Video games, while a digital art, live on physical media. Whether cartridge, magnetic tape or floppy disk, they degrade. Without care and study, they disappear and cannot be played again. While it might be possible to preserve play using emulation or video captures, scholars need to consider every option at their disposal to preserve video games for future study. This includes securing original versions of games and ephemera, recording play, interviewing game creators, and players, and much more. This article develops a new approach to conceptualise video games as material and cultural heritage, and proposes a methodology for their study, especially those for which there is no original version left.
Though previously overlooked by academia, scholars from a wide array of fields now consider videogames as a serious subject of inquiry. The emergence of game studies as a standalone discipline has led to the publication of high-quality work on the medium, yet the field of videogame history is still immature. Initial attempts to introduce critical historical analysis of videogames in a field dominated by journalistic accounts were themselves plagued by an overemphasis on videogame canons and on the United States and Japan. In effect, early writings by videogame historians resembled “great man” theory, something one could qualify as “great game” theory. Over the last decade, this situation has started to be redressed and there are now growing efforts to produce solid historical scholarship on videogames. Still, game scholars and game historians need to collaborate, engage in conversation, and develop and adapt proper methods to conduct historical research on videogames in order to write relevant histories of this relatively young medium.
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