Published: May 31, 2019 by Katie Kuryla

The Learning Games Initiative was designed around the concept of “preservation through use” and makes the constantly expanding collection of computer games, systems, peripherals, memorabilia, scholarship, and a plethora of other game-related materials accessible to researchers all over the world and of all ages.

It is an international, transdisciplinary, and multi-institutional research collective founded in 1999 that studies, teaches with, and builds computer games in educational contexts. This website, built on the Omeka CMS framework, coordinates LGI’s massively distributed archive. At present, the archive contains more 250,000 items, including:

• 15,000+ games;
• 200+ game systems;
• Hundreds of scholarly, trade, and fan publications;

Thousands of other artifacts representing the game industry’s wide and deep incursion into global popular culture, from feature length films and soundtracks, to articles of clothing and comestibles, to private and corporate documents concerning various aspects of game design and development.

The breadth of the LGI Research Archive is meant to be representative rather than comprehensive, making it an ideal source for jump-starting projects, as well as for expanding one’s sense of scope. LGIRA uses Omeka database which is a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform used by museums, archives, libraries, and more.

To learn more about the archives, check out their website! https://lgira.mesmernet.org/