Is That Just Some Game? No, It’s a Cultural Artifact
 When Henry Lowood, curator of the History of Science and Technology
Collections at Stanford University, started preserving video games and
video-game artifacts in 1998 he thought it was closer to professional oblivion
than a bold new move into the future.
In just a few years, however, Mr. Lowood’s notion that video games were
something with a history worth preserving and a culture worth studying has gone
from absurd to worthy of consideration by the Library of Congress.
On Thursday at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Mr.
Lowood announced a game canon, an idea that grew out of a proposal submitted to
the Library of Congress in September 2006 by a consortium made up of Stanford,
the University of Maryland and the University of Illinois.
“Creating this list is an assertion that digital games have a cultural
significance and a historical significance,” Mr. Lowood said in an interview.
And if that is acknowledged, he said, “maybe we should do something about
preserving them.”
Mr. Lowood and the four members of his committee — the game designers Warren
Spector and Steve Meretzky; Matteo Bittanti, an academic researcher; and
Christopher Grant, a game journalist — announced their list of the 10 most
important video games of all time:
- Spacewar! (1962),
- Star Raiders (1979),
- Zork (1980),
- Tetris (1985),
- SimCity (1989),
- Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990),
- Civilization I/II (1991),
- Doom (1993),
- Warcraft series (beginning 1994)
- Sensible World of Soccer (1994).
Mr. Lowood’s canon was closely modeled on the work of the National Film
Preservation Board, which every year compiles a list of films to be added to the
National Film Registry, managed by the Library of Congress since 1989 (a
consequence of the National Film Preservation Act, passed in 1988). The first
list of films included “Casablanca,” “Citizen Kane,” “The Searchers” and “Nanook
of the North.”
 Almost all of the games on the Lowood list represent the beginning of a genre
still vital in the video game industry. Spacewar!, for example, created by a
group of early computer programmers at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, was the first multiplayer, competitive game, and the first action
game too. The first three Warcraft games represent the introduction of real-time
strategy overlaid on a narrative; and Zork introduced the world to the adventure
game.
SimCity helped establish the genre known as god games, in which players take
on an omnipotent role, controlling the game world rather than simply
participating in it. It also broke convention by refusing to establish criteria
for winning, leaving the decision of what constituted success up to the player.
SimCity was selected by Mr. Bittanti, a researcher at the Humanities Lab at
Stanford who works with Mr. Lowood. The game is “one of the most important art
works of the 20th century,” Mr. Bittanti said, adding: “It completely reinvented
the whole notion of games. And then it transcended the game world to become a
cultural phenomenon.”
SimCity and its four follow-ups have sold 17 million copies, and the
franchise it spawned, the Sims, has sold 85 million copies.
Mr. Grant, the editor of the popular Web site www.joystiq.com, who selected
Super Mario Bros. 3, said the game was important for its nonlinear play, a
mainstay of contemporary games, and new features like the ability to move both
backward and forward.
Mr. Lowood said that preserving video games presented certain challenges. For
example the hardware that games are played on changes so frequently that there
are already thousands that can only be played through computer programs called
emulators, which, while readily available on the Internet, technically violate
copyright laws.
“We have to be really careful here because the technology is just going to
make this harder for us,” Mr. Spector said. “The game canon is a way of saying,
this is the stuff we have to protect first.”
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