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Welcome to the University of Michigan's Computer and Video Game Archive (Video)
After watching this video, a lot of you are going to wish you were
Dave Carter, who works at the University of Michigan's Computer and Video Game Archive. He deals with video games, from the oldest hand-helds and consoles to the newest Xbox and PC games and controllers. A lot of his time is no doubt spent fixing things that break, finding obscure games, being generally helpful, and making sure nobody breaks the games, consoles, computers, controllers, and even board games and memorabilia in the collection. But still, this has got to be the ultimate job for a game junkie. And it looks like a great place to visit, because this museum is part of a library, and just as a library encourages you to pick up books and read them, this is a place where you can actually play the games, not just stare at a ColecoVision console in a display case. You can play in a cubicle or, for games that take some space, there are a couple of big gaming rooms with soft-looking sofas and big flat-screen TVs, where you can jump up and down like crazy while you're doing Guitar Hero or using a Wii or Kinect. And if you can't make it to Ann Arbor, MI, there's an informative blog that's all about video games past and present that's must reading for almost any serious gamer.
Another visitor .. stay a while, stay forever!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This is exactly why we need to do away with publicly funded education. This type of shit would never fly in the private sector. Remember this story the next time you get your tax bill.
You fool. Universities offer video game production programs of study, they have for years.
Back to the Stygian Abyss with you!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Yet im sure you have no problem wasting millions a year on sports programs. Video games are a viable human activity.
Good-bye
Any word on how this library is funded? I didn't see anything saying that the University is paying for it. And if so, I don't see anything about what percentage of the funding comes from public tax-paid funds. That's but one revenue source for public universities.
just wanted to mention that the SF Bay Area has a non-profit video game museum in Oakland called the MADE (Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment). these folks are really doing great work keeping the memory of video games alive with a huge variety of consoles stretching back all the way to the Magnavox Odyssey, thousands of video game titles, and a dozen or more stations where you can play any game you want, whenever they're open. There are lots of events happening there, like Fight Night tournaments, indie dev presentations followed by standup nerd comedy, game jams, programming education for kids, and more. here's the link: http://www.themade.org/
Oh. And also.. I just fed a troll. I feel dirty.
stop making sensible statements
True, I didn't need college to study gender.
Well, they die in part because nobody really takes care of them. You could say the same thing about old books or works of art, yet the preservation of those is a precise science these days. If all that mattered was the contents, we could digitize or replicate all of it. But we don't. We don't just throw old tomes through Google's book scanner and then toss them into the recycle bin. The spine of a 1,500-year-old book may not hold any particular value to people who make books today, but we keep them around because there's still a cultural value in having the physical form that holds the content. Maybe not for you, but for a lot of people.
wasting millions a year on sports programs
We're talking about colleges here, not trade schools; museums, music programs, sports programs, social clubs, liberal arts courses, etc. are all part of the college experience. And besides, Michigan's sports programs make many millions of dollars profit for the school.
You took my statement as binary. 'Wasting millions of dollars on sports programs' wasnt meant ot imply that all sports programs are bad, merely that sports spending isnt nearly under the same kind of scrutiny as other equally valid activities. A HORRENDOUSLY disproportionate amount of money is spent on sports. More is spent on sports then is received back to students as services so your millions in profit argument is null. Sports profits prop up an ever increasing sports program, its not the net gain you are trying to make it up to be. Sports have their place in education, but its not at the head of the table.
Good-bye
Michigan's athletic department is on it's own budget. It doesn't get money from the university, and it doesn't give money directly to the university.
The goal should be the preservation of the code AND the artwork that goes along with it. Boxes, carts labels, discs overlays, posters, manuals, etc.
Otherwise, you're going to miss historic details like the extremely crappy artwork of the North-American release of Mega Man.
Right, archiving is a total waste. Who needs the Rosetta Stone when we can just translate to English and throw the original away? That's certainly efficient, and will have no detrimental effects on our understanding of history. Maybe we can convert all records of human learning and knowledge into tweets or lolspeak and burn all original texts, no point in trying to justify the impracticality of maintaining anything that isn't current or faddish.
On a related note, I was involved in an exhibition that featured some work by Nam June Paik, the video artist-- the curator had to dig up a laserdisc player for the show since that's how his work was originally archived. It was a PITA, but that's how his estate wanted it... to preserve the "original" video.