New York SBDC Research Network

Here's a fun, short article from this month's issue of The Atlantic . Titled " Pac Rat ," it describes the efforts being made in certain circles of higher education to save the source code of video games that have long since gone out of favor (and whose intellectual property may no longer be in force). It also speaks to the issues behind technological preservation in general - with so much digitization in force, what becomes of data in general? Can it remain in a non-hard-copy ephemeral state forever? What becomes of the 1,000+ digital photos on my hard drive at home? How about this blog post? I'm fascinated by the judgments that will be made in the not-so-distant future, which reveals what amongst the deluge will live on, and what will fade away.

I have to give the video game industry some credit – they are willing to provide information about their industry on the web. It’s a real pleasure to find associations & websites that offer substantive reports, factsheets and articles, even to non-members. So here are a just a few good sites for video game design & sales: International Game Developers Association http://www.igda.org/ Indie Games http://www.indiegames.com Gamasutra: The Art & Business of Making Games http://www.gamasutra.com/ Entertainment Software Association: http://www.theesa.com