Jerome McDonough is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds a Ph.D. in Library and Information Studies from the University of California at Berkeley, and has been actively involved in the use of markup languages for library applications for the past decade. His current research focuses on metadata and digital preservation.
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of
English at the University of Maryland, Associate Director of the
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH, an applied
thinktank for the digital humanities), and Director of Digital Cultures
and Creativity, a new living/learning
program in the Honors
College. He is also an affiliated faculty member with the Human-Computer
Interaction Lab at Maryland, a Vice President of the Electronic
Literature Organization. His first book,
Doug Reside is associate director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland in College Park. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Kentucky and undergraduate degrees in English and Computer Science from Truman State University. In addition to Preserving Virtual Worlds, his current projects include Music Theatre Online, the Open Annotation Collaboration, and the Text Image Linking Environment.
Neil Fraistat is Professor of English and Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. He is a founder and general editor of the Romantic Circles Website, the Co-Chair of centerNet, and he has published widely on the subjects of Romanticism, Textual Studies, and Digital Humanities in various articles and in the eight books he has authored or edited. He is currently preparing for the press The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship and Volume III of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Fraistat has been awarded the Society for Textual Scholarship's biennial Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize, the Keats-Shelley Association Prize, honorable mention for the Modern Language Association's biennial Distinguished Scholarly Edition Prize, and the Keats-Shelly Association's Distinguished Scholar Award.
Dennis G. Jerz is Associate Professor of English — New Media Journalism at Seton Hill University in southwestern Pennsylvania. His publications include
Adventurein Code and in Kentucky
This is the source
Humanities scholars and librarians both confront questions regarding the boundaries of texts and the relationships between various editions, translations and adaptations. The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) Final Report from the International Federation of Library Associations has provided the library community with a model for addressing these questions in the bibliographic systems they create. The Preserving Virtual Worlds project has been investigating FRBR's potential as a model for the description of computer games and interactive fiction. While FRBR provides an attractive theoretical model, the complexity of computer games as works makes its application to such software creations problematic in practice.
Computer games do not possess the clear boundaries of a physical artifact such as a book.
Humanities scholars have continually confronted questions regarding the boundaries of the texts that they study and the complex inter-relationships that can exist among various editions, printings, translations, and adaptations — in short, the versions — of a work. While librarians have long recognized the distinction between a work as an intellectual creation and its embodiment within a particular physical form (and the need to adequately describe both), the publication of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records Final Report by the IFLA Study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) marked a pronounced increase in the level of attention that the library community has devoted to these issues. FRBR proposed a formal model for bibliographic description that recognizes four classes of entities as implicated in descriptive practice: Works (unique intellectual or artistic creations), Expressions (the realization of Works), Manifestations (the physical embodiment of particular Expressions), and Items (single exemplars of a Manifestation). Attributes commonly found in bibliographic description, such as publisher or title, are bound in the FRBR model to one of these four entities.
In the decade since the Final Report was issued, a tremendous amount of
discussion has occurred regarding the interpretation of FRBR and its appropriate
application within bibliographic systems. At the same time, there has been
almost no cross-communication between humanities scholars engaged in the kind of
work described above (textual studies,
as it is called) and library
specialists. In fact, discussions of distinctions between various ontological
states occupied by a textual object well predate the genteel deliberations of
textual scholars and IFLA study groups alike. [W]hen
composition begins,
wrote inspiration is already on the decline, and the most
glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a
feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.
These
conceptions have typically been recast as the author’s intentions
by
20th-century editors seeking to adjudicate between different versions of a poem
or novel by appealing to their ability to intuit what the author would have
wished, could he or she only be given the opportunity to declare it once and for
all. The so-called eclectic editions that resulted — standardized texts that
were in fact composites of any number of multiple, surviving documentary
instances of the work — also gave rise to an elaborate philosophical framework
which is perhaps most clearly articulated by Photocopying a manuscript book or a printed book
creates a new document, the latest in the series of attempted
reproductions of the work its text represents...
Within the world of traditional manuscripts and print publications, the
relationships between the various versions of a particular text are already
extraordinarily complicated; applying these existing categories to new forms of
creative electronic texts (including interactive fiction and computer games)
makes these relationships become even more vexing and difficult to describe than
we had anticipated. Because each individual or subsequent encounter with the
same interactive work can generate different outputs, the adequacy of
traditional descriptive models applied by librarians to enable scholars' access
to textual materials needs to be carefully examined. From the scholar's (or
teacher's) perspective, even mundane activities such as a textual citation or
assigning students a particular passage to read become problematic. Moreover,
even the simplest electronic text
is in fact a composite of many
different symbolic layers, from microscopic traces on physical storage media up
through machine code, higher-level languages, and finally the visible characters
one actually reads on a screen. Of course without the kind of preservation that
comes from recognition of such creations as part of our late 20th-century
cultural heritage, any such issues will be rendered moot for future generations
since the work will not survive in any accessible or recoverable form.
The Rochester Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Maryland are currently investigating the preservation of computers games and interactive fiction. Sponsored under the Library of Congress’ National Digital Information Infrastructure for Preservation Program (NDIIPP), this project seeks to identify the specific difficulties in the preservation of computer games and interactive fiction that distinguish them from other forms of digital information we wish to preserve, to develop metadata and packaging practices to allow us to manage the long-term preservation of these digital materials in a manner consistent with the Open Archival Information System Reference Model, and to test those practices via ingest of computer games and interactive fiction into a set of functioning digital repositories.
The project employs a case set methodology, focusing on a limited number of
computer games and works of interactive fiction chosen to highlight a variety of
potentially problematic issues. The works were intentionally chosen to represent
a variety of different periods in computer history, different computing
platforms, different styles of artistic work, and different intellectual
property issues. Works within our case set include
Spacewar! — The first graphical computer game,
Spacewar! is a space combat simulation based
on E. E. Doc
Smith's ADVENTURE — One of the most influential
interactive fiction works, ADVENTURE was created by Will Crowther at BBN
Planet in 1976 and expanded upon by Don Woods at Stanford. The
availability of the game's source code on the early Arpanet has led to
its being modified by a number of individuals to add new puzzles, traps
and monsters, and to it being ported to innumberable different
programming languages and operating systems.Star Raiders — Originally published by Atari
for the Atari 400 and 800 computers, a modified version of Star Raiders would become one of the most popular
games for the Atari 2600 game console and be ported to the Atari 5200
and Atari ST machines, with a relatively unsuccessful sequel, Star Raiders II, released in 1986.Mystery House — Created by Roberta and Ken
Williams in 1980 for the company which would later be named Sierra
Online, this is the first interactive fiction work to employ computer
graphics. A binary executable version of the original game for the Apple
II system was put into the public domain in the late 1980s, but the
apparent loss of any source code for the game limited development of
derivative versions, until the Mystery House Taken
Over project produced and released a reverse engineered version
of the game in 2005.Mindwheel — Published by Brøderbund Software in
1984, this work by Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky is also notable for being
a compound analog/digital work, containing both a print novella and the
game software.Doom — Published by iD Software in 1993, this
game came to define the first-person shooter style of game,
revolutionized 3D graphic display technology for games, and as a result
of both the game's design and iD Software's decision to open source the
original game engine led to a whole new Internet culture of game
customization and modification. Like ADVENTURE, Doom has been ported to
a large number of different operating systems, including OS X, all
versions of Windows, Linux and Android, as well as various console
platforms including the Atari Jaguar, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 64,
Sega Saturn, Sony Playstation and Nintendo SNES systems.Second Life — Launched in 2003 by Linden Lab,
this has become one of the most popular of the non-role playing game
multiuser virtual worlds. Our project is focusing on the preservation of
several islands contained within Second Life,
including the International Spaceflight Museum and Stanford Humanities
Lab's Hotgates Island. Given that islands in Second Life exhibit
on-going development and change and can be the work of a number of
different individuals, preserving any island in Second Life is more akin
to trying to preserve a collaborative performance art piece while it is
being produced than trying to preserve a data file.
The first phase of our project, which we have recently completed, has examined
the games in this case set to try to identify representative issues they present
for the long-term preservation of computer games and interactive fiction. As a
particular test of existing library practices we have been examining the
application of the FRBR entity-relationship model to computer games and
interactive fiction, including the seminal work ADVENTURE. FRBR, a model
developed primarily to assist in end-user access to library materials may seem
an unusual choice for a project concerned with digital preservation, but as In order to preserve a digital object we must be able
to identify and retrieve all of its digital components
pretty good
practices for the application of FRBR and traditional bibliographic descriptive
practices to this ever-evolving electronic genre.
FRBR is, at first glance, a promising mechanism for representing this twisty
little maze of cultural heritage. It is an entity-relationship model capable of
discriminating among changes to the substance or content
of the work, as
well as its physical embodiment in particular carrier media. In a traditional
FRBR representation, one might start with the work that is
The quartet of Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item form what the FRBR report
calls the Group 1 entities. Group 2 entities are Person
and Corporate
Body,
the entities which create Works, realize Expressions, produce
Manifestations, and own Items. Group 3 entities define different types of
subject matter with which a Work may be concerned, and include Concept,
Object,
Event
and Place.
The FRBR report also notes that Group 1 and Group
2 entities may serve as the subject matter of Works as well.
In addition to defining the basic relationships between Group 1 entities
discussed above, the FRBR report also describes a number of other possible
relationships that may exist between Group 1 entities. Table 1 shows the various possible relationships between the Group 1
entities enumerated in the FRBR report. A number of these relationships can be
of use when describing video games and interactive fiction. If we consider a
game franchise such as the Doom series from iD software, for example, we can
easily find examples of successor relationships between Works (the original Doom
is succeded by Doom II), supplemental relationships (the original Doom is
supplemented by the Doom Wiki (http://doom.wikia.com), and even transformation relationships (the
original game Doom was transformed into the movie version starring Dwayne The
Rock
Johnson). Other Group 1 relationships are also easy to identify in
the case of Doom. The original shareware expression of Doom has a revision
relationship to the full, registered commercial expression (with the full
registered version containing two weapons, the plasma gun and the BFG9000, not
available in the shareware version). An expression-to-expression translation
relationship also exists between the source code implementation of the original
Doom game engine and a binary executable version of the game engine compiled
from that source code for a Windows '95 machine. The DVD manifestation of the
movie Doom has an alternate manifestation, the Blu-ray manifestation. The item
consisting of our library's copy of Doom 3 for the PC platform has two other
items as parts: a CD-ROM containing the software, and a print manual.
At the same time that FRBR seems to promise a useful and detailed modeled for
description of library materials, including games, certain long-standing
challenges still exist even with more traditional applications of the FRBR
model. For example, there is no formal consensus on how much of the work has to
change before a new expression is declared. Catalogers (for FRBR is primarily a
cataloger's tool) are asked to rely upon common sense, community practice, and
other heuristics. Catalogers are all too aware, however, that even textual
materials within libraries can raise complex issues with respect to the question
of how different
a particular text must be to qualify as a new
edition.
In the case of an electronic object, the complications proliferate almost
exponentially Work,
a particular
instance of the game (the last version modified by Don Woods, for instance)
should be the Expression,
a particular file with a unique MD5 hash should
be the Manifestation,
and an individual copy of that file (perhaps on a
Commodore 64 664 Block disk) would be the Item.
But what if the text read
by the reader is exactly the same, but the underlying code is different? These
variants might be simple (a comment added to the FORTRAN source code),
peripheral (such as the ability to recognize x
as a synonym for the
command examine
), or very large (a port of the code from FORTRAN to
BASIC). Should these code level variants be considered different expressions? To
further complicate matters, what if the FORTRAN code were exactly the same but
compiled to two different chips? For example, an IBM mainframe and a Commodore
64 might both have a FORTRAN compiler, but the two compilers will interpret the
FORTRAN to a different set of machine instructions. It might also be the case
that two FORTRAN compilers designed by different programmers will generate
slightly different machine language. Even the same compiler might generate
slightly different machine code from a single source code file depending on the
options with which it is invoked. Should these compiled executables, different
in their binary structure but based on the same FORTRAN code, represent
different Manifestations
or different Expressions
?
Finally, even two files with exactly the same MD5 signature participate in a
larger software environment at runtime. The drivers that run the display
interface, the keyboard, the memory, and the disk drives arguably become part of
ADVENTURE when the user is playing the game. For instance, the experience of
playing the game using the 6507 chip in a Commodore 64 hooked up to a black and
white television may be different than the experience of playing the game on the
same chip in a Commodore SX64 (the all-in-one machine some felt fit to call
portable
). Should the software environment on which the binary is
executed be a part of the classification scheme at all? Would playing the game
on a video monitor (which displays only a fixed number of lines at a time)
provide a substantially different experience from a session with the same game
played on a Teletype (which saves the output indefinitely on paper)?
We have applied the FRBR model to several different and specific instances of ADVENTURE: the source and data files for the original Don Woods version, as well as two early variants produced by Will Crowther, retrieved on April 27, 2008 at 6:01 pm from Dennis Jerz’s server (http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/crowther/), as well as the DOS Windows executable of these files edited to compile under GNU g77, a free FORTRAN compiler (http://www.russotto.net/%7Erussotto/ADVENT/). This work will be presented in the course of the paper, together with rationale and discussion in the context of the kind of issues enumerated above. We will also discuss the significance of this work for the broader digital humanities community, insofar as it represents the intersection of library and information science, textual studies, and software forensics.
As more and more libraries and repositories begin the process of collecting born-digital objects, they will invariably encounter material that transcends the boundaries of documents, email, and other more or less conventional forms of electronic records. ADVENTURE, as both a working computer program and as a virtual world, as well as an artifact with widespread popular interest, is a harbinger of the kind of content which increasingly needs to be accessioned, cataloged, and described. FRBR represents the library community’s best effort to date to distinguish between different versions and editions of a work. We believe the work discussed represents an important test case for FRBR's applicability to complex born-digital objects.
Will Crowther originally developed the game ADVENTURE in the mid-1970s while he
was working at BBN, the company responsible for launching the ARPANET. The game
focuses on the exploration of a cave complex in which a variety of puzzles and
hostile antagonists (including an axe-throwing dwarf) must be defeated. Crowther
made a compiled version of the game available through his BBN account, and a
copy ended up in the hands of Don Woods, a graduate student at Stanford
University. Woods contacted Crowther and obtained from him a copy of the game's
FORTRAN source code, which he modified to change the game play, adding several
additional fantasy elements. The game, as modified by Woods, was widely
distributed on the ARPANET and was a significant influence on early hacker
culture, with phrases from the game such as
The game's wide distribution and immense popularity in the early days of
networked computing, along with the ready availability of the FORTRAN source
code modified by Woods, led to a proliferation of new versions of the game as
programmers ported it to new languages, new operating platforms, and modified
its structure to add new puzzles, monsters and territory. Figure 1 shows a very partial family tree for
ADVENTURE
This typology of changes highlights one of the unique features about interactive
fiction works such as ADVENTURE as textual artifacts, and one of the
difficulties they present for those trying to describe them within the bounds of
the FRBR model. A port of a game from one language to another involves a
significant amount of creative, intellectual effort and results in the creation
of a source code text
which, while implementing similar algorithms, may
otherwise bear very little resemblance to the original source code on which it
is based. Significant variations in the source code, however, may result in no
visible changes in the game play presented by a compiled executable of the new
code. If we consider the transition from the original Don Woods FORTRAN version
to the Gillogly C language version as programmers looking at the source code, we
see enough changes to qualify the Gillogly version as not merely a new
expression in the FRBR sense, but in all probability an entirely new work. The
Gillogly version certainly seems to answer to the FRBR criteria that when the modification of a work involves a significant
degree of independent intellectual or artistic effort, the result is
viewed, for the purposes of this study, as a new work
While it is tempting to try to resolve this question through reference to user needs, different users will have very different needs when approaching gaming materials, and those differing needs will have a profound impact on the users' preferred intellectual organization for games. From the point of view of someone interested in playing the game, an executable prepared from the Gillogly source code and one prepared from the Woods code are essentially equivalent and of equal interest. From the point of view of a programmer interested in game programming techniques in the C language, the two could not be more different. From the point of view of a scholar of game history, the two are different, but highly inter-related. Establishing the dividing lines between Group 1 entities in FRBR has always been a somewhat subjective matter, but interactive fiction (and perhaps software generally) highlight the way in which differing and incompatible subjectivities may reside in a library's or archive's patrons.
A closer examination of some of the specific instances of the game ADVENTURE
reveals further complexities for those seeking to apply the FRBR
entity-relationship model to the description of computer games. In our research,
the earliest version of ADVENTURE that we have been able to examine is the
original FORTRAN version created by Will Crowther, consisting of a FORTRAN
source code file which is 727 lines in length, and a separate 733 line data file
containing a dictionary of terms that the game employs to interpret user
commands, a set of textual responses provided by the game in response to user
commands, and the geometry of the virtual world which the player explores. While
the FORTRAN source code file does contain a few comments, these serve only to
describe the operation of the code; there is nothing resembling bibliographic
metadata in either file, with no authorship or date of creation provided. The
files in question were retrieved by Dennis Jerz with Don Woods' cooperation from
a backup tape of Don Woods' student account at Stanford University, and are
named advf4.77-03-11 and advdat.77-03-11. Research by
The differences between Don Wood's version, dated March 23, 1977, and the one dated March 31, 1977, were of about the same magnitude, with 14 lines of code in the March 23rd version modified in the March 31st version, and one line in the March 23rd version deleted. The differences between the original game data file, advdat.77-03-11, and the modified version by Woods, advdat.77-03-31, have no impact on game play whatsoever and consist solely of changes in numeric identifiers assigned to twelve terms contained in the game's dictionary.
The files retrieved from Don Wood's old student account can be viewed as comprising three different versions of the game ADVENTURE. The first is the original Will Crowther version consisting of the two files advf4.77-03-11 and advdat.77-03-11. The second is a version with the FORTRAN source code file advf4.77-03-23 modified by Don Woods but with the original Will Crowther data file of advdat.77-03-11. The third is a further modification by Woods consisting of his FORTRAN source code file named advf4.77-03-31 and his modified data file advdat.77-03-31. However, while there are modifications to source code or data file (or both) for all three of these versions, they are all essentially identical in terms of game play. While Don Woods would later further modify ADVENTURE to add new monsters and puzzles, these early changes do not include those later changes to the game. A player engaged with executable programs prepared from these three source code versions would insist that they are, in fact, all the same.
Given that all three versions present an identical text
to the game
player, and substantially similar text to an individual reading the source code,
an analysis of these three instances might conclude that all represent the same
FRBR work. However, the issue of FRBR expression is somewhat more complicated.
Certainly there are changes in the source code and data files between the three
versions, and given their relative historic importance within game studies,
recognizing them as distinct expressions seems reasonable. However, each of the
versions, if compiled and played, would be indistinguishable from an end user
perspective. Or at the very least, the game play would be indistinguishable.
From the perspective of a user interested in experiencing the actual original
game, these many instances are effectively a single expression.
Our discussion so far has somewhat glossed over the fact that our hypothetical
game-playing end user would not be interacting with a source code file, but an
executable file created from a FORTRAN source code file using a compiler. FRBR
states that Inasmuch as the form of expression is an inherent
characteristic of the expression, any change in form (e.g., from
alpha-numeric notation to spoken word) results in a new expression.
Similarly, changes in the intellectual conventions or instruments that
are employed to express a work (e.g., translation from one language to
another) result in the production of a new expression
This gives us at least some basis for considering the three versions of the game as unique and separate expressions, even when viewed from the game player's perspective. The executables compiled from the three different versions of source code will not be identical. They will contain minor variations in their structure and file size that will be visible to an end user should they choose to investigate it. On that basis, an argument could be made that each version of the game constitutes a unique expression, even from the point of view of the game player, and that if we combine the five original files in our possession with compiled executables of the source code files, we have six expressions of a single work, as seen in Figure 2. But at some level, this does not seem a very satisfactory result. Users interested in game play will be more likely to consider the actual interactive experience provided by the software to constitute the basis for determining whether something is a unique expression, not its size in bytes or the internal structure of the op codes contained within an executable file.
Unfortunately, an alternative in which we claim that all three source code
expressions produce a single executable expression with three different
manifestations is difficult to model accurately in existing bibliographic
systems. It also runs afoul of the relationships established between Group 1
entities in the FRBR model. Figure 3 demonstrates
the problem. It is possible to establish a set of Group 1 entities for the
versions of ADVENTURE in our possession that includes a single FRBR Expression
for the executable versions of the program, but in order to express the
relationship between the source code versions and their executable derivatives
we need to state that a particular source code manifestation has a translated
form in a particular executable manifestation (as noted by the dashed arrows).
While this may be a relatively accurate assertion, the FRBR model as expressed
in
The compilation of the three different source files here raises other questions
with respect to the nature of games and their description within a FRBR
framework. Crowther wrote the original ADVENTURE FORTRAN source code file to
compile on a DEC PDP-10 running the TOPS operating system. It includes a call to
an external function, IFILE, used to read in the data file (which was to be
named TEXT
). The IFILE function was not part of the FORTRAN language used
on the TOPS-10 and TOPS-20 operating systems
As the source code defines a variety of other subroutines within itself, we can
assume that IFILE was probably part of an external library of FORTRAN functions
in use on the PDP-10 at the time the game was written.
Computer games do not possess the clear boundaries of a physical artifact such as
a book. Games (and all software) are embedded in and intertwined with a
technological environment that includes compilers, linkers, code libraries,
operating system facilities, and various kinds of hardware. A functioning copy
of a computer game requires not only the game software but also a complete
computer system. When we set out to describe a game within the FRBR framework,
we immediately confront the question of what constitutes the game,
and
that question can be difficult to answer. The case of ADVENTURE reveals that
some of the complexity involved in answering that question is due to the fact
that the game is a compound work containing a variety of subsidiary FRBR works,
authored by different people at different times for different purposes. The
IFILE library function presumably was not written to be part of ADVENTURE; it
was written to provide file I/O services for any program. But it formed an
essential component of the game, which could not be compiled (or played) without
it.
The FRBR framework allows for these types of whole/part relationships at both the Work and Expression levels, and modeling computer games using these types of FRBR relationships actually allows us to assert a variety of relationships between different entities that might be of interest to end users (see the transformation and translation relationships in Figure 4). However, practical application of FRBR in the world of computer games could easily prove to be a tremendous burden on those describing games. A complete description of a computer game within the FRBR framework would need to identify all of the various subsidiary Works constituting the games' technological components, whether created by the game author or not, delineate the relationships between all of the different components, and provide some level of intellectual description for each. For a game like ADVENTURE, defined by one source code file and one data file (at least if we limit ourselves to a single instance), identifying implicated components such as compile-time libraries might be slightly onerous but on its face does not appear an impossible task. But in more modern games, containing thousands of files created by dozens or hundreds of individuals working at a variety of different companies and distributed as parts of different products, complete description within a FRBR framework would be an insurmountable burden on current cataloging resources.
Unfortunately, there are several credible use scenarios for description that require this fine level of detail. For those concerned with preservation of computer games, the need for some level of description down to the individual computer file level is a real concern. Librarians and archivists concerned with copyright issues may need to be aware that the putative creator of a game may not be the only creative agent involved in production of game software and that subcomponents of a game may have differing intellectual property status. Scholars studying games may be quite interested in patterns of use and reuse of game components among both game companies and game players, and without fine-grained description, investigating these issues will become much more difficult.
The description of computer games within the FRBR model provides a reasonably
compelling justification for the notion of a Superwork, a potential addition to
the set of FRBR entities that would collocate multiple Works under a single
descriptive banner for the purposes of retrieval. As Figure 1 makes clear, for a game like ADVENTURE, the number of
instances of a game which can be said to be, in Svenonius's terms, "similar by
virtue of emanating from the ur-work" modding
Modding
refers to taking an
existing game and making modifications to it to alter game play in some
fashion. The game Doom, like ADVENTURE, kept the data which was displayed to
the user in a separate file. In the case of DOOM, this data file (known as a
WAD file) was reverse engineered by the gamer community, which then started
modifying it to add new monsters, game levels, weapons and other
changes.
One final comment should be made about the FRBR model and its application to
computer games and interactive fiction. While the focus of our analysis has
concentrated on description of games within the framework of the FRBR Group 1
entities, the fact that we are working on a project involving software
preservation has meant that we have had to devote a certain amount of attention
to intellectual property issues. It is unfortunate, in our view, that the FRBR
model does not mention intellectual property rights in discussing the
relationships that exist between Group 1 and Group 2 entities (person, corporate
body). Given the examples set forth in the IFLA Study Group's report, e.g.,
it would appear that copyright can adhere at the level of both the Work
and the Expression. If not, it would be difficult to account for cases such as a
recorded song that possesses both a recording performance production copyright
and a creator copyright within the FRBR framework. Greater clarity on how the
IFLA Study Group conceived of intellectual property rights fitting into their
model would be of great benefit to those trying to work on games. While
ADVENTURE is not a particularly problematic game with respect to this issue,
having passed into the public domain, modern games can have extremely
complicated rights situations, in which music with separate performance and
creator copyrights are included in a game copyrighted by yet another
entity.W1 Franz Schubert's Trout quintete1 the composer's
notated musice2 the musical work
as performed by Rosina Lhevinne, piano, Stuart Sankey, double bass, and
members of the Juilliard String Quartetowned by
is described within the IFLA Study Group
report as including either ownership or custody of an item, it is highly
unusual to find a computer game (or other software) which a purchaser will
actually own. They instead obtain a license to possess and use the software.
The use of owned by
as a relationship term could be seen as
misleading to users if presented in the context of software
collections.
Our research has found that the FRBR model provides a mechanism capable of describing some of the web of relationships that exist between games and between the component parts that make up a game. This is impressive given the sheer extent of the component parts and the intricacy of their relationships in any modern computer game or interactive fiction work. However, there are a variety of both practical and theoretical problems that must be addressed when seeking to apply FRBR in the world of computer games and interactive fiction. While the practical issues may be susceptible to technological solutions, the theoretical ones will require further development of the FRBR standard if it is to realize its promise as a descriptive mechanism for these types of interactive art.
The relationships between Group 1 entities in the FRBR model, when applied to computer games such as DOOM, tend to favor descriptions composed of a number of different Works, rather than a number of different Expressions under the banner of a single Work. This may make it more difficult for searchers to collocate variants of a game under a single banner. While asserting relationships between Works (particularly successor relationships) may alleviate this problem somewhat, identifying all of the relationships to record may be difficult and time-consuming. Game aficionados may be willing to invest the time and energy in deciphering relationships between instances of a game such as those shown in Figure 1, but asking catalogers to engage in this level of detail may be unrealistic.
The multiplication of Work-level entities in the description of games and interactive fiction is further promoted by the need to describe the various component pieces of games individually. This in turn leads to a need to assert even more whole/part relationships between Expression-level entities. Each of these constituent parts can obviously come with their own set of additional Work-to-Work relationship issues, primarily to indicate succession relationships.
All of the preceding makes practical application of the FRBR model to computer games a time-consuming and expensive enterprise. This is not necessarily a fault of FRBR; the reality is that detailed description of games, particularly within a preservation environment, is time-consuming and expensive. Our work has been carried out within a context of ensuring the preservation of games in the long-term, and that requires fairly detailed description of the software, including identification of its component parts and dependencies on other software and hardware. FRBR provides a theoretical framework that can be applied to this task, but it cannot in itself lessen the costs associated with such detailed description.
Our work with ADVENTURE and other computer games, however, does highlight two
deficiencies in the FRBR entity-relationship model. The first problem arises
from the complex tangle of derivative works associated with any particular game.
As Bibliographic families can be as complex as human,
genealogical families. Many generations can exist on the same plane at
the same time
ADVENTURE and its passages also offer a compelling demonstration of the extent to which complex born-digital objects, especially those that are popular, historically significant, or cherished by communities of enthusiasts, will demand other kinds of expertise not likely to reside within a typical cataloging department. Our work applying FRBR to ADVENTURE required an advanced knowledge of antiquarian computers, systems, and programming languages, as well as an appreciation for how the game has been ported and reworked by diverse constituencies over the course of several decades. Digital humanities is well suited to serve as a disciplinary rubric for uniting these disparate kinds of interests and expertise, and we believe that the bibliography of complex electronic objects must become an increasingly significant aspect of activity for those who consider themselves its practitioners.