2020 Internship Blog Post #15

This week, working on my internship from home, I read a few more articles that were on the intern reading list that my supervisor had sent me to read. I choose to read two articles related to video games and video game archives. Video games have been a passion of mine since I was young enough to play them on the computer or hold a controller or a Gameboy in my hands. In reading the first article entitled “U. of Mich. video game cache serves as an archive, at play,” it talked about how this very different archive accessions their materials. This article was by Mike Householder in 2017 and was published in AP News. They even allow people to play video games at this archive, as well. They even have a budget to buy certain video games as they are released. They make a point in the article that they don’t have every video game ever made but they have roughly 7,000 titles. In my opinion that is amazing. I am originally from Michigan and used to live not far from the University of Michigan. I often used to visit their graduate library. As a graduate student at Eastern Michigan University, I was able to get a library card with them because I was a student. I had no idea they had a video game archive. If I would have known I would have definitely visited when I was living in the area during my last masters program. 
            I think it is interesting to think about video games in a digital tools context. It is possible for video games to have historical merit and can definitely be used as a tool for teaching students about history. This article even references that professors bring history classes to the video game archives at the University of Michigan. Some students have even done research on the video games which the article talks about as well. Personally, it's incredible to see archives with different types of materials that they are accessing. Of the two articles I read on video games, this was the more interesting one in my opinion. I will include links to the articles I read this week at the end of the blog. Perhaps, video games can be the final frontier in terms of how we can teach the next generation history and other subjects, while keeping them engaged in this digital age we live in. However, that being said I do truly believe that there are many video games that I  personally think should have an emphasis on making the games as historically accurate as possible. Perhaps, it is possible to create a new genre of video games that emphasize (more strictly) historical accuracy. I do want to ask this question, is it possible to be completely historically accurate? Or is it as profound historian and theorist, Dr. Hayden White, suggests that history is fiction in many ways? Do we have any way of knowing with 100% certainty what happened in any given thing we are studying in history? We have our own biases even those primary sources we use in our research have biases. We often insert this into our own writing whether we realise it or not. In turn, this makes it not exactly how things happened. However, as I talked about in class and in a lit review for Introduction to Public History, we don’t have much else to go on. 
            This week, I was also sending email in preparation for finals week. I have been working on my final paper for my internship, organizing the date for my final presentation. I have to finalize the date with my supervisors and Dr. French. I also received revisions on my history bio of Burnett House and will make the final revisions this weekend. I will also send it back to my supervisor and Dr. French this weekend for a final verification before it will go up on the STARS website. Finally, I have a few hours to finish up but I will complete that by working on my presentation and final paper this weekend and next week before I present. This is my last blog for my internship at the UCF Special Collections and University Archives. I learned so much and had a great time doing so. I gained so many valuable skills that will be extremely valuable in the future and for the profession I have chosen to pursue. I have also met so many wonderful people while working at the UCF Special Collections and University Archives. Thank you so much for reading my blogs each week!







The University of Central Florida Special Collections and University Archives Website:


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