Often, we learn more from our failures and struggles than our successes. By learning from what didn’t work, we build stronger, more resilient practices moving forward. This Panel focuses on the importance of sharing failures and 'war stories' within the digital preservation community, using diverse examples from cultural heritage organisations.

By sharing these stories, we encourage transparency and open discussions. This has significant benefits for institutions in all stages of their digital preservation journey - from institutions with a long history of digital preservation experience and many stories to tell, to institutions just starting out that can benefit from these learned lessons.

The purpose of the session would be to give those interested in video game preservation a chance to meet like-minded people and discuss the preservation of New Zealand made video games.

It would be an informal session where I would facilitate a few questions to spark the conversation, mainly around what preservation urgency there is, what are the main challenges we face, what has already been done (e.g. the Play it Again project) and where do we go from here. While the focus is on preservation, how video games can be made accessible would also be in scope of the discussion.

The ideal outcome of the discussion would be to set up a regular group meeting of those are willing to take this work forward. The discussion may also result in valuable insights into challenges or ways of doing things that have not been considered, especially from overseas attendees who may be able to offer some advice and lessons.

I feel this session would be best in-person, though I would be open to doing an online version if there was great interest. I would like to make the session interactive with items from my own personal NZ games collection, however, I will need to further investigate the best way to do this.