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.
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.
