Best Practices for Organizing and Maintaining Collections of Game Development Artifacts

Video games have undoubtedly become a major fixture in contemporary culture, and are present in millions of homes across the world; however, these cultural heritage objects have only just begun to be recognized and collected by academic institutions and other cultural heritage organizations. While enabling long-term access to published games is certainly important, consideration must also be given to related information and artifacts‚ such as early drafts, design documents, prototypes, and research notes‚ which are crucial for understanding a game's creation processes and creative intent. Our research seeks to advance our understanding of how to organize and represent archival collections of artifacts related to the development of video games.