Exploring Video Games CD-ROMs: Curatorial Challenges and Historical Contextualisation and Significance
The last presentation explores the diverse aspects of curating, accessing, and understanding the historical significance of CD-ROMs in the video game industry and history. We will employ as a case-study an upcoming public exhibition scheduled for Autumn 2025 within the frame of a two-day gaming convention. The project features retro-gaming while addressing critical knowledge goals.
The creation of the exhibition must address various curatorial considerations, including concept and narrative flow, target audience, the accessibility of certain games (in terms of game play, interfaces, latency, authors’ rights, etc.), their nostalgic value, and the balance between triple-A best-sellers and less obvious choices. Additionally, the exhibition aims to let the users experience media archaeology (Fickers and van den Oever, 2014), which involves contemplating how to present these games amidst emulation, old gaming consoles, their gameplay relevance, and their contemporary significance. Finally, we hope to shed light on the creative role of CD-ROMs (Lessard, 2018) in shaping the gaming landscape, while providing visitors with an immersive experience that transcends mere nostalgia. A central focus is therefore put on the challenges of contextualization, accomplished partly through paratextual materials. We aim not only to ensure technical accessibility but also to engage visitors cognitively.
This presentation will therefore focus on the curatorial choices, challenges, limits, and research questions that this project raises in terms of media archaeology, public history, and retro-gaming. It relates to several key elements of the call for presentations, like approaches to researching the born- digital mediation of cultural memory and creative research uses to born-digital materials.
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