TY - JOUR
KW - Game preservation
KW - critical heritage
KW - game culture
KW - game studies
KW - intangible heritage
KW - participatory heritage
AU - Niklas Nylund
AU - Patrick Prax
AU - Olli Sotamaa
AB - While games and the cultures that have sprung up around them are diverse and vastly different from each other, most exhibitions dealing with them are based on a limited understanding of games that relies on symbolic brands on one hand and on the centrality of playable experiences on the other. This bias is potentially replicated by heritage institution collections starting to define how games become cultural heritage. While games research has shown that games are firmly nestled in a participatory grassroots culture, these kinds of perspectives are curiously lacking in exhibitions. By connecting previous work on critical and intangible heritage with game studies literature, this paper emphasises the importance of various productive communities for game heritage. The concepts of intangible and critical heritage suggest that the inclusion of players and communities into the game heritage process could offer a more diverse heritage discourse. But participatory practices in collector run museums tend to produce game heritage which is implicitly working towards the same kind of one-sided understanding of games that has been criticised heavily in game studies. The critical expertise of museum professionals is needed in order to start incorporating the varicoloured practices of communities into our understanding of game heritage.
DO - 10.1080/13527258.2020.1752772
M1 - 3
N1 - Publisher: Routledge
N2 - While games and the cultures that have sprung up around them are diverse and vastly different from each other, most exhibitions dealing with them are based on a limited understanding of games that relies on symbolic brands on one hand and on the centrality of playable experiences on the other. This bias is potentially replicated by heritage institution collections starting to define how games become cultural heritage. While games research has shown that games are firmly nestled in a participatory grassroots culture, these kinds of perspectives are curiously lacking in exhibitions. By connecting previous work on critical and intangible heritage with game studies literature, this paper emphasises the importance of various productive communities for game heritage. The concepts of intangible and critical heritage suggest that the inclusion of players and communities into the game heritage process could offer a more diverse heritage discourse. But participatory practices in collector run museums tend to produce game heritage which is implicitly working towards the same kind of one-sided understanding of games that has been criticised heavily in game studies. The critical expertise of museum professionals is needed in order to start incorporating the varicoloured practices of communities into our understanding of game heritage.
SP - 268
EP - 280
TI - Rethinking game heritage - towards reflexivity in game preservation
UR - https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85084082105&doi=10.1080%2f13527258.2020.1752772&partnerID=40&md5=747e36d957e4a7868b19e3e3c1fadecf
VL - 27
SN - 13527258 (ISSN)
ER -