Digital Preservation Innovation Through Play

The theme of this year's DPASSH Conference was "Making space for play in Digital Preservation" and Sharon and I were very excited to take up that challenge with a brand-new digital preservation game.

The practicalities of working in this field can be very constraining to the way that we think about digital preservation. With limited resources and often a mountain of work to climb, it can be difficult to find the head space to think about the possibility of doing our work differently. Even when funding opportunities present themselves, they are often very focused and have specific requirements. However, this is still a relatively new domain and there is a lot of space for potentially making things better with new ideas.

With our game, we wanted to remove some of those shackles and give players the chance to explore new ways of solving digital preservation challenges in a fun, friendly and collaborative environment. The Digital Preservation Innovation Game gives teams of players the opportunity to devise their own digital preservation project before pitching it to the other teams. Random cards dealt to each team give some topical hints to get the creative juices flowing. These include Problem Spaces to solve, Catalysts that might help steer a solution and Experts with skills that the project could employ.

Our DPASSH session was our first full play test of the game and as the room started to fill up, I confess to feeling somewhat nervous as to how it was going to go. With all the seats taken we had to divide up the participants into 3 separate games to keep things manageable. It was clear this was going to be a thorough playtest!

After explaining the rules, the teams started dealing cards and immediately everyone was talking as each pair started devising their new digital preservation projects. We had an inkling it was going well when everyone was still talking when it was time for the teams to give their pitches. I always squirm a bit when I have to stop people chatting about digital preservation - it's the only bit I dislike about facilitating a conference session. Luckily, from years of running training sessions, Sharon has no such qualms!

After the pitches we had to clarify the scoring system for the players of one of the games. This is perhaps the least naturally flowing part of the game, so not surprising it needs a careful check of the rules card. Teams vote for their favourite pitch, but the pitching team gets an extra point for each of the card they include in their pitch beyond a minimum of 3 cards. Reference all of the 6 cards you were dealt in your pitch, and you get 3 bonus points. We even had a tie breaker between two of the teams which was quickly resolved with a further vote.

With a winning team from each of the 3 games, Sharon and I thought it was time to make this more interesting. We asked the winning teams to repeat their pitches to the whole room, with the audience voting for the ultimate winner and the prize of a Preserve Together digital preservation training course of their choice.

We're very pleased to announce the overall winners of the Digital Preservation Innovation Game at DPASSH were Noelia Romero, Killian Downing and Ifé Thompson.  

Feedback on the game was very positive. I think we managed to generate a useful focus on team working, on innovation, and on advocacy. But most importantly everyone seemed to have a lot of fun playing it with lots of smiles and laughter around the room.

We are also taking the Digital Preservation Innovation Game to the iPres Conference in Copenhagen, so please come along and have a go!