We are pleased to announce the publication of our recent National Endowment for the Humanities supported white paper on archiving and appraising academically produced computer games. “A Unified Approach to Preserving Cultural Software Objects and their Development Histories,” is aimed at providing a first step towards an archival methodology for computer games and their development documentation. The report provides an in-depth look at the development of Prom Week, EIS’s social simulation game, with a focus on its development process, context, and documentation. We highlight key moments in its development timeline, and elaborate on the different types of documents produced, and the challenges encountered in gathering everything together for deposition into the University of California’s Merritt Repository.
The report is available at CPGM’s main website (permanent URL link at the bottom of the page): https://games.soe.ucsc.edu/project/prom-week-development-archive
The development archive is available here: https://merritt.cdlib.org/m/ucsc_lib_promweek
We would like to thank the NEH Digital Start Up Grant (HD-51719-13) program for providing the funding for this effort!
