Game Preservation

[György Dudas]

I am afraid, but I think that 50 years from now, none of our games will work anymore. 50 years at most.

[Thomas]

You can still pay all c64 games (although it takes some effort) and they are 30 years old There are games that are even older still, for instnace the original Adventure (father of all adventure games) is still possible to play, and it was released in 1977 (35 years old!).

The biggest problem I think is not the games themselves, but the input. For instance playing any N64 game is hard because available controllers are not that appropriate. It will be even harder for wii games, guitar hero etc. I think that 50 years from now, there will still be many games of today available, especially PC Games, although they might not be super easy to run.

While games as a medium is special in hardness to preserve, other media such as music and movies are not all that different. For instance many early movies have been lost due to the films being very inflammable.

[Michaël Samyn]

I console myself by thinking of video games and other computer based art works as performance art. A dance piece can be seen once and then it's gone. I will forever regret never having seen Nijinsky perform, or even Pina Bausch. At least in the case of the latter, some film recordings remain. But the real art of dance, theater and music concerts evaporates the minute after the curtains close. Video games are a bit like that, not just because they only really happen when somebody is playing them, but also because the hardware changes continuously. An extinct games console is not unlike a dead dancer.

[God at play]

This may seem a bit odd, but I take an even harsher stance than Michaël. I think it's perfectly ok that some things die quickly and aren't easily preserved. It leaves some mystery in the world.

I personally like the idea of some obscure artwork being buried somewhere, and then years later an adventurous person makes an exciting discovery and unearths it.

[Michaël Samyn]

Yeah, you're right. Maybe we shouldn't be hoarding all this stuff like hamsters.

Maybe we should try harder for the art to become part of living culture rather than some archive.