Swiss Games
Garden
The roots
Swiss Games Garden’s main objective is to promote Swiss video games while encouraging data saving.
This project is free1, open source2 and collaborative. It belongs to everyone. That’s why we encourage any new game suggestion or update!
The Swiss Games Garden aims to allow the exploration of the vast jungle of Swiss video games in order to extend your knowledge, while both reducing the maintenance effort of the platform and increasing the ease of game submission.
Data moderation work is currently supervised by David Stark, David Javet & Yannick Rochat.
Useful links:
Initial Github repository
Current Github repository
The fertilizers
Led by passion, the whole team is working without any kind of financial contribution to increase Swiss video games visibility as well as archived data quality. All work behind this platform is benevolent (design, supervision, contact).
If you love this project, you can make a change to help this community by donating to the Musée Bolo, our main partner whose aim is to preserve and enhance the value of the computer heritage.
All funds received will be redistributed for the promotion of Swiss video games, whether through the platform or other organizations.
The GameLab UNIL-EPFL
The Gamelab UNIL-EPFL greatly supports the Swiss Games Garden project. It acts as a consultant in the development of the project and participates in the supervision of the hosted data.
The website developers as well as the GameLab UNIL-EPFL will also ensure that the data hosted by this project remain accessible to game developers, researchers, as well as any other interested actors (government, media, museum, public audience, etc.).
Musée BOLO
Musée Bolo, the Swiss Museum of Computer Science, Digital Culture, and Video Games, supports this initiative to catalog Swiss video games by hosting the platform and by adding relevant items identified in its collections.
Founded in 1995, the museum exhibition includes old computers, peripherals, documentation, books, magazines, software and video games.
One of the missions of the Musée Bolo is to preserve the history of video games in Switzerland. Having a catalog of Swiss video games is an essential tool to prioritize the Musée Bolo’s work on its collections.
The gardeners
On Aug. 11 2014, David Javet, game designer and researcher, created a “List of Released and Playable Swiss Video Games”. He then opened and shared it to the Swiss game dev community which collaboratively fed it. In February 2015, at the 1st Open Data Hackathon in Bern, the game developer David Stark designed the “Swiss Games Showcase”, a “website made to show off the work of the growing Swiss computer game scene. The basis of the site is a crowdsourced list of Swiss games. This list is parsed, and additional information on each game is automatically gathered. Finally, a static showcase page is generated”. The “Swiss Games Showcase” project aimed at “providing a directory of Swiss Video Games and metadata about them”. In September 2017, during the 3rd Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon at the University of Lausanne, David Stark led a team of eight persons to strengthen the data quality and the range of the list. At the start of this hackathon, the list was composed of 241 games. It was turned into an open data set, September 8. 2017, on the opendata.swiss portal by Oleg Lavrovsky. The list was continuously fed by the inputs of the game dev community but also by game historians, data archivists or journalists. In 2019, David Javet gathered a team of volunteer web designers to create the Swiss Games Garden website, a fertile ground to cultivate and harvest the benefits of this collective project.
1 Free is also a concept that originated from software development. It refers to data that can be modified and/or distributed freely, usually under a free licence’s conditions. Free data are implicitly open source whereas open source data are not necessarily free.
2 Open source source is a term originally applied to software development. Open source data in general refers to data that anyone can see and access.
