Museums of Failure: A project about videogame preservation, fan culture, and failed objects
This is one of the projects I’ve been working on for the past few years, together with Marçal Mora-Cantallops and Ignacio Bergillos.
What is it about?
Game preservation is key for the development of gaming cultures and the acknowledgement of games as (sub)culture(s). Agents involved in it approach the issue with different motivations and purposes, but there is no widespread agreement on the criteria for measuring a game’s worth. Within that context, fan communities stand out as leading environments that not only conduct curation practices but also negotiate the cultural, social, and economic value of video games. Particularly, certain fandoms seem to be attracted to games and systems that challenge the very idea of a classic: failed games and systems, objects that are often considered “bad”, unreleased, unlicensed, or “flopped” (those that failed commercially), often forgotten and buried by the official history. Why do some fans become so interested and focused in such failures and how are they preserving them?
Why am I working on this?
I may be rationalising this in hindsight (this didn’t start as a project in any sense, and has and still is being shaped by common interests, lucky coincidences, and an on-going conversation among the three participants), but here’s the reasoning: 1) preservation is an urgent issue of gaming culture, 2) collecting is a messy affair, with both internal — among collectors — and external — between collectors and the industry, the specialised press, and so on— tensions, 3) even if we don’t have a clearly stated “gaming canon”, we nonetheless go back to the same works (be it in academia, criticism, or fandom, and there’s a noticeable overlap between these fields) all the time.
Moreover, I’ve been long fascinated by failure as a concept and how we discuss it in our cultures: we either ignore, laugh at it — considering it kitsch, camp, paracinema, trash…— , or make it to be part of the myth of the “entrepeneur’s journey”, a stepping stone to success stories. By studying how fans place value in what are widely considered to be “failure stories”, and how they work to save it, even by clashing with their originating cultural industries, we have a chance to explore all this.
What have we done so far?
· “Museums of Failure: Fans as curators of ‘bad’, unreleased, and ‘flopped’ videogames”
This first text was published last year, in 2017, as a chapter within the volume Fans and Videogames: Histories, Fandom, Archives, edited by Melanie Swalwell, Helen Stuckey, and Angela Ndalianis, and published by Routledge.
The same year, Marçal and me included a chapter in the book Productos transmediáticos e imaginario cultural, edited by Patricia Trapero Llobera and María Isabel Escalas Ruiz, and published by Edicions UIB. We used the same theory and approach to explore a fourth type of “failure” (or blind spot), unlicensed games. For this, we analysed the case of Gluk Video, a Spanish company that imported and adapted Taiwanese games by bypassing the NES10 lockout chip.
· “Fan preservation of ‘flopped’ games and systems: The case of the Virtual Boy in Spain”
In the last paper in this project, Marçal and Ignacio interviewed the biggest Virtual Boy collector in Spain and studied the system’s community for this research included in the volume 10.2 of the Catalan Journal of Communication and Cultural Studies; a special issue titled Game Studies today (I was a guest editor for this volume, together with Antonio Planells and Jan Gonzalo).
Anything else?
· Beyond these publications, I was invited to give a talk on the topic at the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB) during the Transmedia Week 2016, titled “¿Desea guardar el mundo? De cómo la industria y los fans preservan el texto, la plataforma y los paratextos de videojuegos transmedia”.
· In 2017, I was invited to the XVII Ubi Sunt? Multidisciplinar Conference: Videogames and History, organised by the University of Cádiz. My conference was called “Guardar la historia del videojuego. Fans, preservación e historia del medio”.
· During this past Foundations of Digital Games conference, in Malmö, Marçal participated in a workshop called Beyond playable games: The role of the player in the writing of game history — a workshop on digital games in museums. Our talk was titled “Fandoms of Flopdom and Museums of Failure: Seeking value in “bad”, unreleased, “flopped”, and
unlicensed video games”, and we used it to explain the project and add new lines for future research.
What’s next?
We keep an eye on fan communities and failed games, systems, and technologies, which we are still cataloguing and researching. We have another paper at an early stage and have worked on the concept and table of contents of a couple of books: one aimed at a scholarly audience, putting together everything we’ve done and filling in the gaps, and another one with a more accessible catalog for the general reader.
In any case, it’s still early to say — as I said before, we never intended this to be a project and have marvelled at how easily it has grown and transformed into academic production. And if we stop here, well, wouldn’t it be fitting to fail at finishing it?
While we work on this, you can also check my published notes on different amateur efforts to preserve failed gaming artifacts in this series:
