The Keepers Of All Games

Another World

The idea of a collection of a relatively new medium's formative creations is romantic. But, why does the team believe so strongly in its importance, especially when the industry itself seems uninterested. "Maybe it isn't important," says Newman. "We think it is, but maybe it isn't. However, we think it's better to preserve the stuff and later work out it's unimportant than let it disappear and work out later that we should have saved it.

"Second, we'd probably also say that it isn't just gaming's formative history that needs saving. Certainly, we stand to lose plenty of games as well as the stories behind them as their creators pass away - but we stand to lose just as many modern games.

"With digital distribution we see the disappearance of physical media which means there is no material object to preserve, with online patching and updating games change so it is increasingly difficult to work out what the game is as new levels are added and gameplay fixed/changed; with online games we might even ask where the game is and how we could ever archive or preserve it. Even if we could get access to the servers, the gameplay isn't stored on them, it happens and is gone forever. Unless we devise strategies for dealing with and recording gameplay we stand to lose far more than just old games."

But, to play devil's advocate for a moment, in a medium that, unlike many others, is iterative in many of its product releases, is it really important to preserve, say, FIFA '98 when we have FIFA 2011? "The idea that the games industry is in a permanent state of innovation and disruption that sees each new title or hardware platform render that which it replaces obsolete is an interesting and potentially problematic one. In one sense, it doesn't matter to us – FIFA 98 is potentially as interesting as '11, '12 or beyond. They are documents of their time and they represent attitudes towards game design at a specific moment.

"Where it becomes a problem is when we think of the new game being better than the old one. This is an idea that marketing and advertising tends to promote - quite understandably - and it's certainly something we want to challenge. Comparisons with other industries and cultural forms are always difficult but it's worth considering whether we think the same way about old music as we do old games. Despite the apparent technological progress that's happened in the recording studio, we don't automatically denigrate music that didn't have the benefit of 24-bit Pro Tools HD or Autotune. The Beatles albums don't sit in bargain buckets for 99p because they are old or because they don't take advantage of the latest studio technologies."

Wipeout

On of the greatest challenges facing the collection is ensuring the ongoing playability of any video game collection's specimens. Consoles, joypads and peripherals are all made of plastic, which is inherently unstable. Contacts on cartridges and chips corrode and stop functioning while even the data stored on optical discs or EPROMs eventually disappears as the storage media decay.

However, where games present particular challenges is by virtue of their interactivity. Games want to be played and we need to work out what to do with the play. How do we preserve it? Or do we try to preserve the game so that it can be played in the future?

One potential idea the pair is toying with is an oral approach to preserving play, for example with videos of players playing through a game while talking about what they are doing, and describing the cultural context in which they first played a title. "Games do not necessarily have to be playable for their play to be understood by a viewer," says Simons. "Increasingly we believe that play is what we have to capture, not playability."

Newman agrees: "We question that value of making a game available to play in 100+ years time when the player may be so utterly divorced from the lived reality of the game as it was. It isn't just about seeing Jet Set Willy in the historical context of the miner's strike in the 1980s, or even as a sequel to Manic Miner. We also forget how much knowledge you need to play games. Take a modern beat-em-up. It relies so heavily on references to Street Fighter II in its control system that without that knowledge, it is difficult to properly appreciate and certainly difficult to play."

"Although it is typically the goal of games preservation, we're not sure whether trying to ensure that games are playable in the future is necessarily the best objective. We're not saying we shouldn't do that but just that we might learn as much from seeing them being played by the players that really knew them, hearing those people talk about them etc. We know this idea is a little off-the-wall and isn't the official position of the National Videogames Archive, but we think it's possible that 'non-interactive' media like gameplay videos might be a central part of the interpretative strategy for videogames as we move forwards."

Whether through storing consoles and game boxes in warehouses, or oral documentaries of playthroughs on YouTube, few who truly care about video games would argue against the value in preserving the tapestry of our medium's evolution. And beyond that, interesting video games remain interesting. The idea that new creations supersede old ones is a fallacy. The National Videogame Archive is a project not only to preserve that heritage as a museum, but also to acknowledge the fact that that many video games -- despite what their publishers might want us to believe as they promote the next big thing, and the next, and the next again -- offer timeless experiences. They just need someone to bottle them.