Last week, Dr Jimmy, Tom from the NMM and myself travelled down to Kew, having been invited to deliver a talk there about our work on the National Videogame Archive, which is one of the core projects we’re working on at present. The whole thing was organised by the brilliant people at the National Archives, which is an awe inspiring operation the scope of which I truly didn’t appreciate. Seriously, folks – you should go there. I always had a sense that there must be a National Archive, but actually visiting it is both surprising – in the extent of its scale and accessibility, humbling in how it brings our efforts into perspective and utterly terrifying when considering that our efforts are part of that ecosystem. It’s one thing to talk about videogames as part of our cultural heritage (not that we do a lot of that at all, actually) but another entirely to begin to visualise them as part of a continuum of history.
The talk was an adaptation of the Save the Videogame presentation we’d done in Manchester, mostly with the jokes removed and delivered wearing suits. As with all talks about games, the access points are seldom shared across the whole audience. One corner of the room delivered moans of warm nostalgia when Elite was mentioned, but remained coldly silent about Horace goes Skiing – happily that kind of segmentation serves to illustrate one of our key points.
Anyway, more on the ongoing campaign very soon – coupled with our steady realisation of the magnitude of the task. For now, a gentle image of myself and Dr J outside the archive.