Presentation on the use of Let's Play video's as a way of preserving and presenting computergames

2. Preserving and presenting
games through Let’s Play
video’s
Jesse de Vos
(Netherlands Institute for Sound and
Vision)
René Glas // Jasper van Vught
(Universiteit Utrecht)

3. Game On!
“The research project sets up the
first unified effort between game
research, cultural heritage
institutions and the Dutch game
industry to define, preserve, archive
and exhibit the history of Dutch
digital games and game
development”

4. Institutional Context
• Biggest AV-archive in the Netherlands,
with
– 1,000,000h of audiovisual heritage
– 2M pictures
– 20K objects (Take a look in depots!)
– 25 petabytes of digital storage
• Safeguards collections of public
broadcasters, organisations and private
persons.
• Makes its holdings available to media
professionals, researchers, educational
users and the general public.

6. Video documentation as a
preservation strategy
“Audiovisual recordings provide us with a unique perspective on the history of
art, a perspective that moves beyond the image in a book, words on paper, or
abstract notations. They provide us with a fuller sense of what it was like to be
there and then.” (Dekker in Noordergraaf et al, 2013:155).

7. Video documentation as a
preservation strategy
“The capturing of games in and at play could and, I would contend should
be the core objective of game preservation” (Newman 2012)

8. Preserving gameplay
“What about putting up a Let’s Play
recording studio in the museum and
inviting game hobbyists, researchers,
cultural historians or complete outsiders to
play a game and voice their reactions to
it?” (Nylund 2015)
Our project: What kind of game is it now:
adding new interpretative frames to these
games, potentially highlighting or
negotiating the social, cultural, and
technological significance of older Dutch
games from a contemporary perspective.

9. Added layers of meaning
Reflections on development of
games
Information about language
the perception of the machine itself
Information about original context
Information about the emotional
reception

10. From preservation to presentation
Let’s Play videos offer an alternative
form of access
Let’s Play videos constitute a
familiar and popular
contemporary media practice
The often individual experience of
gameplay becomes a social
event
A self-conscious, reflexive attitude is
encouraged

11. Final comments
Preservation of Let’s Play video’s
and metadata
Making Let’s Play video’s of the
same game every ‘x’ amount of
years
The popularity of Let’s Plays as a
media practice

12. Questions?
Jesse de Vos
jdvos@beeldengeluid.nl
René Glas
R.glas@uu.nl
Jasper van Vught
J.F.vanVught@uu.nl
Further results will be published in:
Ariese-Vandemeulebroucke, Csilla, Krijn Boom, Angus Mol,
Aris Politopoulos & Vincent Vandemeulebroucke (eds.).The
Interactive Past. Leiden: VALUE/Sidestone Press.
forthcoming.