Rock Paper and Shotgun provides an interesting viewpoint into Youtubers and Let’s Play videos as a form of digital preservation and secondary documentation of both the games and the players/community. Filming both the games and the reactions leaves a cultural footprint and sometimes provides the only way to have a look at a game no longer available in any form.
Ken McAllister, co-founder of video game archival group the Learning Games Initiative (LGI) notes that the YouTube videos preserve a documentary how people play and capture the game style and game reaction.
“All of those things will teach future researchers what games mean.”
And while YouTube videos are often made about the most popular and trendy games, there’s always someone who covers also the smaller and retro games.
“Let’s plays preserve games in ways that simply archiving the software itself does not”, says Chris Wallace of Rock, Paper and Shotgun and we absolutely agree with this.
More information: How YouTube let’s plays are preserving video game history
