As the video game industry continues its sustained march to becoming the world’s dominant form of entertainment, it is important to remember medium’s history, and to treat the games of the past, no matter their relevance or cultural importance, as art just as worthy of preservation as any other form. Video games serve as cultural artifacts in the same way that film, literature, or visual art do – they provide a window into the zeitgeist of their time, and allow one to trace the lineage of the game medium, and of its societal effects, back to the source. Despite the medium of video games taking up a constantly expanding amount of space in our collective cultural consciousness regarding art and media, there remains a massive discrepancy between how preservation is treated within games when compared to essentially any other artistic medium which remains culturally relevant. The game industry has shown itself to be largely apathetic to its own preservation, with only a tiny smattering of the medium’s history being preserved solely for its ability to be mined for future profit. While this is, of course, also true of film, or of any other medium that has become entwined with global capital – games are far worse at preserving their history than any other artform. When viewing games through the lens of cultural artifacts, this becomes a far more pressing issue than if games are taken with the flippant, disposable attitude often displayed by publishers. The slow death of game history, as technology advances, is something that seems inevitable – but thankfully, the medium is being preserved, though often through dubiously legal means. The community of game enthusiasts and preservationists have taken up the mantle for saving the history of games through emulation and free digital preservation – which have been fought against tooth-and-nail by the game industry. Video games are now in a peculiar position, where not only is more and more of their history becoming lost by the day, but the game industry itself is actively battling against the safety of that history – which at this point, can only be fully maintained through piracy

While there remains a thorough, legal distribution network for a massive amount of existing film, television, literature, and other popular media – the same cannot be said for games. Though there certainly are a wide variety of legal ways to play old games, these represent a miniscule amount of the full breadth of game history, even when only considering the catalogs of the massive publishers which most often re-release their games onto current platforms and storefronts. While this is certainly true to some extent in any medium, with there still being a considerable amount of films which were only ever released on VHS or DVD, or books which only received a single printing, for example – these “lost” pieces of media can be far more easily transferred to digital platforms and experienced, even if through extralegal means, than video games have ever been able to. Much of this difficulty is inherent to the medium of games, in that unlike essentially any other form of media, each game can only be played on the specific hardware it is meant for – or that hardware must be recreated to some degree. Even though games are now perhaps our most relevant artistic medium, our collective view of its history has not evolved in step with that cultural proliferation, with older games often treated as simply archaic and disposable – or, more recently, simply as a tool of financial speculation completely divorced from the games themselves set alongside a broader trend of mining millennial nostalgia for profit.

While any film on VHS format, for example, can be viewed on any VHS player and easily ripped onto YouTube or other file sharing platforms and experienced through that medium, a Super Nintendo game, for example can only be played on a Super Nintendo console, and while files from cartridges and other forms of storage media used by older games can be ripped using specialized hardware and preserved, these files are useless on their own without a dedicated digital recreation of the hardware it is meant for, an emulator, or a ground-up port of the game onto modern platforms. While there has been a massive amount of progress made on emulating and making accessible the tools to play old games, especially ones on platforms which remain broadly popular or culturally relevant, almost all of this progress has been made through dubiously legal means, by hobbyists and enthusiasts who have no permission from the companies which own the rights to the original hardware or games on these platforms. In fact, a great deal of effort has been made by massive game companies to eliminate free emulation and the distribution of game files – despite these companies often having no plans to legally distribute these games. Of course, the crackdown on illegal distribution of media by copyright holders is well within their rights, and arguably obligatory – but when there is often no other option to preserve these games considering the often complete apathy of game publishers towards their own backcatalogs, it results in game companies actively fighting against the preservation of their own medium and history. 

This issue becomes even more pressing as a larger and larger portion of games are released only on closed digital platforms, where games can be removed from sale and distribution at any time, or entire storefronts can be closed forever, taking all of the games released on those platforms along with them. Unlike with games pre-digital distribution, where even if they are increasingly difficult to find, they can still theoretically be played legally – without expressed effort from the creators and copyright holders of these games, piracy will inevitably become the only way to experience digital games upon the deaths of the closed systems they inhabit. Unfortunately, sometimes even preservation through piracy is incredibly difficult, especially when it comes to more obscure or older digital platforms – an example being the recent scramble of the Tokyo-based Games Preservation Society and US-based Video Game History Foundation, fully community-driven organizations, to preserve the games of the Japan-only i-mode cell phone game service after its closure was announced months before expected. Platforms like early cell-phones are preludes to the upcoming issues which will inevitably broadly appear in the future of games preservation.

 As documented in an open letter by a game preservation hobbyist only going under the pseudonym “RockmanCosmo”, and publicized by the Video Game History Foundation – exemplifying and discussing up another large issue of game preservation, the relegation of what should be important work in cultural conservation, which by all rights should be headed by larger academic institutions, to amateur hobbyists and small community-funded organizations: “Currently, there are small, independent preservation projects that are working to design methods to rescue these games. Some of the more extraneous work involves finding ways to decrypt files on SD cards or reverse-engineering phone software. Needless to say, it’s an increasingly daunting task, [exacerbated] by the fact that the fate of an entire ecosystem of niche video games rests on the shoulders of a mere handful of passionate hobbyists.” As these older platforms show, our increasing reliance on digital distribution, while continuing the model of games requiring diffuse, separate hardware, and publishers continuing to remain largely apathetic to their own history, leaves the medium of games open a bevy of complications regarding the safety of their history, and risks a larger erasure of its recent history than ever before – equivalent only to the massive loss of silent films released at the turn of the 20th century. 

Perhaps most concerning is the sustained push towards cloud gaming and game streaming throughout the past decade by companies like Sony, Google, and Amazon – which could arguably make a wider spectrum of games available to a mass audience, but in turn, making games proprietary to these platforms only exacerbates the future loss when these platforms inevitably end support, leaving the broader community with absolutely no way to preserve these games as the files are hosted on central servers only accessible to the platform holders and game publishers. In fact, the medium of games, just as with film and television, is seeing a gradual move away from the idea of “ownership” in the traditional sense at all, with purchasers of cloud games only essentially only receiving access to rent said game for an indefinite period of time. This issue extends to, in perhaps its most relevant form, free-to-play or online-only games, which often rely entirely on developers’ central servers – and already there have been countless examples of developers ending support for these games leading to them becoming completely inaccessible, unable to be preserved at all. The continued existence of these games is entirely contingent on their sustained popularity – and, by consequence, we will inevitably reach a point in history where some of the most culturally important and successful games in the medium’s history, such as Fortnite or League of Legends, become entirely inaccessible because of their inherently online-only nature.

In fact, despite or even because of the medium’s increased centrality in our cultural understanding, the now almost-complete takeover of digital distribution within games is seeming to make them even more disposable in our minds. This certainly extends to all forms of art and media in the digital age, but without the tangibility and physicality of games to serve as a vessel and reminder for our memories and experiences for them, we are far more easily able to move on from and even forget those experiences, rendering the need for preservation a moot one. 

A digital purchase of a game doesn’t give one that true feeling of “owning” a game, which publishers are more than happy with – as shown through the increased push towards cloud services and free-to-play “live service” games, a move towards a new system of forced rental, where profits are completely controlled by publisher and the purchaser of the game no longer has any rights to that product outside of the terms of said publisher, is a profitable one. However, this further puts at risk the ability for future generations to experience these games in their intended form, or at all – something which most game companies seem to lack an iota of concern with, as shown by the innumerable examples of online games (especially ones by massive publishers), controlled entirely by a central server, being shut down and completely disposed of just years or even months after release. As Saara Toivonen and Olli Sotamaa detail from their research in Of discs boxes and cartridges: the material life of digital games: “The experience of having the rights of possession is not limited to the existence of a game; it is also related to the reliability of use. Regarding physical copies, it was mentioned that ”nobody can take them away” (Male, 21 years), whereas regarding downloads, the respondents felt that being dependent on the downloading service even after purchasing the game weakens their rights of possession to the game, and therefore also weakens their experience of ownership.” (p. 3). As this “right of possession” slips further and further away from consumers as the game industry evolves, not only does game preservation become almost impossible in a practical sense, but our attitude towards games changes – from singular artistic works to disposable, replaceable commodities.

A thorough preservation of the video game medium’s past is not only vital for understanding and appreciating that past, but also for paving the future of games –  analyzing both the flaws that have been worked through over the decades and the lost mechanisms of gameplay and storytelling which make these games unique and worthwhile, so the medium’s further progression can be defined not by efficiency of capitalist extraction, but by what makes games truly special as art. The current state of the games industry is one of manufactured consent in its purest form, where trends in game design are not even determined by perceived popularity, but simply by how much money can be mined from a single individual player. Games attempting to profit of the Destiny model of “looter-shooter” live service games, such as perhaps the most prominent example in EA and BioWare’s Anthem, have proven to be commercial failures – because the decisions to create these games were not based on the popularity of Destiny-style games (which while in the best cases are extremely successful, are not the type of universal blockbuster hits which other genres have proven to be), but by the model’s sheer profitability as an engine to be continually mined for profit past a consumer’s initial purchase. As Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky detailed in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, “the mass media are interested in attracting audiences with buying power, not audiences per se; it is affluent audiences that spark advertiser interest today, as in the nineteenth century. The idea that the drive for large audiences makes the mass media “democratic” thus suffers from the initial weakness that its political analogue is a voting system weighted by income!” (p. 16).

The history of the video game medium is one of developers constantly bashing up against the walls of what is technologically and artistically possible – and while the “primitive” graphics, inherently simpler storytelling, and lack of many basic quality-of-life elements, which old games often had by necessity, may be deemed now as archaic or outdated – but it is this quality of constantly pushing against what is possible is what has allowed the medium of games to evolve. Instead of a hindrance, these affordances of old games are what truly makes them special, and valuable from a historical perspective. As Jenny L. Davis defines them in How Artifacts Afford, “affordances mediate between a technology’s features and its outcomes. Technologies don’t make people do things but instead, push, pull, enable, and constrain. Affordances are how objects shape action for socially situated subjects.” By this metric, there is perhaps no medium defined more by affordances than video games, a constantly shifting landscape of what is and isn’t considered “possible” within games – though it is not always a forwardly progressing one. If the affordances of games are to be expanded, we must analyze what led to today’s affordances within game being possible, and how throughout the medium’s, artists and developers within the medium have been able to harness (comparatively) limiting affordances in ways which expand those affordances in ways outside of previously established norms and conventions of games.

Video games, despite how much they have evolved, are still a young medium, and still have yet to truly form an artistic vocabulary all their own. Games, or at least the most high-profile ones, remained locked into artistic trends aped from film and drawing upon an increasingly dwindling selection of popular genres and themes. While terminology and technology has changed, in a broad sense, Janet H. Murray’s words in 1997’s Hamlet on the Holodeck remain true: “One of the lessons we can learn from the history of film is that additive formulations like “photo-play” or the contemporary catshall “multimedia” or a sign that the medium is in an early stage of development and it is still depending on the format derived from earlier technologies instead of exploiting its own expressive power.” (p. 69). A preservation and carrying into the future of games history is essential if games wish to fully build their own artistic repertoire, one unbound by conventions of other mediums like film, and not constrained by the tiny amount of avenues for gameplay and storytelling deemed most profitable.  Unless a broader understanding of the true artistic possibilities of the game medium can be reached, games are doomed to be further divorced from the idea that they are distinct, unique works at all, instead simply existing as links in a larger chain of profit – and the only way for us to collectively reach such an understanding is through an accessible, thoroughly preserved record of the games past. If we ever truly wish for games to be different than they are now, to become a more open and expressive medium – their creators must understand fully what they are, and how they got to this point – and to understand the paths left unexplored and underappreciated which can build towards that better future.

Bibliography:

Toivonen, Saara, and Olli Sotamaa. “Of Discs, Boxes and Cartridges: The Material Life of Digital Games.” Proceedings of Think Design Play: The Fifth International Conference of the Digital Research Association (DIGRA), 2011, https://doi.org/http://www.digra.org/dl/db/11312.23263.pdf.

Murray, Janet H. “From Additive to Expressive Form.” Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1997, pp. 68–90. 

Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. “A Propaganda Model.” Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Pantheon Books, New York City, NY, 1988, pp. 1–36. 

Video Game History Foundation [@GameHistoryOrg]. “With the i-mode website shutting down at the end of the month, the folks at Rockman Corner wanted to spread awareness for an important preservation project they’re working on. DoCoMo’s multimedia phone service, i-mode, hosted video games from dozens of well-known franchises.” Twitter, 17 November 2021, https://twitter.com/GameHistoryOrg/status/1461065735615119360.

RockmanCosmo. An Open Letter to Video Game Preservation Organizations on I-Mode Preservation, 18 Oct. 2021, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nnoBi6LJ_y7QJNP42il5H4IsjYl1UpyvJ9EFn5m0QlI/.