This is a fascinating video on the history of a popular beat sample, and reflections on the copyright of it (I like the Judge quote). (Via. Chewing Pixels awesome link roundups)
Tag Archives: history
IGDA.org’s Treasures
igda logo
The old IGDA site will be closing down, with a new site put in place, sometime – I presume – next month. In the mean time I’ve done some automated, and just recently some entirely manual preservation of the site. I still need to confirm the original site will be preserved, or better put online as archived pages.
In any case, now is a good a time as any to say there are some rather unknown but great articles and words on the site, just very difficult to find! Most of it is under the aptly named Content section, so it’s worth digging yourself of course…
The Articles section hasn’t been updated for a few years, but contains some nice, lengthy articles. Some good reports, good opinion pieces and some factual works too. Work a check out 🙂 – I just wish there were more new ones… 🙂
Out of the various Columns, only 3 are currently active (I presume paid for, and come out monthly). All 3 are worth reading themselves – if only for the entertainment, although as advice and opinions they are well informed and extremely on the mark.
The archives are good too, Famous Last Words by Jim Charne goes into a lot of legal and contract topics (fascinating stuff, even if not all American law applies to the UK for me) – no wonder he got an award for MVP award in 2006 🙂
Matt Sakey goes in-depth into culture and related areas in Culture Clash – a highly recommended read. The great thing about the archives is the additional reading material links (if they still work). He also gets down on culture more often at his Tap-Repeatedly site (formerly the quirky-named Four Fat Chicks), which I’d also urge a read or search of the archives 🙂
The Games Game by Tom Sloper does a good job, and entirely applicably still in the archives, give great advice to students and those looking for industry jobs. A lot is basic, but there are some things worth learning there for sure 🙂
Finally, the closed columns!
The Ivory Tower is fascinating – I’ve not read nearly enough of it yet to give a full comment, but I’d say this would be something worth bringing back – or doing more ad-hoc articles for the IGDA site in the same vein. Lots of writers I recognise, with good topics – on games at the time, the collaboration of academia and industry and much more. I will be making enquiries at DiGRA if I have a chance on if this would ever be restarted!
Miller Time by Scott Miller is a fun little read, stopped short it appears. Since 3d Realms is now in the area known as “mostly dead”, seeing the old words from the owner back when Duke Nukem Forever wasn’t so much a joke is interesting.
Finally, Words of Wisdom is a nice look at luminaries’ quotes – not enough of this is done I think, more is needed so people can be called out on repeating rubbish or changing views or being hypocritical – but this column was more just for advice for new people, sought out by Barbara Walter, who I can’t find online (but appeared to be a recruiter, and worked the moderation of the newbie forum at the time).
I’d love to see more of all of this on the IGDA site! 🙂
There are also some well-worth-reading white papers and other material in the Papers and Reports section – a wee bit old now, but some is still highly relevant and not out of date at all. It misses out any kind of new papers (from around 2006 onwards unless it links to a more up to date page), which is a big shame.
PS: I’m still working on other posts, but without a gallery which, yes, I’m still looking into, I’m reserving those for when I can upload pictures 🙂
My Profile as a Videogame Historian
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. 😀