Museum of the Game, Arcadia, KLOV, & Forum Updates

mclemore

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Museum of the Game, Arcadia, KLOV, & Forum Updates

Happy Easter, and I hope all are safe and relatively content at home.

We've been working hard here, and wanted to give you an update on a number of fronts:

Social Media

The Museum of the Game is (slowly) joining the external social media world as we begin to participate in some of the major platforms. Please consider liking and following us on our first social media account, and a new YouTube account.

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/MuseumOfTheGame/

YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCywfida7LwRKM-s8zHGuHLg

On our new YouTube channel, we've posted our first video not hosted on our site. Our Arcadia division continues to work both our new shows as well as a new accompanying book (the last one was released so many years ago) and videos. Please check out (and hopefully like) our first video on YouTube:

Arcadia - 100 years of Gaming History

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vmsCLnlaw0



Arcadia Shows and Exhibits

We were planning some smaller Arcadia exhibitions in the Pacific Northwest this year. Due to the Coronavirus world we live in now, we aren't sure when we will be able to re-schedule these. At this point, when they are rescheduled, they will likely be in Portland on 2 or 3 different dates and will likely be invite only at this point.

Our next major Arcadia exhibition is currently in development. It will be held in Pasadena, California, at and in partnership with the University of Southern California's Pacific Asia Museum. It is planned on running for several months (5 days a week: Wednesday through Sunday), and is projected to bring an audience of in excess of 20,000 visitors. It will have a heavy focus on early Japanese influence on video gaming. There will be numerous treasures to view and to play. The most famous piece scheduled for display is the Nintendo Playstation we just obtained. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl5sd1wC-bU



We have a couple related projects in the pipeline, but aren't ready to announce them yet.

Web Site Upgrades

We are planning and working on a major site upgrade to both the main site and the message forums, that is currently scheduled to roll out in phases between May 1, 2020 and the Fall of 2020.

Currently the design team we use has been working for the last six months on a ground-up rebuild of www.eFootage.com, a stock footage company affiliated with Greg McLemore. That site had a number of the same challenges this site did: some functionality was broken or missing, the site wasn't mobile friendly, and the design was antiquated. The team is now quickly working bare minimum updates on making www.ace.com mobile friendly and response, and hopefully that will only take another week or so. For those that are unfamiliar with it, Ace.com is focused on filtering out 99% of eBay listings to identify only those collectible items that are likely the real gems.

Hopefully a quick upgrade for Ace.com will somewhat clear the deck and allow us to focus on the site with improvements to be released over the next 6 months. Our primary areas of focus will be (a) message forum upgrade, (b) making the whole site mobile friendly, though this will likely happen in phases, and (c) rebuilding the content submission system so that we can clear our nearly 10,000 image backlog and grow from there!

eFootage still has a lot of work to be done, but we are postponing that at this time to focus on this site. It is our goal to launch some of the upgrades for this site as quickly as possible so that we can launch them while we have a highly captive at home audience...

As many of you know, we have had a test site for the new message forums up since late last year that looked pretty complete. However, we keep running into data migration issues, and have other issues to deal with, including how the forums integrate (or not) with third party image hosting.

As mentioned in other threads, while the image submission system works, the back-end moderation system didn't work well with how volunteer moderators actually work or want to work. To make a long story short, we are going to change our approach here.

All our changes require significant planning and work. All new functions will be running on a new operating system, with a new database, and with a different generation of programming languages. For the main site, the goal is not to upgrade pages, but to replace them from the ground up. We are evening considering moving from Apache to Nginx. For all these reasons, it will take a significant amount of work (and patience of all), though we believe the upgrades will prepare us well for the next decade.

International Arcade Museum Library - Official Charity

Unfortunately, construction for our new office space has been delayed, in particular now because of the Coronovirus (When I get a chance, I'll take a post a photo of the space). And social distancing rules in Los Angeles have just been extended until May 15, 2020. We were going to let the Library use some of our spaces for various projects (such as manual scanning). As such, the Library is behind in launching its initiatives. Additionally, we are to the extent possible looking to use non-library money for the shows and exhibitions. Since it isn't spending any money currently, the Library's reserves continue to grow.

Thank you

Thank you for your continued interest and support.
 
Update.

Web site work (as usual) goes a little slower than I would hope. We had to go back to do a little more work on eFootage.com. Since the last update (above), we did create a new version of Ace.com. It desperately needs a new logo/header still, but other than that looks and works great. It's fast, mobile friendly, etc.

Web Site: I'm frustrated we haven't started yet, but believe we will start work on it this week, and then should be able to continue working on it without too many distractions.

Videos: We had extensive discussions with another group also working on an arcade video history series. For a variety of reasons, it doesn't look feasible for us to combine our efforts at this time. Their project will likely get a pre-production launch with a Kickstarter campaign in the next week or two. Ours will likely take a little longer and will be tied more closely to the full history arcade games and video games as well as tied to our collection and exhibition efforts.

Exhibition: I'm getting more pessimistic that a mini-show in Portland is practical this year as I'm not convinced that a Coronavirus re-opening is going to go smoothly. This morning I also just received an email about the show we are doing with the University of Southern California and the Pacific Asia Museum. In short, there is a proposal on the table to push the show back into 2022. I need to touch base today and compare thoughts. I'm guessing with the museum closures, all the shows between now and then are stacking up and getting pushed back. We continue to work on another potential show... and this isn't getting pushed back, so who knows, we might actually release shows in a different order than originally intended.
 
We have started working on major site upgrades, though things are going slower than originally expected. We are most interested in planning carefully than planning quickly. Here is a state of the nation though...

Main Site: This one is easy. We've started. It's a huge amount of work. We are probably going to pause for a week for some web dev experiments (see link below) and then get back to work. Hopefully before the end of July people will begin to see the fruits of our labor...

Forums: This month we totally reworked how we interfaced with our new forum system to make it much more robust and friendlier to further system upgrades. The new system has been working on another site (forums.lymphoma.com) for weeks now... and working great.

System Updates: We continue to modernize hardware, operating systems, and more. There are a few features on the main site (and the forums) that might not work while we make these changes. Please be patient...

Forum Traffic: When we upgraded the forums at lymphoma.com (which I support), we took a huge traffic hit from Google. However, these forums, which haven't been upgraded, also took a traffic hit. For more info, and especially if you have an interest in web sites and web hosting, see the other post I just made on the subject: https://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?t=473288
 
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