Preliminary Analysis of a Large-Scale Digital Entertainment Development Archive: A Case Study of the Entertainment Technology Center’s Projects

摘要

This paper describes a research plan for the investigation of the project archive from Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center, an interdisciplinary professional Masters program in interactive entertainment and game design. Representing nearly 20 years of project design in the interactive arts, the ETC’s ad hoc archive provides a prospective template collection for the analysis of entertainment software projects through historical, archival, and computational methods. The work-in-progress described here is based on a preliminary analysis of four early projects from the archive, and provides a guide to potential synchronic and diachronic investigations of software development methodology in a chronological collection of unified provenance. Access to software process documentation is difficult to come by and this “working” collection provides a significant resource for approximating the organizational state of future software development collections to be ingested into archives.