About the AP Archive project

Context

Born-digital media is inherently fragile. Most of our digital videos live on local hard drives or on servers owned by the world's worst men. But some of those videos matter to me, and I want them to stick around.

I've been doing Actual Play (live play of TTRPGs) since 2018 and I've found an incredible community of nerds, performers and feral audience members. But this entire medium is born-digital.

While some AP has been uploaded to the Internet Archive, there are no standards for documentation. Many of these shows don't include any of the context someone in the future would need in order to appreciate (or study) them. They are also tricky to discovery.

The goal

My dream is to have an Actual Play collection in the Internet Archive, similar to Attention K-mart Shoppers or the Classic Gaming Archive. This will be a collection of AP, both video and audio, that are stored with enough metadata and documentation that in 50 years, someone will be able to stumble on it and explore this strange and wonderful world.

I hope to have multiple archivists overseeing the collection -- helping with quality control, supporting producers' documentation efforts, and encouraging the community to archive early!

In addition to storing this collection in the Internet Archive, I would encourage people to download it in its entirety. More copies is better! While I don't expect IA to disappear any time soon and I trust them to stick to their preservation mandate, tons of media has been saved by distributed copies. And that's easier to do if you have a tidy, curated, documentated collection to distribute.

Right now, I'm looking to include anyone who wants to be included, so long as your show depicts a roleplaying game of some sort being played. Of course, you can upload to the Internet Archive on your own, you don't need my permission, but I'm hoping we can work together to make more consistent, meaningful metadata so that the works can be discovered in the future, and also I'm here to help.