[Ken McAllister speaking]: So the archive, the Learning Games Initiative Research Archive, is a collection that … is indiscriminate; we collect everything related to what we call a computer game complex. That is, not just video games and not just video game consoles, but also books about games. And those books could be academic, or they could be things like strategy guides, trade publications--so the newsletters that arcade managers used to circulate amongst each other to help each other, you know, fix the Ms. Pac-Man machine--correspondence and concept art from game designers. Just about everything; we’ll take anything in the archive. And the reason that we have that, and the reason that it all circulates, by the way: we send things to people all over the world. In fact, we’ll send anything from the archive to anyone in the world and do so for free or as close to free as we can reasonably manage. But the reason we do that is again because it is difficult to be in game studies, unlike being say, in literature, where, you know, these days you can get almost, maybe not almost any book, but you can get many, many books digitally and if not digitally through interlibrary loan or something like that. With games, you can't really do that. And some games and games systems are quite expensive. Things like the trade journals, they’re just really difficult to track down because they were never meant to be kept. Indeed, many of the things in the archive were never meant to be kept. Games are a disposable culture. And so for us, we have this concept called “preservation through use.” This is how we justify letting people check anything out of the archive. Unlike more conventional special collections where it's white gloves and the book is put on a stand and you use a wand to turn page, which is really important work; we’re not suggesting our mode replace that one. But for us, games are about interactivity and so we feel like yeah, you have to be able to interact with them and that includes handling just the cartridge. Not even just playing the cartridge but you need to handle the cartridge, feeling its heft, feeling how it feels to put it into the machine, you know, and all those things are part of the practices that constitute game culture and therefore games studies. So the archive is really about helping people get as many of those experiences as possible.
[Judd Ruggill speaking]: I just want to add … Ken mentioned, and did a great job talking about the various kinds of publications, and in addition to the games and game systems, there are other artifacts as well. There’s a lot of handicrafts, so art … there are toys, there are food, there are commemorative items, T-shirts, hats, belt buckles, themed pencils, light … handgun lights, light switch plate covers. We pretty much tried to collect anything game related. The idea is that we’re never … We’re not … we’re obviously never going to collect everything. You can’t. Even in these small collections of things, your small numbers of items, you’re never going to collect an entire set of something. But what we try to do is not to collect everything, but just to collect enough things and enough different things to give people a sense of the breadth of the game complex because it is really quite impressive and it becomes clear when you step into the archive. You see just … you see all of these things, from maybe a Pac Man embossed theme belt buckle from 1979, for example, or a handmade Atari cartridge … or uh, controller, excuse me, with Bake-lite buttons and it’s made out of sheet metal. You get a sense of the astonishing breadth and really complexity of games in cultures, so that’s what we’re really hoping the archive does.