Meet the Devs: Cherie Heiberg (2015.04.14)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] Hey guys, I'm here with our archavist archavist Sherry Hyberg. Sherry, how you doing? I'm good. How are you today? I'm pretty good. Thanks for coming on. Oh yes, I'm happy to be here. So, you started very recently. How did you kind of hear about the game and how did you kind of get your foot in the door? Well, I heard about the game initially just from being on the internet. You know, I was aware of the Kickstarter. I was aware of Chris Robert's career, you know, as as someone who's been a fan of video games all my life. How could I not be aware, you know, um, but I first came on to the game initially because, uh, Will Weisenbomb is one of the writers and he's one of my friends. He's known me since I moved to California a year ago. And he's heard me talk at length about how passionate I am about video

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   games and my how I think that they need to have more respect in the academic and professional world and how they need to be preserved. And he thought, hey, here's someone who has a background in digital preservation. We really need someone to come in and help get confluence in order. And that's how it began. Yeah, Confluence is unwieldy. It is. It's a beast. How's that process been? Well, you know, I've had multiple people come up to me and say, "Oh, you're getting confluence on order. I feel sorry for you." But I really enjoy it personally. I I love having the chance to go over an information system and to hit it with a stick and talk to everybody about what the best way to hit it with that stick is and get it into some kind of semblance of order. So, what was your history? Said, "Did you have a history in like uh digital preservation?" Digital preservation.

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   Yes. Um, I'm a library science master's person. Congratulations. Thank you. From the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I got my degree um in late 2013. Um, where I specialized in archives and records management and digital preservation. And I did my master's paper on preserving video games. Interesting. How what got you started in that? Well, I noticed during the course of my education and my experience with video games that there are very few people out there who are making an effort to preserve video games on a professional level. There have been some institutions that have made good headway like Stanford has a program on physically preserving the games. Uh University of Texas at Austin has an archive and I know there's been some effort at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. But far and wide there hasn't been much professionally done

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   about digital preservation. And as more games become digital and as more games are lost and the only thing that we have is the code, it's the effort to preserve this becomes more and more important. And what my master's paper was really about was building a strategy for preserving digital games based on the practices of communities of players because Yeah. Yeah. Because it seems like a lot of the preservation is almost in like pseudo illegal mini uh thing means where if the you know the means to play the game no longer exists and there's a so you know there's a way to play it online. It's not technically legal or illegal like has that came into question for you at all? Yes. It's sort of a gray area and archavists and librarians are all very interested in towing the line of copyright. you know,

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   it's the only way we can preserve things is to make sure that we respect the copyright that's being held by all the people who made the game. But the early history of video games is very fuzzy. Yeah. You know, there were a lot of studios that sprang up and then disappeared and no one knows who holds the copyright to a particular game because there's no one left to contact. No one knows where they went or even who they were in a lot of cases. Yeah. Where's LGN at? Who knows? Yeah. And so while archavists and librarians and other professional organizations have been trying to figure out where the copyright holders are, communities of game players, just amateur preservationists have come in and said, "Well, I can get this code and I can preserve it just as it is." Yeah. And I can build an emulator so that you can actually play the game without

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   affecting the code. And though no one was trained in archival principles, those are archival principles. They were following them. It's just that's that's what I find so interesting as I look back at like old Turbo Graphics games and you know companies that don't even exist anymore and yeah you can find them online there's an emulator for them but are you you know are you breaking the law a little bit it's it's legal to own it and to like archive it yourself but if you put it out there doesn't that break copyright? It does depending on the game. Like um the games that I was talking about specifically, the ones where no one knows where the copyright holders went. If you can demonstrate to the law that you made a reasonable effort to copy to contact the copyright holder, then you can technically interesting preserve it and put it out there like what the Internet Archive did

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   recently, which I love, by the way. The Internet Archive is awesome. So, shout out for Internet Archive. Internet Archive. They released a bunch of ROMs. And what ROMs are are games that were made from uh cartridge based games, like the chips. Yeah. Yeah. And now they have a bunch of these games out there that no one knows who the copyright holders are and they're just like there. They're available to play or they sought permission from the copyright holders to distribute. Yeah. Because it's spec it's specifically interesting when you go into digital stuff like you were talking about earlier where now uh you know if Yes. a copy of Mar Super Mario Brothers. I have I have a physical copy of it and I can digitize that if I'd like. Yes. But for for example, a game like Braid. Okay. Yeah. There never was a physical Yeah. It's just purely digital. So what

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   if Xbox Live, if you bought an Xbox, Xbox Live goes down? Like where does that thing live? Well, it lives in the possession of everybody who has the code. And if a worstc case scenario, the original code of the game was lost. Mh. And I say worst case scenario as if it doesn't happen often, but it actually does happen quite often. Like when Square Enix lost the original assets for Kingdom Hearts 1. Yeah. Which was that was that was something. It broke my heart. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. It's a wonderful game. They were trying to make an HD release and they lost the original asset, so they basically had to start from scratch. But anyway, so if Braid disappeared, then the people who held digital copies of the game somehow, maybe they made backups or maybe they have it downloaded onto the hard drive

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   of their Xbox, these are the people that we would have to turn to to try to rescue it. Yeah, that's interesting. You would hope Jonathan Blow would have multiple multiple backups. Yes, I think he probably does. Seems like a guy who would. So, let's move into more Star Citizen. Like, what about the game? game was it that interested you? I know you love video games in general, but was it is it the the promise of Chris Roberts or was it more the minutia of it? Love space. I love space sims. Um I love Mass Effect. That's one of my favorite games. Me, too. I just love the idea of having a living universe where I can just go and explore and find new worlds and actually contribute to the growth of the universe. That was the most exciting thing for me. It's crazy when you think about it because when you when you live here every well I mean I kind of live

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    here when you're here every day you kind of lose track of the scope and then you get those little moments where you get to see it coming together and it's still even after a year here it's staggering you're like wow we are making something very special. Yeah. So before I let you go we got to do some rapid fires about favorites. Okay so favorite video game Portal 2. Good call. Movie. That's a tough one. No, it's totally tough. I can't think of a movie off the top of my head that I like best. Um, goes West. Yes. Fal Goes West. No. What is my favorite movie? Oh, Pacific Rim. There we go. I've never seen Pacific Rim. It's

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    awesome. I heard Ben tells me all the time. Oh, it's great. You should absolutely see it. Favorite food? Favorite food is ramen. Nice. All right. Well, thank you for joining me. Um, James Pew and this is Sherry Hyberg. And you just met a dev. I'll stick with that one for a while. I'll be honest. I need you to do better, but you're going to own it then just own it. Keep your laugh in there at the end, though. Like like Top Ramen or No, like real ramen. Like real ramen you can get at stores at at restaurants.