The art and science of video game preservation is still a Very Important Thing, so I was pleased to see that Henry Lowood of Stanford University has written a lengthy post on the IGDA Preservation SIG mailing list discussing what happened at GDC, and possible plans for the future.

I'll highlight a couple of the notable findings - unfortunately I couldn't make it to either of the preservation talks:

"In the first roundtable, several people suggested that there is need for more work not just on software preservation, but also on matters such as archival collecting, oral histories, and video documentation of gameplay... There will be a new Virtual World videos collection on the Internet Archive as part of [a new U.S. Library of Congress funded project, through NDIIPP's Preserving Creative America program]."

The notes continue: "In the second roundtable on Thursday, more meat was put on the bones of a possible oral history project or set of projects that the SIG could facilitate." The Silicon Genesis project at Stanford, with oral history of the important history of the microchip, was put forward as one of the examples to possibly cue off.

For those wanting to know more, the IGDA Preservation SIG blog is updating regularly now, and the Game Preservation SIG Wiki has quite a lot of very useful information on it. They're also starting up a Memorials section, which I think is very worthy and worthwhile.