Eaten by a Grue

Welcome back! We are very excited to announce the reopening of the Computer & Video Game Archive (CVGA) this Fall, starting on Tuesday, August 31st. We are reopening with a new service model—outlined below—which will help us provide you with a space that is safer to visit as we adjust our services around COVID-19. While hours will be limited at first, we plan to expand our hours later in the semester once we have settled into the new service model and increased our staffing capacity.

The University of Michigan is offering a rich variety of game-related courses during the Summer and Fall 2021 terms, so we thought we'd highlight them here as well as on our research guide as you're choosing courses. If you're looking for ideas on how to play games online, we'd recommend taking a look at the Online Games page on our research guide.

The Computer & Video Game Archive (CVGA) has a dual mission of providing users access to our game collection, and the preservation of games for future research and scholarship. Since the CVGA has been temporarily closed to the public due to the pandemic, we have used this time to shift our focus from user access to the preservation portion of our mission, and have been discussing how to digitally image and archive our game collection.

The University of Michigan is offering a rich variety of game-related courses during the Winter 2021 term, so we thought we'd highlight them here as well as on our research guide as you're choosing courses for the Winter term. If you're looking for ideas on how to play games online, we'd recommend taking a look at the Online Games page on our research guide.

Still looking for a video game-related class to take in the Fall? This blog post lists the classes that still have open spots. We also share details about what our services will look like (as far as we know) during the Fall term.

Are you interested in learning about and promoting diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) in game culture and the game industry?
We have a few sections devoted to this very important topic on our research guide. Several of the resources listed on our guide can be accessed remotely, and we have highlighted a few here, along with the official summaries for each resource. We invite you to check them out.

Are you wishing you could be playing board games in person with your friends? You're not the only one. Being able to sit around a table with friends is a great way to socialize with fellow gamers, and would normally be a popular activity in the CVGA. Playing board games in person is definitely preferred, but circumstances like quarantine, geography or other factors can make this difficult. And thanks to technology, it's not the only way to enjoy them. The Online Games page on our research guide lists several online platforms that can be used to play board games online with friends. Today, we're going to review one of those platforms, Boardgame Arena.

Looking for a video game-related class to take in the coming semesters? This post includes classes that are listed at present. For more information regarding our available services during this time, please see our blog post called CVGA Services During the COVID-19 Lockdown. This will likely be our modus operandi throughout the Spring and Summer. Our physical collection may be inaccessible at present, but we encourage you to visit the Online Games page on our research guide for ideas on how to play classic games online for free, how to play board games online with your friends, and more.

The Computer & Video Game Archive physical collection is closed, as is the Duderstadt Center. Our staff won't be answering our phone or returning calls while the building is closed, but feel free to reach out to us via email at video.games@umich.edu with questions or requests for remote consultations related to video game studies. We're happy to help. The gamer community is a tight-knit group, and we're thinking about you during this time of social distancing. We hope you stay safe, and hope you're able to visit us once we're able to reopen. For now, we hope you'll engage with us on social media and let us know how you're doing.

The mission of the University of Michigan Library’s Computer and Video Game Archive (CVGA) is to preserve and provide access to games for current and future study and research. In a world where digital games are becoming more prevalent than physical games, preserving these digital games can be a challenge. The CVGA recently received special funding from the library to purchase a large number (approx. 180) of games from Limited Run Games, a "publisher of limited run physical games for PlayStation Vita, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch," that focuses on "bringing games that were previously only available in a digital format to a physical medium."