Play It Again

Flinders University Chief Investigators

Dr Melanie Swalwell

Dr Denise DeVries

 

Project Partners

Associate Professor Angela Ndalianis

Dr Ian Welch

Dr Stuart Marshall

Mrs Susan Corbett

Mr Andreas Lange

Dr Winfred Bergmeyer

 

Partner Organisations

• Australian Centre for the Moving Image
• Berlin Computerspiele Museum
• The New Zealand Film Archive
• Victoria University of Wellington

 

Project links

Website - http://playitagainproject.org/

 

Blog - http://blogs.flinders.edu.au/play-it-again/

 

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/playitagainproject

 

Twitter - @AgainPlay

 

The Play It Again project was awarded ARC Linkage funding announced in November 2011 (Play It Again: Creating a Playable History of Australasian Digital Games, for Industry, Community and Research Purposes).  Play it Again is a game history/preservation project focused on Australian and New Zealand digital games of the 1980s and has dual cultural and technical ‘streams’. 

 

The digital future has a history and it needs remembering. Vital human and technical data is in danger of being lost. In the 1980s, the Australian and New Zealand software industries were remarkably active in the production of digital games and yet little is known about this chapter in the history of the moving image. In collaboration with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and other institutional partners, the Play it Again project will address the need for institutional collecting and preservation solutions; document and preserve the histories of early games and gaming cultures; and create software tools to facilitate both the playing of early games now, and the delivery of benefits to research, industry and community into the future. The project aims to both uncover the history of local production and consumption of local games, and develop techniques for preserving the complex digital artefacts that games are.