“Not worth mentioning”: Preserving Unremarkable Videogames

• Hybrid event
• Library and Archives Canada – Public Archives and National Library Building , Ottawa , ON , K1A 0N4
• Zoom meeting link

All lectures will take place in the Pellan Room at Library and Archives Canada (395 Wellington Street). Lectures will begin at 7pm.

Description: 

Classic videogames are in peril. Indeed, a 2023 report by The Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network revealed that 87% of games released in the United States before 2010 are critically endangered. The frequent removal of games from online stores, their closure, and recent announcements that physical game production will be discontinued only serve to reinforce this call to action. Fortunately, the fields of video game preservation and history are quite healthy, but initial efforts to preserve video games and their history focused generally on the great men of videogame history, the most successful or impactful titles or series and companies, or the countries whose industry was most developed or had the most impact on gaming culture. This effectively relegated most of videogame history to the shadows. 

Dany Guay-Bélanger will present a novel approach to researching and preserving the history of videogames that answers this call by putting players first. By conducting interviews that position participants as experts on their own memories and taking seriously the contributions of lay historians and the gaming community, this approach attempts to create fissures in the proverbial ivory tower and create better, more connected scholarship that will hopefully change the public’s perception of academic video game historians and vice versa. 

Biography: 

Dany Guay-Bélanger is a SSHRC and FRQSC-funded PhD candidate in game studies at the Université de Montréal and holds a master’s degree in public history from Carleton University. His research aims to devise a methodology favouring a holistic approach for the preservation and study of videogames as cultural heritage artefacts in order to allow players and researchers, present and future, to access videogames from every era of this medium’s history. Dany has worked in the Canadian heritage sector for several years and is currently the treasurer of the Canadian Game Studies Association and a member of the History of Games conference steering committee. 

Please RSVP: