Emulation as archive and archival practice

With some alarm, Henry Lowood et al describe the looming issue of digital game preservation—posing the question, "What if we do nothing," they argue de facto that we are, in fact, doing nothing. I argue that digital gaming industry and culture is organized around a logic of supersession; in the words of James Newman, "the next game is the best game." In this milieu, the practice of game emulation reclaims and relocates the gaming archive. Emulation is legally ambiguous and contingent on evading corporate notice; games are distributed freely through back channels. Emulated games bear the trace of their pirated nature - as a preservation and reproductive strategy, emulation creates an archive that is both fugitive and ephemeral. In the pseudo-anonymous bittorrent swarm and the ROM site threatened with takedown, the work of digital preservation is conducted without sanction, constantly shifting and endangered.