“As gaming accelerates into the digital realm, there is an urgent need to preserve the wealth of supplementary content about these games found on websites, wikis, blogs, and YouTube. Without efforts to actively archive this digital content, future generations will miss out on crucial cultural context around landmark digital-first games.
This session [from Hit Save] will advocate best practices for keeping this web and video content before it vanishes by exploring real preservation projects and experiences with tools such as TubeArchivist, ArchiveBox, and the Webrecorder suite. During the presentation, live examples will be shown of effective techniques for web scraping, crawling, and downloading to capture content and metadata as it currently exists online. By analyzing successful digital preservation strategies, I aim to demonstrate methodologies that can be adopted more broadly to retain our digital heritage.
If we don’t preserve the online context now, insights and experiences around beloved games can be permanently erased. Bringing attention to these issues and aligning around best practices is a step toward securing our gaming history, and drive coordinated efforts to properly archive gaming’s web presence for posterity.”