Short version: Not a fucking thing except going on about how she's preserving game history.
Medium Version: It's a legit field covering restoration of digital ecosystems and covering well-known game files and histories, to prevent them from simply disappearing into the ether when servers get pulled or the like. It also covers things like pre-expansion MMOs, recording and backing up famous Starcraft Maps and Doom Wads, and so on. Becks herself does none of these, and is part of the new guard of Social Justice infiltration into fields it has no experience or care for, but will cheerfully conquer for the sake of taking it over.
Long Version: Games Archivers extract game ROMs and source code for archival purposes so they can be looked at, analyzed, and learned from. They also back up things like game saves, maps, patches, and even quantity digit data. This data is used to create everything from emulators to reproduction carts of old video games and even arcade rigs. When there's a classic game someplace, some asshole is going to record it and make sure it's available to
future generations. They even work at analyzing hardware to make reproductions of unique hardware like the Vectrex. A great number of both amateurs and professionals carry on this tradition, from Harvard grads to Vinesauce:
In the last few years, however, the same sort of infestation we seem to encounter
fucking everywhere on yon internet has made a serious in-roads to professional spheres of game archiving. This has mostly taken the form of Social Justice lunatics (who, surely by coincidence, almost to a man have direct ties to at least one, if not multiple Rat Kings, and groups like the
International Games Developer Association (IGDA) and
Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA), who canny Kiwis will note were central to Gamergate even happening in the fucking first place with their "
video games are sexist, no matter what the actual data says" research. Both groups were mainstays in the attack platform, with the latter leading directly to the Gamers Are Dead Incident.
I mentioned it in-depth during Chipman's thread, but if you go to.... Say, the
University of Michigan's Games Archiving program, something will jump out at you if you start digging through the site: A special section dedicated to preservation "special interest groups" or SIGs - and that this group - who again,
surely by coincidence - just happens to have a number of people who showed up in the the CON Leaks - such as Randi Harper, Katherine Cross, and more. Most of the work of these "SIGs" will fall into the category of screaming about how this, that, or the other thing in video gaming aren't inclusive enough, how there's too much violence, and how video games
inherently misogynistic.
Insert mandatory "Move SIGs for Great Social Justice" Joke here.
Becks falls into this crowd. She does exactly nothing of value or note and accomplishes exactly jack shit but act as another footprint the usual suspects have in the industry. And because more professional games archiving services are a relatively new field, they were able to move in pretty much without any opposition. If there's any upside to their presence here it's that the damage they can inflict in this capacity is relatively minimal, but you can find a lot about the ins and outs of
why Gamergate's biggest trigger, the Gamers Are Dead Incident, happened
if you take a closer look at this nuttery. Word of warning, though, you're going to find a
ton of cases of people doing research, finding evidence that doesn't go with their preconceived notions, and then claiming that they were right in spite of said evidence anyway if you do.
I can sum up why that was in a single emoticon:
Another poly relationship, another broken home life.
if there was a cow crossover) because counting all the crossovers proved fucking impossible. Not even Kengle is capable of this amount of lolcow centralization; it's truly a sight to behold.
