Spring 2024 Review
Charter on the Preservation of Digital Game Heritage
- While attending GDC (18-22 Mar 2024) I met with numerous members of the game preservation community and discussed my research with them.
- Video Game History Foundation (Frank Cifaldi and Phil Salvador)
- Stanford University Libraries (Henry Lowood)
- The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (Jesse Burns and Rob Curl)
- Updated my charter document based on feedback and suggestions
- I presented "A New Charter on the Preservation of Digital Game Heritage" at the MAD (Media, Art and Design) Conference on May the 4th, 2024 (a.k.a. "Star Wars Day").
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| click image above to view the recording of the presentation |
- I have continued revising my charter for submission to the MAD conference proceedings, which is due on 31 Jul 2024.
History of Role-Playing Games
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| Giving a class lecture covering the contents of my book chapter |
- MIT Press published the peer-reviewed book Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons on 14 May 2024, including the chapter "Doctor Holmes, I Presume?" that I co-authored with Zach Howard. Our work covers the creation of first "Basic Set" revision of the Dungeons & Dragons rules and its connection to the early RPG scene in California.
- I am also co-teaching a new "History of Role-Playing Games" course and created a new 8-part lecture covering the history of RPGs from the earliest origins in Kriegsspiel and the like, all the way up to digital publishing and the modern ways we play today. My 2nd lecture in the series covers the same information as the book chapter.
- The book chapter and course are described in further detail at my other blog: https://crypticarchivist.blogspot.com/2024/04/book-update-fifty-years-of-dungeons.html
- In service of the new course, I completed an in-depth close reading, analysis, deconstruction, and overhaul of the original D&D rules as published between 1974 and 1975. As an experiential in-class activity, we had the students all play new campaigns using the original rules. However, we didn't want to distribute the original rules due to copyright concerns (even if this is under fair use). Also, we didn't want the students to have to suffer through the original rules that were "slammed together, virtually non-edited" (as per Gary Gygax in Rudy Kraft, "The Wizard of TSR... An Interview with Gary Gygax," Gryphon, Summer, 1980).
- From my analysis, I created my own "retro-clone" named The Fantasy Game. I freely shared the three books I wrote (Character Creation and Combat, Monster Menagerie, and Trove of Treasures) with our students, though any RPG rules that hew close to the original D&D rules would work. The following links have more information about The Fantasy Game project on my other blog:
Summer 2024 Plans
- Complete my revision of my "A New Charter on the Preservation of Digital Game Heritage" paper for submission to the MAD Conference proceedings (due 31 Jul 2024).
- I will return to my Taxonomy of Virtual Spaces interactive digital project that I started last summer. In the first version of the project, I was able to replicate the "Filmation" spatial paradigm that is part of my theory of spatial aesthetics of digital games. This summer, I will continue the project by adapting other influential spatial paradigms.
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