ICHEG Interview – Part 5

Introduction

Back in 2012, I was fortunate enough to interview International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) Director Jon-Paul C. Dyson, PhD. At that time, well less than half the interview was actually published, leaving a lot of wonderful insights and information on the cutting room floor. I hope to rectify that with this multi-part post, whereby the interview will be published in its entirety.

ICHEG’s mission to collect, preserve, study and interpret video games, other electronic games and related materials remains as important today as it did back then. With the goal to “examine the ways in which electronic games are changing how people play, learn, and connect with each other, including across boundaries of culture and geography”, I cannot recommend enough going to check them out.

In Part 5 of this multi-part series, we discuss various ICHEG resources that are open to scholars and the community.

Museum Resources

Visiting Scholars Programs

(Game-Route) It seems that a number of visiting scholars participate at the museum throughout the year.  How does such a program work?  Does ICHEG reach out to individuals in academia, or is it the other way around?

(J.P. Dyson) Well it’s both.  Sometimes people reaching out to us.  We have a relationship with the Rochester Institute of Technology, RIT.  We work with them closely.  This coming September we’re hosting an I.E.E.E. conference on video games with them.  But more and more scholars are approaching us wanting to use the resources and want to do research.  Because we’re gathering these (things) because we feel that the research and history of video games are going to grow more and more. So that’s happening.  We’re getting a lot of people contacting us and we intend to continue building that.  And again, sometimes that’s through building relationships, getting out the word about what we have. 

Fellowships

And we also have plans to offer fellowships for people to come and do research here as well, in the coming years.  We just got a $500K grant to support some of our efforts, and that includes fellowships.  Because when you want to encourage research into something, we feel that video games are important and they deserve the research, there are a lot of things involved in that.  It’s gathering the materials, so that’s building the collection.  It’s getting the word out, letting people know that the materials are here and getting more materials in.  And it’s also encouraging people to actually use the materials too. 

We don’t want to horde these.  We’re not doing this to horde these and build up our own private collection that we can go and gloat over it.  The goal really here is to gather the materials so that they can be useful to other people to really understand the history of video games and their impact on society.

Online Resources and the Future

(Game-Route) What is the ‘vision’ for the Center’s Online Collection and resources, where does it stand today alongside that vision, and how is this managed given the Center’s means? 

For example, do you envision a searchable database?  The ability to toggle between front and back covers for software?  360 degree views of gaming hardware?  High-res images?  Or is the emphasis being placed on physically bringing people into the museum?

(J.P. Dyson) I think that an online presence does a number of things. 

First it builds awareness: “Hey, these are the resources we have.  If you want to use them, contact us”. 

Second, I think is giving access to information about the individual components of the collection.  So, this is what our online database does right now, which has, I want to say little more than 20,000 items from the video game collection are in the online database.  You can go there and at least see an image of the item, a short web essay. 

Now many of those web essays are more general than we’d like.  They don’t go into a deep history of the object, and that is by necessity.  We’ve been bringing so many objects in there’s just no way; we decided our priority was to get them up on the web rather than waiting until we had the perfect essay written for each one.  But there’s a lot of individual information there.  So, part of it is almost a ‘way finding’ tool; ‘hey, here we are, if you’re interested in this aspect contact us about this’.  Some of this is individual items and descriptions you can see, you can see parts of the collection.  And for those eventually we’d like to do more with that. 

So, I would love to, say, have an individual item of the collection (and) maybe after doing this video capture, if it’s possible, you could then click an item and see a video sample of the gameplay.  So again, there’s that one-to-one link of not only the object and information about it but here’s an actual visual image of it.  Again with the gaming magazines, getting more of that content as we’re able to, online, is a goal.  So that you could go and say ‘Oh, here’s that old issue of “Creative Computing” from the 1970’s.  Oh, I can click on it”.  And whether that’s digital images of the whole thing, or at least of the Table of Contents, and you could contact us and say I’d like to get this article. 

So, way finding, individual items, and the third is sort of interpretation. 

Balance Between Online Vs Physical

(J.P. Dyson) We want to do physical exhibits, but also more online stuff.  And that’s something I feel we don’t have, I’d like to do much more of that interpretation of the history of video games.  So, one of the projects we’re working right now, we have a fairly small timeline, (is) expanding that to give you more.  Do more online exhibits on the history of games, on individual companies, on themes in games. 

We have a blog right now that we produce fairly regularly, has most of the interpreted historical information I’d say in there.  But blogs are not always the perfect medium for searching, for that sort of thing.  So more online exhibits I see in the future, doing more of that.  Being more of a go-to resource, for not only ‘Hey, here are these collections and here are these individual items’, but if I really want to understand the history of video games, I can come here for that, and we’re helping to supply that.

Please check-out the rest of this 6-part interview:

• Interview Part 1 – Mission, Beginnings & Role
• Interview Part 2 – Game Preservation Process
• Interview Part 3 – Community Partership
• Interview Part 4 – Game Maker Spotlight
• Interview Part 5 – Museum Resources
• Interview Part 6 – Preservation & Education