Recovery Exhibit

The capstone — a recovery attempt, an archaeological report, and a public-facing exhibition of one lost or abandoned game

Due: 28 May 2027 · Weight: 60%

The brief

Recover one lost or abandoned game, and show your work to people who weren’t in the room for any of it.

This is the practicum’s capstone: the recovery attempt itself, the report that documents it, and the exhibition that makes it legible to someone outside the course. All three are required — a strong recovery with no report is unmarkable, and a report with no exhibition hasn’t done the job this brief actually asks for.

Recovering the artifact fully is not the requirement. A recovery that stalls at a specific, well-evidenced obstacle — a corrupted archive, a format nobody has documented, a dependency that no longer exists anywhere — is a valid, completed piece of work if the report explains exactly why recovery wasn’t possible and what was tried.

What you submit

Three parts, submitted together: whatever you were able to recover (a build, an emulator profile, extracted assets — whatever your attempt produced), a written archaeological report, and a presented exhibition in the week 12 session per the studio spec.

The spec

The brief poses the problem and leaves room for a response. The spec is the fixed part: what a marker checks. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for judgement.

How it is marked

Judged as a whole against the brief — whether the recovery attempt used methods appropriate to the artifact, whether the report lets a reader who wasn't there understand what was found and how confident to be about it, and whether the exhibit communicates that clearly to a non-expert audience. A well-documented failed recovery is judged on the same standard as a successful one, not marked down for failing to fully recover the artifact.