IIPC RSS Webinar: Game Walkthroughs and Web Archiving

The IIPC Research Speaker Series (RSS) focuses on the research use of web archives and features presentations of use cases, collaborative projects and new tools for researchers. This presentation will feature Travis Reid of Old Dominion University speaking about Game Walkthroughs and Web Archiving. “Game Walkthroughs and Web Archiving” was awarded a grant in the 2021-2022 round of the Discretionary Funding Programme (DFP)

Game walkthroughs are guides that show viewers the steps the player would take while playing a video game. Recording and streaming a user’s interactive web browsing session is similar to a game walkthrough, as it shows the steps the user would take while browsing different websites. The idea of having game walkthroughs for web archiving was first explored in 2013 (“Game Walkthroughs As A Metaphor for Web Preservation”). At that time, web archive crawlers were not ideal for web archiving walkthroughs because they did not allow the user to view the webpage as it was being archived. Recent advancements in web archive crawlers have made it possible to preserve the experience of dynamic web pages by recording a user’s interactive web browsing session.

The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session chaired by Sawood Alam (Internet Archive).

Speaker Bio

Travis Reid is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Old Dominion University and a member of the Web Science and Digital Libraries (WSDL) research group. His current research interest involves the gamification of web archiving and the integration of web archiving and video games.