Nibble in Cyberspace: Digipres Adventures, Vol 1

In 2019 I was staying in Hamburg for a short amount of time while I was waiting for my Canadian visa. It was around the time of the iPRES digital preservation conference and I was only a few hours away. While I hoped my work would send me it was not going to be my year. I then hoped I would take myself there anyway by writing a computer game; inspired by Board Games sessions in 2017 and 2018. Alas, that didn’t work out either, but I did end up with a piece of work I am still very proud of.

Nibble in Cyberspace: Digipres Adventures, Vol 1. Homepage: https://ross-spencer.github.io/nibble/

Nibble in Cyberspace

Nibble in Cyberspace is what I believe may be called an infinity game – it will run for as long as there is time and you simply collect as many points as you can – with one twist: corruption! The game itself will self-destruct if you don’t keep collecting good digital preservation practices over time.

Not just a computer game, Nibble is a piece of interactive art, and a live demo of bit-rot.

As you navigate its strange scrolling futuristic, or underwatery-feeling scenery you try to collect icons representing good digital preservation practices:

• fixity check,
• keeping local copies,
• keeping lots of copies (LOCKSS),
• writing digital preservation policy.

You will collect points for these, but if you collect things that impact digital preservation you will be deducted points; these items include:

• power surge,
• solar flare,
• software bug,
• computer virus.

Collecting bad items will not just deduct points but will also see the game actively attack its own memory, mimicking the effects of bit-rot but on a much more immediate timeline than in real life.

Nibble can be compared to Glitch Art – the effect of corrupting sequences of bytes in digital images or video to create interesting or visually satisfying derivatives of the original media.

Nibble, being a computer game, corrupts its own in-game memory depending on a player’s pathway through the game. Depending on the player’s approach, or the platform they are playing on, the effects will always be different.

For some, they may be interested in the visual effects which can include the generation of new colors in the game’s palette, destruction of game imagery or icons, or sometimes the complete replacement of images. Really, it’s quite unpredictable so anything can happen.

For me, for the limited musical ability I have I was interested to observe the generational effects of corruption on the music I ‘composed’  🥴 and listen to the way its pitch changes, notes become more sparse, or simply take on different tonal qualities.

You can’t really beat Nibble. The goal is really to observe the insidious and not so insidious (read: not subtle!) effects of data-loss and corruption on digital information; and to have fun watching it as well; and to conversely, create.

Pico-8

Pico-8 is a fantasy gaming console and offers an all-in-one coding and development experience for the want to be games developer.

For the purposes of this work, its in-game memory could be easily manipulated. The memory is restricted to 65KiB and contains  graphics, map, sound, music, and direct access to hardware features such as persistent cartridge data and GPIO pins. It is quite safe to modify this memory in-game as it won’t affect things outside of the Pico-8’s container, but as we see with Nibble, it will affect the game’s aesthetics.

The Pico-8 has other interesting features for digital preservationists – it offers a polyglot file format for storing game information.

The Pico-8 PNG Cartridge format is a PNG graphic with the game data stored inside it using a steganographic approach. This game data can be used to play, or as source code to be hacked on to create a new derivative.

This affords the developer a mechanism of creating an aesthetic game cartridge image as well as a means of distribution for those with access to a Pico-8.

The game can also be rendered in other formats such as JavaScript which makes it playable in the browser, and is also accessible in Pico-8’s library of games.

Reaction

The game was never demoed at iPRES but I was able to share it on Twitter at the time and the reaction was positive.

Some folks even shared game-play examples but many of these have gone with the change in Twitter’s leadership and values over the past few years.

My friend Retro Sega Dev gave it a shout-out.

Jaye Weatherburn gave a shout-out to Nibble on her blog, reflecting on iPRES2019.

My all time favorite post on Twitter was David Cirella who got the game working on his PocketChip, and it looked awesome:

What next?

I have a few more ideas for games. I don’t know if I will get a chance to write those, but maybe I will get back to it.

Nibble in Cyberspace, Vol 1 might also benefit from some reworking — the memory corruption routines don’t quite work as anticipated, namely, corrupted sections of memory are supposed to be tracked and stored elsewhere, this would allow players to collect positive digital preservation items and recover memory at the same time they are scoring points, thus reversing the corruption and allowing the game to literally run for infinity — maybe in fact, beating entropy!

More game corruption

At Ravensburger AG in my role as digital preservation specialist for the corporate archive I had access to a number of computer games from early in their foray into software. I found the Atari version of Weltraumkolonie had properties suitable for glitching and so I gave it a whirl and looped different glitches over its title screen for a number of repetitions and recorded it. I like the result!

iPRES2024

While I haven’t an entry, iPRES2024 has an entire program dedicated to games. There are at least two video games this year. Along with the other submissions it should be a fun time for conference participants!

Conclusion

The number of digital preservation games has been on the increase over the years. They are important resources for outreach and engagement on what is an important topic.

iPRES2024 is certainly the place to watch for upcoming features but if that’s not enough for you, you can view “retro” digital preservation games on Remco van Veenendaal’s Preservia games listing (Preservia itself another entry!).

Digital preservation and related games