Yoni Blumberg's Profile

Where have all the games gone? Explorations on the cultural significance of digital games and preservation

Barwick Joanna, Muir Adrienne, Dearnley James

September
2009
Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

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It is now 50 years since the development of the first computer game but despite the proliferation of digital games in our society - with an industry which is flourishing and an average of 9 games sold every second of every day in 2007, it seems that these products are not as valued as the products of other cultural industries, such as film and television, and they are being excluded from the preservation of our digital heritage.
This paper will focus on research interviews undertaken with people in the academic community. It will highlight that the growing academic interest in digital games is being hindered by a lack of research collections to support historical study. Researchers acknowledge that the study of digital games is a relatively new discipline and that outside academia, there is still little understanding of their cultural significance. However, they recognise the importance of protecting games as part of our digital heritage to ensure that future generations are able to understand the development of a valuable aspect of our social history. In other words, this research has underlined that games are considered a culture worth studying and something in need of preserving.

Keywords: Digital games, preservation, cultural heritage, academics

DATAPLAY: Mapping Game Mechanics to Traditional Data Visualization

Macklin Colleen, Wargaski Julia, Edwards Michael, Li Kan Yang

September
2009
Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

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• Adolescents who play more than one hour of console or Internet video games have more or more intense symptoms of ADHD or inattention than those who do not (Chan, 2006).
  
  
  
  
• The most likely reasons that people play video games excessively are due to either ineffective time management skills, or as a symptomatic response to other underlying problems that they are escaping from, rather than any inherent addictive properties of the actual games (Wood, 2008).