The Recordkeeping Roundtable is pleased to announce its next event: ‘Game ON! The challenges of digital game preservation and why it matters’ with Associate Professor Melanie Swalwell from the Department of Screen and Media at Flinders University.

When: Tuesday 2nd April , 5.30 for 6.00-7.00pm
Where: Seminar Room, Level 2, Fisher Library, University of Sydney
Cost: $5.00 donation to cover drinks and nibbles
Registration: Go to http://gamespreservation.eventbrite.com.au/

The preservation of born digital materials is a challenge that faces us all.  Games provide a means of exploring any number of specific issues of broader relevance, including:

• Preserving the object or the experience
• The challenge of almost in-built obsolescence (the latest is always the best)
• As exemplars of early innovators in graphic techniques, dealing with ubiquitous connection and massively distributed audiences
• Engaged user base

The field of digital games preservation is growing internationally.  But what of our local Australasian experience? Melanie Swalwell is at the forefront of exploring these issues in relation to early Australasian games.

About Melanie Swalwell

Melanie is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Screen and Media   at Flinders University, South Australia. She is a scholar of digital media arts, cultures, and histories.  Currently Melanie is Project Leader of the ARC Linkage Project “Play It Again ” – Creating a Playable History of Australasian Digital Games for Industry, Community and Research Purposes.  She is also very involved with the Australasian Heritage Software Database.

Since 2004, she has been researching histories of digital games.  As well as current archival research into the production and reception of computer games in 1980s Australia, Melanie is finishing a suite of projects on digital games histories in New Zealand. Outcomes include traditional and interactive journal articles, a monograph, an exhibition of historic photographs, an online, community database of early NZ software, as well as revived examples of such software.

Melanie was the 2009 Nancy Keesing Fellow, at the State Library of New South Wales. A podcast of a public lecture she gave at the Library is here.