{"id":46727,"date":"2018-09-11T20:44:00","date_gmt":"2018-09-11T20:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/326250"},"modified":"2018-09-11T20:44:00","modified_gmt":"2018-09-11T20:44:00","slug":"to-stay-relevant-u-s-adds-select-pc-games-to-national-software-registry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/09\/11\/to-stay-relevant-u-s-adds-select-pc-games-to-national-software-registry\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;To stay relevant&#8217;, U.S. adds select PC games to national software registry"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This week the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology published a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nist.gov\/news-events\/news\/2018\/09\/database-software-fingerprints-expands-include-computer-games\">blog post<\/a> confirming that the (non-regulatory) agency has added a new class of software to its National Software Reference Library: modern PC games.<\/p>\n<p>Notably, the NSRT now contains select games (including\u00a0<em>Mass Effect, World of Warcraft<\/em>, and\u00a0<em>PlayerUnknown&#8217;s Battlegrounds<\/em>)\u00a0from Steam, Electronic Arts&#8217; Origin platform, and Blizzard Entertainment.<\/p>\n<p>Some were donated by Valve, EA and Blizzard, others were purchased, but the important thing for devs\u00a0to know is that these games are now embalmed in\u00a0a long-term government archive of popular computer software.<\/p>\n<p>The NSRL exists primarily to help digital forensics and cybersecurity researchers identify and track software, so everything in it has\u00a0been run through an algorithm that assigns\u00a0a 60-character string (of both letters and numbers) as a unique hash. Those hashes are now part of a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nist.gov\/itl\/ssd\/software-quality-group\/nsrl-download\">public database<\/a>, a database that the NISL claims also doubles as a &#8220;repository of culturally significant digital artifacts.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019re not watching what gamers are doing,\u201d NSRL\u00a0lead Doug White stated in the blog post. \u201cBut we need to include gaming software in the NSRL if we want to stay relevant.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>While these are reportedly the first modern PC games to be archived in the NSRL, they aren&#8217;t the first games: two years ago the NIST <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/281296\/Unexpected_alliance_aids_notable_preservation_of_video_game_history.php\">worked to archive a collection of retro games<\/a> (including what were presumably Atari copies of\u00a0<em>SimCity<\/em>, <em>Asteroids<\/em>, and <em>Mario Bros.<\/em>) acquired from a collector by Stanford University.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology published a blog post confirming that the (non-regulatory) agency has added a new class of software to its National Software Reference Library: modern PC games. Notably, the NSRT now contains select games (including\u00a0Mass Effect, World of Warcraft, and\u00a0PlayerUnknown&#8217;s Battlegrounds)\u00a0from Steam, Electronic Arts&#8217; Origin platform, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":46728,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46727\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}