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Video Game Preservation: Practices and Approaches
Videogames as a medium represent unique challenges for archivists and curators – a game is both an experience and an object, a work of art and a commercial product, and both a defined and ever-changing object of study and preservation. All of these paradoxes make the preservation of games and game history a space of constant renegotiation and creativity. How do you capture the historical experience of play? How do studios preserve and structure their own design documents? and how can archivists and curators resist the inexorable tide of technological obsolescence and give games an ongoing life after the industry has moved on?
Hear from academics, curators and games archivists about the work around preservation in video games.
About our speakers:
Will Butler is a PhD researcher at Bath Spa University in the School of Design. His research concerns videogame preservation; specifically what role producers and developers of digital media play in the preservation and cultural heritage ecosystem.
Emily Marlow is a creative Curator with a focus on videogames, working most recently as in-house Curator at the National Videogame Museum (NVM) in Sheffield. Emily has worked across the academic, videogame and creative sectors over the last decade, writing for PCGamer, TheGamer and TechRadar, as well as working as Research Assistant for the V&A’s 2018 exhibition ‘Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt’.
Alex Habgood is an Archivist, working to preserve videogames at The Rebellion Group Archives. He is also a PhD researcher at University College London, exploring potential use-cases for archived videogame materials in the UK context.
Chaired by Dr Jack Orchard. Jack is the Content Editor for the Electronic Enlightenment project in the Bodleian Library. In 2019 he completed a PhD on reading practices in eighteenth-century women’s correspondence networks, and has published on digital editing, correspondence, and historical reading practices. More recently he has extended his research into historical game studies and the communication of historical emotions and subjectivities. He currently sits on the editorial board of the Multiplay Network and has published articles in Play the Past and the forthcoming Multiplay collection, Games that Haunt Us.
Join us in Oxford for lunch, talks, and a chance to chat over tea and coffee, or join us on Zoom to hear the talks and panel discussion.
Date:
10 November 2025, 12:30
Venue:
Centre for Digital Scholarship, Weston Library
Speakers:
Alex Habgood (Rebellion Games),
Will Butler (Bath Spa University),
Emily Marlow
Organiser:
Digital Scholarship @Oxford (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address:
digitalscholarship@humanities.ox.ac.uk
Booking required?:
Required
Booking url:
https://digitalscholarship.web.ox.ac.uk/event/video-games-archives-and-preservation
Cost:
Free
Audience:
Public
Editor:
Katharine Dickinson
