I’m currently putting forward some help for the Home of the Underdogs revival project. Adding my profile to the volunteers list, I added “very amateur historian”. This fits the bill quite well – my work in the IGDA’s Game Preservation SIG is pretty much based on the gathering of knowledge around actual preservation work, rather then actively doing any myself. I have however helped on the nearly finished white paper, and have done a little worthwhile work at the National Museum of Computing.

Hopefully, certainly once there are resources in the UK available for researchers to play old games so I can research them more, I can move up the ladder. It will be self-taught, but I do hope to contribute authoritatively by research (rather then anecdote) to different areas – web or otherwise (I hope to get oral interviews done at some point in my life). At least this can be in the way of recording how a game works, which anyone can do but really not enough is done to help.

I also hope my project work in the SIG can help further some aspects of preserving videogame history. I am still working bit by bit on the plans for the Digital Game Canon website, and maybe with that I’ll work on a standard for metadata/data fields in the SIG. All my work in this area will be hopefully entirely public domain or as close to it as possible, as long as we can get it that way – this might mean contributions are tough to come by (but links will be a mainsay of this area anywhere with so much information being around the web and offline), although this is fine with me. 🙂

We’ll see how far I level up my historian skill this year I guess. 😀