Dice have functioned the same way for thousands of years: Roll a die and receive a random result. From determining how far you can move in Monopoly to whether you pass a speech check in Disco Elysium, the generation of random numbers to decide a discrete outcome remains central.
“Games today are just the latest incarnation of a long tradition chipping away at different genres, forms, and approaches to the development of interactive media,” says Doug Brown, director of the Games Academy at Falmouth University. “A tradition whose analogue gaming roots extend back further than most literature.”
Whether we should preserve Neolithic dice is not up for debate, so why is the importance of video game preservation so difficult to quantify in the mainstream, despite the precedent of similar efforts in other media?
I ask Michael Pennington, curator at the National Videogame Museum in Sheffield, why we should preserve games at all. “It would be practically impossible to tell the history of the late 20th and early 21st century without discussing the cultural, economic, social, and technological impact of video games,” he says. “It is vital that future generations of game developers and game industry professionals have access to historical game development resources and reference material.”
WIRED asked preservationists about video games, and what they’re doing to ensure that future generations have access to the cultural artifacts shaping society today.
“As a purely technological challenge,” Brown says, “archiving and preserving video games is a massive task, given how dependent the medium is on a whole stack of other, complementary technologies, hardware, and software.”
It’s easier to imagine the challenges of physical preservation. We’ve all seen Indiana Jones, and we know how fragile artifacts from the past can be. But as gaming increasingly focuses on digital distribution, those challenges start to feel more abstract.
“Digital games, even some from only a few years ago, are often more difficult to preserve than games that came out in the 1980s and 1990s,” Pennington tells me. It’s rare for games to be released in a finished state. Rather, they become living objects subject to constant update and modification. It makes it difficult to pin down what exactly to preserve. “Part of the challenge of game preservation,” Pennington continues, “is to keep the scope broad enough.”
We can no longer assume that a physical copy of a game will include the complete video game. Even the most fragile artifacts from two decades ago “are more reliable than just digitally distributed games,” says Niklas Nylund, a researcher at the Finnish Museum of Games, “since those are dependent on DRM systems and server-based computing, which makes them impossible to play once the IP owner removes access to them.”
Loss of access is quickly becoming a reality, as Nintendo plans to shutter the WiiU and 3DS eShops in 2023. Archivist Vojtěch “sCZther” Straka acknowledges how difficult these closures can make preservation, but he also suggests it provides clarity. “We now have a ballpark value of about 12 years of support,” he says. “In some ways, it’s good for discussion about preservation, as it brings a sense of urgency to the matter.”
For console and PC preservationists worried whether to preserve a single version of a game or as many as possible within that time frame, his work preserving mobile games can offer some perspective. While many games get a few updates a year, in the case of dump phones (to which games were distributed to limited hardware via SMS), Straka can look at thousands of implementations of a single application.
He is philosophical about the challenge. “The problem with any preservation is that you never get everything,” Straka says. “As for what’s important? I don’t want to decide that. The future will. My goal is to grab as much as I can.”
He believes a more systematic process should be implemented going forward, one that “needs to be both an obligation and supported from the outside.”
Baking preservation into the development process could help. Natalia Kovalainen is chief archivist at Embracer’s new Games Archive. When I ask what the future of preservation looks like, she suggests that it will be not so different from today. Change will take time, she says, because games are a “medium most creators don’t normally think about preserving.” Still, Kovalainen believes “the best way to preserve is from the source.” To help that along, “we should also make preservation easy; it should be easy to do the right thing.”
Brown also believes the onus should be on developers and studios, suggesting preservation could and should be integrated into the approval process. “Console publishing approval and app store submission are the natural points in the game development pipeline where archiving could be built in,” he says.
With so many disparate groups attacking the problem, I ask Brown whether a more centralized effort might help things along.
“A true games archive and library, or at least a major curated collection, like the Bodleian Library, would be an amazing project,” he tells me. He’s quick to add, however, that any centralized collection comes with its own challenges—especially financial. John O’Shea, creative director of the National Videogame Museum, explains that the museum still relies “heavily on publicly available grants, support from patrons, and revenue generated through our box office and shop.”
Many traditional institutions are subsidized by government funds. For instance, the Tate in London receives yearly funding from the UK Department of Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport. It’s easy to imagine the challenges of managing a collection without meaningful state support.
As a result, several institutions may consider what can be preserved not by version numbers, but within economic and spatial constraints. The Syd Bolton Collection, part of the University of Toronto Mississauga’s preservation program, holds “14,000 video games and hundreds of consoles and systems, along with over 5,000 issues of game magazines, hundreds of books and literature, peripherals, and related technology, materials, and documents,” according to its website. The cataloging of that media represents an enormous challenge in itself. The collection’s curator, Chris Young, is head of UT Mississauga’s Collections & Digital Scholarship. He sees it as a question of priorities:
“For us, it won’t be possible to preserve every game in that regard, and certainly not every version or instance of a game, as it’s continually updated and modified,” Young says. “I think our focus will eventually shift to developing a local collection for games made and released by Canada, Ontario, and Toronto-based developers and publishers.”
Niklas Nylund tells me this could become the norm for many institutions as we consider the ecological implications of ad hoc, mass digital storage. “In a world where the environmental impact of computer systems is increasingly under scrutiny,” he says, such storage of digital games “might not be a viable way to go forward.”
Rather, he proposes a long-term triage in which we “concentrate on preserving certain key games that help to understand the past.” This would not necessarily prioritize the most well-loved games, but games that “convey facts about the past.” But criteria for such a selection process remains uncertain, especially among disparate preservation efforts.
For Pennington, however, “emulation is the key to unlocking the future of preservation.” The power to present accurate facsimiles of games outside their original hardware is incredibly valuable, but as gaming hardware evolves and becomes more difficult to emulate, emulation may only be feasible for older hardware. As Nylund stresses, “We do need to make sure that the quality of the emulation is good enough so that it doesn’t paint a false picture of how games operate.”
Ultimately, the legal ramifications of emulation may prove insurmountable. As corporations try to preserve the value of their IPs, preservation can feel at odds with corporate interests. But it’s also an area in which Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft could get involved. That could take the form of lobbying for clearer legislation—fair use laws in many countries ostensibly allow academics to make copies of games, but it’s legally untested—allowing access to their own archives, or simply recognizing that without transparent preservation on their part the industry requires ad hoc (and maybe more buccaneering) solutions.
There is a possibility that the future of preservation isn’t playable and certain properties might not be saved. At that point, elements like video and other recordings become incredibly powerful tools for demonstrating what gaming looks like in 2022.
It’s something preservationists are considering. “We could say there is a documentary approach to game preservation,” Pennington says, one “that thinks about cultural meanings, or the social and economic aspects of games.”
Preservationists like Straka already collect physical and digital ephemera, like “trailers, advertisements, press kits, or magazine reviews,” all of which provide context and complement existing practices.
Niklas Nylund suggests these materials, be they game manuals or forum discussions, “might be the only sources available to shed light on how the games were understood when they came out.”
Many of us understand preservation solely as playing old games beyond their ostensible lifecycle, but Straka says that’s the “layperson’s understanding” of preservation. According to him, “the context and the story of the thing is as much, if not more, important.”
It’s difficult to pin down a specific shape for preservation in 10, 20, or 50 years. Preservationists remain cautious, fixed on the present, and pragmatic about what’s needed. More. More money, more legislative freedom, more resources—and more people. There have never been more people working in preservation, but it’s still not enough. “With more people getting involved,” Jonas Rosland, executive director of Hit Save!, says, “The more we can preserve for the future.”
Beyond the technical and legal challenges, video game preservation is a human endeavor concerned with capturing human stories.
“What I cherish is how there are efforts to make digital objects meaningful,” Straka says. “A lot of what I do may be important to someone in decades. But most of the stories of products, of technologies, they are ultimately human stories. Like all stories. They are products of hopes and ingenuity, and right now we are able to talk to those people and tie that story to the digital object that is, by itself, very shallow.”
Better legislation could help, along with greater collaboration and transparency from larger entities, and making preservation part of the development process. But what really represents the future of video game preservation is—the people.
