Game development documentation and institutional collection development policy

  • Authors:

  • Megan A. Winget;Wiliam Walker Sampson

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA;University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 11th annual international ACM/IEEE joint conference on Digital libraries
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Videogames and other new media artifacts constitute an important part of our cultural and economic landscape and collecting institutions have a responsibility to collect and preserve these materials for future access. Unfortunately, these kinds of materials present unique challenges for collecting institutions including problems of collection development, technological preservation, and access. This paper presents findings from a grant-funded project focused on examining documentation of the creative process in game development. Data includes twelve qualitative interviews conducted with individuals involved in the game development process, spanning a number of different roles and institution types. The most pressing findings are related to the nature of documentation in the videogame industry: project interviews indicate that the game development process does produce significant and important documentation as traditionally conceived by collecting institutions, ranging from game design documents to email correspondence and business reports. However, while it does exist, traditional documentation does not adequately, or even, at times, truthfully represent the project or the game creation process as a whole. In order to adequately represent the development process, collecting institutions also need to seek out and procure numerous versions of games and game assets as well as those game assets that are natural byproducts of the design process like gamma and beta versions of the game, for example, vertical slices, or different renderings of graphical elements.