Browsing History: Archiving Video Game Context

This research paper is about the collection of contextual materials for video games at The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. The focus is on the context of reception that can be found online, such as webreviews, Let’s Plays and other web videos. Games and their interactive and processual nature make them difficult to archive and present as cultural objects. Collecting context can help with both preserving and presenting. It can be collected for the documentation as a (secondary) preservation method. Context is also necessary to describe the game as they cannot be played by the user groups of Sound and Vision yet. There is no detailed workflow or guideline on how to contextualize games and archive the contextual materials in relation to the games. Therefore, a new workflow is proposed to archive the context of reception next to the games.