Olle Sköld

Digital games have become a central part of contemporary culture and society. At the same time digital games provide numerous challenges for collections, preservation efforts, documentation, and exhibitions. This article investigates the challenges and opportunities implicit in LAM convergence and collaboration with actors outside of the LAM-sector itself. These actors are stakeholders of various kinds within game culture: game makers and industry, players, and rogue archives. More specifically, we turn to the collaboration in two Nordic museums in their work with digital games: The Finnish Museum of Games and the National Swedish Museum of Science and Technology. We draw on their actual efforts at collaboration between LAM-institutions and outside stakeholders and analyze them through the lens of political participation and agonistic pluralism. These concepts come from an interpretation of the participatory agenda in cultural policy that aims to resolve inconsistencies in the participatory agenda specifically around neoliberal logics of participation.

The paper asks: How can the preservation of digital games be supported through participation of stakeholders inside and outside the LAM sector, and what policy changes would such collaborations require?

This paper concludes that political participation and agonistic pluralism are useful concepts for the modeling and understanding of game preservation and provide a possible solution for the paradoxes of the participatory agenda in Nordic cultural policy. Our comparison of the work in two museums shows that approaches that empower participants can lead to successful and surprising exhibitions not possible without the sharing of curatorial power. Policy regulating LAM-institutions should change in order to accommodate players, makers, and rogue archives as participants in game preservation efforts. For the future the participatory agenda in cultural policy should be interpreted through the lens of political participation and agonistic pluralism as calling for truly empowering participants in order to elevate participation in game preservation from lucky accidents to a political participation policy.

Introduction. The aim of this paper is to form a framework capable of theorizing how virtual communities are entangled with their new media environments, thereby contributing to the understanding of present-day virtual communities and how to preserve them.
Method. An extensive bibliography on virtual worlds, virtual world preservation, document- and practice theory, and virtual communities forms the conceptual basis of the paper.
Analysis. The proposed framework was formed by the way of qualitative and synthetic conceptual analysis of the collected literature. Results. Virtual world communities can be fruitfully conceptualized as distinct domains with specialized documentary practices. In each domain of practice, the virtual world’s related new media ecology functions as a central hub where the configuration of shared routinized sayings, doings, and knowings specific to that virtual world are negotiated.
Conclusion. By theorizing the activities of virtual communities in new media environments as documentary practices, and blog posts, comments, and tweets as documents, the framework accentuates new media as infrastructures that do not solely carry informative traces of the activities of virtual communities, but in effect are an active and formative part of them. As such, they merit high preservational priority.

Purpose. The purpose of this paper is to explore how virtual world communities employ new media as a repository to record information about their past.

Design/methodology/approach. Using the notions of documentary practice and memory-making as a framework, a case study of MMORPG City of Heroes’ (CoH) virtual community on Reddit discussion board “/r/cityofheroes” was conducted. The study consists of an interpretative analysis of posts, comments, images, and other materials submitted to /r/cityofheroes during a period of approximately seven months.

Findings. The principal finding of the study is that the CoH community, with varying levels of intentionality, documented a range of pasts on /r/cityofheroes, relating to CoH as a game world, a site of personal experience, a product, a nexus of narratives, and a game. The analysis also lays bare the community’s memory-making processes, in which the documented conceptions of CoH’s past were put to work in the present, informing community action and viewpoints.

Originality/value. Games and gaming practices are increasingly prevalent in leisure and professional settings. This trend, which makes virtual environments and online media proxies for or augmentations of “real life”, makes it necessary for information scholars to understand how the full range of human information behaviours, including documenting, and memory-making, emerge or are replicated online. Additionally, few studies have examined the interplay between new media affordances, documentary practices, and memory-making in the context of virtual world communities.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the sociocultural underpinnings of wiki-based knowledge production in the videogame domain, and to elucidate how these underpinnings relate to the formation of wikis as resources of videogame documentation.

Design/methodology/approach. The paper is based on a three-month ethnographic investigation of knowledge practices on the Dark Souls Wiki (DSW). In focus of the analysis were the boundaries and knowledge aims of the DSW, together with how its contributors organized inquiries and used various sources, methods of investigation, and ways of warranting knowledge claims.

Findings. The principal result of the paper is an empirical account of how the DSW functions as a culture of knowledge production, and how the content and structure of the wiki connects to the knowledge practices of its contributors. Four major factors that influenced knowledge practices on the wiki were identified: the structures and practices established by the community’s earlier wiki efforts; principles and priorities that informed wiki knowledge practices; the characteristics of the videogame in focus of the site’s knowledge-building work; the extent and types of relevant documentation provided by videogame industry, the videogaming press included.

Originality/value. Previous research has shown interest in investigating the mechanisms by which community-created knowledge and online resources of documentation emerge, and how these are utilized in play. There is, however, little research seeking to elucidate the sociocultural structures and practices that determine and sustain collaborative online videogame knowledge production.

This paper aims to show how videogames are construed as archival objects in the videogame‐preservation literature by investigating drivers and motivations, selection of material, and methods of preservation. The review focuses on the expanded notion of videogames (“the EN”), a concept this paper introduces to collectively refer to the cultural and social aspects of videogames—for example, game culture, experiences, play, and community life and activity. The study's research aims are pursued on the basis of a critical systematic literature review of 42 publications originating from academic research and videogame‐archiving projects. The study's main finding is that the archiving literature construes the EN of videogames in three principal ways: i) as an essential part of the videogame as an archival object; ii) as a useful resource in archiving videogames, able to provide documentation of game culture and social context; and iii) as a useful resource in inquiries focused on the current state and recent history of society and culture from a sociotechnical viewpoint. The study suggests videogame community dynamics, videogame ontology, the development of archival theory, and videogame‐archive studies as rewarding directions for further research.

Scientific images are important and complex objects of study in the field of digital humanities for two principal reasons. Firstly, scientific images are key components in the making and communication of science in the present day and constitute central source materials in scholarly projects seeking to elucidate the historical practices of research and the development of scientific disciplines. Secondly, the archives, libraries, and museums (ALM) sector invest significant resources into the digitization and mediation of scientific images and it is a crucial success factor for both ALM institutions and future research initiatives that the premises and consequences of such efforts are thoroughly explored. This paper seeks to map which avenues of study and work that are crucial to pursue if available modes of curation, access, search, and analysis in digital collections of scientific images are to be meaningfully improved. The paper is based on a literature review and an overview of the current state of digitization work, digital collections, and digital infrastructures for storage and mediation at Uppsala University Libraries. Methodologically the paper makes use of action research and an adaptable, pragmatic, and ’exploratory’ approach to academic research. The study identifies five themes of study and work that, if competently pursued, promise to push the boundaries of what is known about scientific images forward in many areas of the digitization spectrum both in terms of best practices and theoretical understandings. The themes are: (1) method and infrastructure focus; (2) method focus; (3) digitization work focus; (4) epistemic and research-practice focus; (5) epistemic, methodological, and historiographical focus.

This paper examines how the effects of virtual space on learning have been elucidated in recent research with the aim of providing both a comprehensive picture of the current state of research and interesting avenues for future projects. Drawing on a multidisciplinary review, it identifies five key themes that together constitute research in virtual space and learning: analogies between the study of physical space and learning; socio-cultural constructivist perspectives; practical and theoretical pedagogy; architecture; and, aesthetics. Current research on how virtual space affects learning is fragmented, albeit rich. The pivotal challenge for the future is to establish a research infrastructure that can harness the richness of already existing studies, while simultaneously serving to drive, focus, and interconnect future research efforts.

Purpose – To examine the connection between social media and games, and to analyze information phenomena relating to them.

Design/methodology/approach – A survey of existing research is combined with results from two studies.

Findings – Players use game-related social media as an expansion of play and as a substitute of it, while avoiding information overload in the form of finding out so much that it damages the play experience.

Research limitations/implications – The number of potential game- related social media sources is so high that this chapter mostly presents just the early steps toward researching them further.

Practical implications – The chapter reveals the tight connection that has been formed between games and social media, showing that to properly research one, a look at also the other is necessary.

Originality/value – The chapter presents initial guidelines on where to start in researching game-related social media, an area that has so far seen very little research from both game studies and information scholars.

Keywords: Blogs; games; information behavior; social media

Drawing on the disciplines of library and information studies and archival studies, this study seeks to explore the production of information in online videogame communities and to elucidate how such insights can offer practical and conceptual support to the knotty issue of how to preserve those sociocultural aspects of videogames that exist 'beyond' the code and audiovisual data resources of the videogame itself. This is accomplished in two principal moves: (i) by delving into the current state of socioculturally-focused videogame preservation and; (ii) by inquiring into the production of information carried out by videogame communities in what arguably is one of their most important interfaces of interaction—discussion forums, wikis, and other social-media services. The study is based on four papers (I–IV). Paper I develops the theoretical framework of the study on the basis of practice theory and document theory. Papers II and III report on field-studies of videogame-community information production in the context of two processes of importance in community social life: memory-making (II) and knowledge production (III). Paper IV offers a qualitative systematic review of videogame- archiving literature, allowing Papers I–III to be situated in an archival context. The study employs multiple methods and encompasses several empirical sites of inquiry and was inspired by the framework of exploratory research and of 'bricolage' research strategies.

The results of the study add to the present state of knowledge on how information in the social-media environments of the large and influential present-day videogaming domain emerges as a result of community practices of production, and how videogame-community social life is entangled with information production in such spaces. The study also furthers archival inquiry on the topic of videogame preservation by providing a description and analysis of what information objects videogame-related social media plausibly hold, and by what communal practices and processes they have been brought into existence. Furthermore, the study examines the consequences of collecting community-produced social media and framing it as documentation of the sociocultural aspects of videogames—a key issue in videogames preservation.