Pixelarchive

Mission

More than half of us regularly spend time playing on a mobile phone, console or computer. The average age of the gaming community in the Czech Republic is over 30 years old and almost half are women. Local development studios continue to grow, with annual profits more than triple the income from cinema. Digital games have been developed in the Czech Republic for more than forty years. Domestic developers have achieved worldwide success not only in the field of commercial titles, but also independent studios with art-oriented or educational games are winning awards.

Games both co-create and reflect our culture and have therefore been awarded cultural heritage status in Western and Northern Europe. In the Czech Republic, however, they still carry the stigma of toys for children. Unlike films or literature, we learn little about them and communicate with them in a serious way. That is why our society does not understand digital games very well and considers them as harmful or simply a waste of time.

Digital games are defined in Czech legislation only as software and thus do not receive the care that we obligatorily give to other cultural artefacts such as books or films. As an intangible digital object subject to dynamic economic and technological changes, games are quickly becoming dysfunctional or disappearing altogether. We are losing valuable cultural heritage and the opportunity to explore our own past. In the US alone, 87% of classic games across platforms are unavailable, according to a recent study by the Video Game History Foundation.

Pixelarchiv.cz is a five-year project of the NFA, AMU and CTU, which aims to create sustainable methods and tools for documenting and archiving Czech and Czechoslovak digital games for use in local memory institutions - archives, museums or galleries. We are developing procedures that will allow historical and contemporary games to be treated as cultural heritage.

Pixelarchiv.cz builds on the principles of participatory archiving proven abroad. We organize a beSITE for community projects dedicated to historical games. We have established contacts with developers and academics in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. We are members of the European Federation of Game Archives, Museums and Preservation Projects (EFGAMP) and we organize an international conference with leading European experts in game preservation.

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