How Archivists Helped Video Game Designers Recreate the City's Dark Side for 'L.A. Noire' | History | SoCal Focus | KCET

Earlier this week, video game enthusiasts and fans of L.A. history cheered the release of Rockstar Games' L.A. Noire, a police procedural game noted for its faithful reproduction of Los Angeles circa 1947. To recreate a city now hidden beneath 64 years of redevelopment projects and transformed by age and expansion, production designers with the game's developer, Team Bondi, consulted several Los Angeles area archives.

Designers consulted street maps created by the city's planning department and the Works Progress Administration, aerial photography combined with topographical information from the U.S. Geological Survey, photograph collections from the University of Southern California and UCLA, the police blotters of historical newspapers, and the papers of writer Raymond Chandler to reconstruct an historically accurate 1947 Los Angeles. Also, in promotion of the new game, the L.A. Times and Rockstar Games collaborated on this "special archive edition Crime Map" that presents newspaper accounts of real crimes from 1947 on an interactive map.

"@" symbol added to MoMA's Dept. of Architecture and Design collection

"@" was an under-used almost vestigial character on typewriter keyboards until Ray Tomlinson - the guy that invented email - "chose the @ for his first e-mail because of its strong locative sense—an individual, identified by a username, is @ this institution/computer/server, and also because…it was already there, on the keyboard, and nobody ever used it."

As the curator notes, the acquisition of "@" "relies on the assumption that physical possession of an object as a requirement for an acquisition is no longer necessary, and therefore it sets curators free to tag the world and acknowledge things that “cannot be had”—because they are too big (buildings, Boeing 747’s, satellites), or because they are in the air and belong to everybody and to no one, like the @—as art objects befitting MoMA’s collection."

Read the full article, which includes a brief history of @.