File Format Frenzy

Abstract

This is an interactive, choose your own adventure game designed to teach players file format analysis and how to identify various file formats. It is built using the twine platform with various side games and quests built in. The premise of the game is that you shrink into a computer that has been infected by a virus. You quickly realise that the files on the computer do not know what they are anymore and by solving a series of puzzles you must help them piece together their identity. This is created with the goal of helping the player understand concepts such as magic bytes, how to look inside a file, hex and many of the tools of file format analysis. The hope is that this will be a valuable and fun learning tool to understand files in repositories and how file format identification software such as PRONOM and DROID work. These are topics that can often seem intimidating and inaccessible but with gamification they may reach a wider audience. For the session laptops will be recommended for participants to reach the website the game is hosted on, however shorter games and paper versions of the side quests will be available. Participants could also work in teams around one laptop. Therefore the game could be played solo or in groups.

Details

Creators

Francesca Mackenzie

Institutions

Date

2024-09-18 11:25:00 +0100

Keywords

approaches to preservation; start 2 preserve

Publication Type

game

License

Creative Commons Zero (CC0-1.0)

Collaborative Notes

here