Assembling Auras
Towards a Methodology for the Preservation and Study of Video Games as Cultural Heritage Artefacts
Bibliography
Guay-Bélanger, D. (2022). Assembling Auras: Towards a Methodology for the Preservation and Study of Video Games as Cultural Heritage Artefacts. Games and Culture, 17(5), 659–678. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120211020381
Abstract
Video games, while a digital art, live on physical media. Whether cartridge, magnetic tape or floppy disk, they degrade. Without care and study, they disappear and cannot be played again. While it might be possible to preserve play using emulation or video captures, scholars need to consider every option at their disposal to preserve video games for future study. This includes securing original versions of games and ephemera, recording play, interviewing game creators, and players, and much more. This article develops a new approach to conceptualise video games as material and cultural heritage, and proposes a methodology for their study, especially those for which there is no original version left.
Notes
The paper “Assembling Auras: Towards a Methodology for the Preservation and Study of Video Games as Cultural Heritage Artefacts” by Dany Guay-Bélanger explores the challenges of preserving video games as both digital and material cultural heritage. It argues that video games are more than just software—they are complex assemblages of hardware, ephemera, and cultural contexts that give them meaning.
The article highlights the difficulty of preserving video games due to the decay of physical media, hardware obsolescence, and copyright issues. The author proposes a methodology that draws on intertextuality, paratextuality, aura, and assemblage theory to understand and preserve video games holistically. This includes not only the software and hardware but also the social and cultural elements surrounding games, such as fan activities, oral histories, and game-related objects.
Key ideas include:
- Intertextuality: Video games are influenced by other games and forms of media, making them part of a larger cultural conversation.
- Paratextuality: The materials that accompany games (manuals, reviews, fan works) are essential for understanding their cultural significance.
- Aura and Assemblages: Video games exist in a dynamic state of copies, ports, and adaptations, each contributing to the game’s identity and cultural aura.
The paper concludes by urging heritage professionals to adopt flexible approaches to video game preservation that consider not just the technical aspects but also the experiential and cultural ones. Public engagement, particularly involving players and fans, is emphasized as crucial for preserving the full scope of a video game’s historical and cultural value.
Go to annotation “This article develops a new approach to conceptualise video games as material and cultural heritage, and proposes a methodology for their study, especially those for which there is no original version left.” (Guay-Bélanger, 2022, p. 659)
The authors propose an approach of collecting-as-much-as-possible, especially also paratexts and contextual information. The following quote is evocative and a beautiful rendition of the problem.
Go to annotation “A ‘video game’ is not just software. It is consoles, living room couches, arcades, box art, supporting maps, magazines, and paraphernalia; it is everything that gives the act of ‘playing’ the game meaning.” (Guay-Bélanger, 2022, p. 660)
The author goes on to propose different concepts in approaching the preservation of video games and their history.
Go to annotation “The proposed methodology revolves around the concepts of intertextuality, paratextuality, aura, and assemblage theory.” (Guay-Bélanger, 2022, p. 660)
Video games, as all software, needs to live on physical media. That makes them prone to Go to annotation “bit rot, hardware failure, and format obsolescence” (Guay-Bélanger, 2022, p. 662). The physical media are decaying and it’s getting more and more difficult to create the necessary systems to play the games.
To truly study video games, they have to be played (preservation for use). At the same time, they are important audio-visual and material cultural heritage. The author’s approach tries to unify this two aspects.
Video games, as all software, exist in between the physical and the digital. Software is the instruction, carved onto a physical medium, out of which a digital world can emerge.
‘The cartridge or disk is a vessel with the wine, the stone upon which the writing was carved containing the deeper meaning born of words and syntax. It is the physical manifestation of code wrapped in layers of instructions that created the portable package, a world in itself containing a world within’ (Reinhard, 2018, p. 93).
Go to annotation “Software is of two objects: the code-object and the media-object” (Guay-Bélanger, 2022, p. 661)
- Code-object is code… inclusive the UI
- Media-object is the media and paratextual material
The author criticizes that older lists of what needs to be preserved in video games often leaves out the user.
Go to annotation “But focusing on such materials neglects that software needs a user; a video game emerges from the user’s interactions with the software’s rules and potentials for it to actually be, and so, the ancillary materials that enable or depend on and result from that running also need to be considered.” (Guay-Bélanger, 2022, p. 662)
The problem is in preservation focused on technical aspects versus preservation for use.
Ongoing processes of preservation of the media-object face many obstacles, such as all software. See Go to annotation “bit rot, hardware failure, and format obsolescence” (Guay-Bélanger, 2022, p. 662). The author then goes to length to describe the different problems these three aspects bring up for preservation.
Go to annotation “Proposed Approach: Intertextuality, Paratext, Aura, Assemblages and Articulations” (Guay-Bélanger, 2022, p. 664)
- intertextuality: ‘meaning in a text can only ever be understood in relation to other texts; no work stands alone but is interlinked with the tradition that came before it and the context in which it is produced’ (Allen, 2000, p. i)
- paratext: Go to annotation “formulates a simple algorithm that governs the whole of Paratexts: Paratext = peritext + epitext. The peritext includes elements ‘inside’ the confines of a bound volumeeverything between and on the covers, as it were. The epitext, then, denotes elements ‘outside’ the bound volume—public or private elements such as interviews, reviews, correspondence, diaries etc.—although Genette does comment that ‘in principle, every context serves as a paratext.’” (Koenig-Woodyard, 1999)
What counts as paratext can be defined fundamentally different. From technical material, such as drivers and text files, to paraphernalia.
‘there is never a single or correct way to read a text, since every reader brings with him or her different expectations, interests, viewpoints, and prior reading experiences’ (Allen, 2000,p.6–7)
The author would radically include all forms of fan-labour as well. Nonetheless, paratextuality should be understood as a very fluid concept, especially when deciding what is text, and what is peripheral.
Go to annotation “Dividing between what is in and around the game stops being useful when all of the potential influences on a game are taken into account. By being flexible in what we consider to be central and peripheral to a game, the framework proposed here opens the door to new and varied positions. Limiting the number of items considered to be part of the game does not allow for the expression of the complexity of video games and their derivative material.” (Guay-Bélanger, 2022, p. 667)
- aura: Go to annotation “Games are much more than entertainment; they are art, they are software, but they are also inherently social. They are represented in movies and books and are the source for a plethora of derivative material, such as clothing and toys. All of which hold on to the game’s aura.” (Guay-Bélanger, 2022, p. 667)
In opposition to Benjamin, Latour and Lowe argue that copies can hold the original’s aura as well. Even if they are Go to annotation “copied, ported to other platforms, adapted, reinvented, and reimagined” (Guay-Bélanger, 2022, p. 667). Through this perspective, video games become assemblages.
- assemblage: Go to annotation “DeLanda defines assemblages as ‘wholes whose properties emerge from the interactions between parts’.” (Guay-Bélanger, 2022, p. 668)
Assemblages have kinship with the concept of intertextuality. An Assemblage is fluid. It’s part can exist on their own and become parts of other or multiple assemblages.
- articulations: Go to annotation “defined by Slack and Wise as ‘dynamic interminglings that can move in many and various directions, propelled by various and changing circumstances (of other articulations). The “web” of these particular articulations is what [they] call an assemblage’” (Guay-Bélanger, 2022, p. 668)
Articulations are parts of assemblages. They are also very flexible in being articulations.
Go to annotation “While it could be argued that this interpretation could cause confusion in the understanding of an assemblage, making a whole too stable risks oversimplifying and denying the dynamic aspects of assemblages and their articulations.” (Guay-Bélanger, 2022, p. 669)
Video games form also assemblages with the art forms that came before them and from which they are pulling.
Go to annotation “Video games are assemblages of many different origins and the combination of arts forms, culture, and technologies. They are also social and, as a result, defined by their users. Players are parts of these assemblages. Therefore, they should be involved in the study and preservation of this medium.” (Guay-Bélanger, 2022, p. 670)
Positions on preservation
Go to annotation “what are game historians and preservationists aiming for, accuracy or authenticity?” (Guay-Bélanger, 2022, p. 671)
Go to annotation “In essence, being accurate refers to an attempt to reproduce the original as closely as possible, while being authentic suggests that the meaning of the original is put forward.” (Guay-Bélanger, 2022, p. 671)
Go to annotation “there needs to be an approach to video game preservation emphasising authenticity, meaning it acknowledges the presentness of a game and that some aspects of games cannot be saved unless compromises are made and scholars of video game preservation consider diverse materials and alternative tactics.” (Guay-Bélanger, 2022, p. 672)
Notions of assemblage, intertextuality, paratextuality, and the concept of the aura can help for such an approach.