about games, rather than the culture, think about a game and how you would actually display it in a meaningful way to somebody that had never seen it before. That's okay if it's Pacman, because that has enough cultural significance that most people know what it is anyway. That game has been designed to be walked up to, it explains itself really well.

But if that game is Final Fantasy XII and you're in some sort of exhibition space, and you don't have 150 hours to dedicate to finding out how the Hell it works, how do you make it make sense?

So we start from a slightly heretical position that the game isn't necessarily the unit of currency - because often they're not the best things for describing themselves. A lot of our research right now is working out how you exhibit and interpret complicated, non-linear narratives that branch out in different ways and respond to players making choices - whether they know they're making them or not.

How do you display that stuff in a meaningful way to somebody that's never seen it before? I don't have the answers for that at the moment, but that's good, because it's what keeps us in the business for the next ten years or so.

If you were my mum... I wouldn't even know what book to get her about games. I know where she'd find out about science, and dinosaurs, and art, and radio - and even TV in the last 40 years. You can go and learn a lot about that. But to our knowledge there isn't somebody you can direct people to for learning about games.

It's been good. We started last October, so we've done a couple of specific projects, but what we're really interested in most is working out ways in which we can display that work. The support's really good, but we want to explore it further.

NationalVideogameArchive.org - if they go there it'll tell them what we're doing, how to get involved and how to get in touch with us.