Record/Replay aims to develop the theoretical and practical tools needed to ensure the long-term preservation, repurposing, and cultural appropriation of videogames. Such tools are becoming increasingly necessary as:

• Current solutions to the problem of preserving videogames (e.g., emulation) focus on user experience but neglect the needs of producers;
• Videogames constitute an important cultural form of our time, increasingly susceptible of transposition into other mediums (e.g.,. films, novels, machinima);
• The intellectual property value of videogames extends well beyond the end of their commercial production;
• Creators and producers need to understand the history of their genre, in order to identify present and future trends.

• Knowledge Management: developing tools which can help producers capture to the fullest extent possible the genesis of works, that is, the abstraction, description and organization of all the elements that may be needed to recreate/repurpose the game at a later time (e.g., rules, maps, drawings);
• Curatorship: providing gaming communities with ways to access and interpret their heritage, including tools to analyze, compare, quote, cite, sample, and otherwise manipulate games (à la Machinima), thus fostering the cultural appropriation and diffusion of videogames.

The Record/Replay team has already completed the development of the MUSTICA preservation tool for the highly unstable media of electro-acoustic music. The tool has been enthusiastically adopted by France's IRCAM for the long-term management of their catalog of hundreds of electro-acoustic works. Record/Replay seeks to extend this project to videogames by, on the one hand, developing tools and data models that can describe and catalog the units of content of videogames, so as facilitate preservation and long-term management of IP value, and, on the other hand, develop the analytical instruments that can foster their cultural appropriation by diverse cultural groups and audiences.

Primary Investigators

	Jean-François Blanchette Department of Information Studies University of California, Los Angeles		Bruno Bachimont Université Technologique de Compiègne Institut National d'Audiovisuel

Partners and Funding

Center for Information as Evidence / Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) / Institut National d'Audiovisuel (INA) / UCLA Academic Senate / Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)

Graduate Students

	Sarah Dilling Department of Information Studies University of California, Los Angeles		Kasey Eng Department of Information Studies University of California, Los Angeles
	Anna Lynn Martino Moving Image Archive Studies University of California, Los Angeles		Sudeep Sharma Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media University of California, Los Angeles
	Wei-Li Sun Department of Information Studies University of California, Los Angeles

Publications and Conference Presentations

Bachimont, B. & Blanchette, J.-F., "Computer-Aided Hermeneutics: A Practical and Theoretical Approach to Digital Media Preservation" (in preparation).

Bachimont, B. & Blanchette, J.-F., "Reading digital documents: the need for a new paradigm", DOCAM '05, SIMS, Berkeley, October 7-9, 2005. [PDF]

Sirven, X., "Authenticité et accessibilité des archives électroniques − MUSTICA, Le cas de la création musicale numérique", Technical Report, Université Technologique de Compiègne, 2004. [PDF]

Bachimont, B., Blanchette, J.-F., Gerzso, A., Gilliland-Swetland, A. J., Lescurieux, O., Morizet-Mahoudeaux, P., Nodin, N., Teasley, J., "Preserving Interactive Digital Music: A Report on the MUSTICA Initiative" in Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Web Delivering of Music (WEDELMUSIC 2003), 15-17 September 2003, Leeds, UK. IEEE Computer Society Press. [PDF Preprint]