Matthew J. Westerby opens his article “Annotating Upstream: Digital Scholars, Art History, and the Interoperable Image” with the story of how downstream uses of the British Library’s IIIF images and manifests lost their own access when the Library was the subject of a cyberattack. This domino effect showed a “change in the relationship between institutions and users of online collections in which separate layers exist to serve images and also to present the digital surrogate of a real-world object like a book.”¹ Similar complex layers of delivery and downstream/upstream usage have been on the minds of video game scholars for a long time. There is always a layering between the game’s software and the hardware or the display, as well as between the game as code and the physical object that carries that code, such as a cartridge. Especially with online-all-the-time consoles, a game can be pulled or updated or changed at any time without user consent or warning. These delivery layers are perhaps more apparent to the average gamer than the average user of an IIIF image art surrogate because they have demonstrably affected how games are released and experienced. It is now common (though not acceptable) practice for a game to release in a broken state with day-one patches to download. Patching post-launch was a near impossibility before internet-connected gaming, so the uneven quality of games at release has been felt by all video gamers.

This is not the only place where Westerby’s suggestions and insights for art history run parallel to emerging practice in game studies. Annotating video games is one way game studies is looking to share knowledge weither via annotating games themselves, annotating screen captures of video games, or through examining existing annotation practices like wikis and let’s plays that are a part of the larger life of “networked hyperlinked videogames”.² For the practice part of this post, I used Panopto to experiment with annotating a brief screen capture of me playing The Blood of Dawnwalker. ³

Panopto was the assigned tool for class but I didn’t find it particially useful for the annotations I would like to make where it would be helpful to have them show up on specific parts of the screen during viewing.

One of the reasons wikis are such a robust source of information for video games is that they are such complex artworks that one person could never annotate a full game by themselves. It also adds to the robustness of scholarship when sharing is part of the process, not just the outcome. The Zelda object-focused digital humanities project⁴ that I mentioned in my post about Collection Builder was one project that used this style of sharing. My portion was about multiplicity and repetition of objects in the Zelda series, focusing on small keys, but I was doing it alongside Sydney Bauer whose object was a single American painting, Hannah Iovanna who was examining the still life paintings of a single artist, and Addie Magyar who worked with me on the Zelda portion and also acted as coordinator (Magyar was actually who noticed that small keys are the only constant in all the games). Being able to do those separate case studies with the same methodology while in communication during the process made the projects much richer and more enjoyable. Our discussions and brainstorming sessions brought up the question that I swear one day I will write about: why is there always a wheel of cheese with one little slice out in every video game? I sometimes wish I had picked the history of the wheel of cheese with one little slice out as my art history thesis: a study of why it is the most filling and delightful of foods across time and medium.

Annotating interoperable images is a mode of scholarly communication that is fundamentally different from the traditional sharing of only finished writing in journals and academic press books but no less a creative or scholarly act.⁵ When there’s a wider variety of acceptable ways to communicate information, writing a book or a journal article becomes a choice, not an obligation. The quality of all scholarly communication increases as forms increase because the output mode is not just one default option regardless of the needs of the argument or the data. This also allows for more modes of scholarship that cannot be studied or communicated as well via paper alone, like GIS mapping projects from my previous post. I was unfamiliar with the idea of thick data or data pollution⁶ as terms when I wrote the mapping post, but they are great terms for the concept I was exploring at the end of that post: messy data that balances the line between being so messy it’s no longer a useful tool but isn’t so clean that it carries unquestioned authority with data pollution also covering the source of data like AI or how data is used.

Westerby’s choice to end the article with how you can’t control other people’s usage of your images or metadata if you share them, and how the fear of misuse should be a known risk but not a reason to abandon openness was nuanced and powerful.⁷ There will always be people who take good things and warp them. Making decisions based around absolute prevention of misuse is an impossibility and an unnecessary burden. It is better to work from being risk-aware, with practices like the usage tags that Westerby suggests.⁸ It reminded me specifically of the Wretched & Alone SRD,⁹ a system written by Matt Sanders for making solo journaling games in the style of Chris Bisette’s game The Wretched.¹⁰ The Limitations section of the SRD includes “Finally, nazis, homophobes, transphobes, and other bigots are expressly forbidden from making new content using the Wretched and Alone system. If you have to ask whether this includes you, it does.”¹¹ Are parasites going to ignore the usage terms? Likely. Still, by making clear the usage and specifically taking a stance on who is forbidden to use the material, bigots cannot hide behind not knowing or accidental infringement. It makes the deliberate nature of the theft apparent.