Like you, I come at these kinds of things from a textual angle, but I think THATcamp is a great opportunity to look at it in a room likely to include many historians.

I think there’s an implicit connection between your tension between preservation and erasure and the idea of the emulation gap. What emulation implies, culturally speaking, is a restorative nostalgia that is undermined by the conditions of its own production. You can’t run Stella (Atari 2600 emulator) on a Channel F, for example.

So one of the more apparent dissonances, in my experience, is that we use software like MESS, which can be a hassle to configure properly, to emulate systems that are on their own naively simple to operate. I have a Vectrex, for example. To operate it, I plug it in, turn it on and play. On the other hand, running it in MESS required finding good copies of the BIOS files and convincing MESS to run in vector mode at a reasonable resolution. The end process, of course, is a simulated vector display (not emulated) so that emulation gap exists as a kind of infinite relation between text and artifact. Consider Stella’s inclusion of CRT-style filtering, for example. That’s a really finely-tuned medial epistemology at work there.

Anyway, the legal ethics of emulation are pretty important, too, especially when we try and bring these things to our students. I’m satisfied, personally, that my use of console BIOS files is well within DMCA and Fair Use, but that satisfaction comes from accepting some personal risk (however minor that might be). I’m significantly less comfortable passing that on to my students. Of course, the legal/ethical questions can make for good class discussion because it raises the stakes on the whole classroom context while narrowing the focus on the technological processes underlying the game itself (which is often my point anyway).

So yeah, let’s talk about emulation this weekend.