Video games as historical objects

January 16, 2025

Not all material is created equal

Video games are a difficult media when it comes to historical preservation. Part of this is due to their relative novelty in the temporal space. Video games haven't existed for more than 80~years, and even then, at their earliest we'd barely recognized them. The written word, the most common type of historical material, has existed for millennia. Of course with changing production methods and style and technique, but remaining pretty much the same in how we access it. Avant-garde art might ask us to touch, feel, listen, but for the most part our eyes are all the tools we need to read a book.

This immutability makes these sources accessible. The only thing you really need to read a book, is the book itself, as long as you can read that particular language. This way the primary barrier to preservation is spatial. We need places to put books when we're not actively looking at them, and a place for the activity of looking. For this we have museums and archives. Institutions we as a society understand to be important, wherefore we fund them, make procedures within them, with systems and staff to facilitate the work of the historian. We make copies of books, scans of them, digitally accessible sometimes even from our own home over the internet. I can sit right now and read a newspaper from 1756 in the Danish West Indies as easily as a book from my own shelf.

I am not saying reading historical material is light work. I know I've sat with lettering I could hardly understand, not to speak of the cultural understanding needed to fully appreciate a given context. No, the work is hard, time consuming, frustrating, but the access is easy. Books can be read even with pages missing. It is frustrating, yes, but a page with a sentence blotted out in due to a careless ink spill, still holds most of a page. The ink blot might even tell you something about the care taken when writing the source!

Now let us compare to a video game. Yes, you need the game itself. A piece of software, or a cartridge or other physical media. This needs to be fully intact. If you have a damaged disk, the entire thing might not ever run unless you get lucky. You need a computer or console on which the software can run. These are often proprietary systems (looking at you Nintendo), which might not have been in production for a long time, making their acquisition difficult and sometimes costly. Already you need two different pieces before you can even begin assembling the whole.

The Library of Congress in the USA has determined that CD-ROMs, the primary physical media for a whole host of games, lasts about 100-200 years, and only 70% of discs tested held up to this estimate¹. Some losing their readability in an estimated 15~years. Similarly the Canadian Conservation Institute found that some writable disc formats last only 10-20 years². As you read this there are archives of games slowly becoming unreadable. While video games continue to gain legitimacy as an art form and objects of cultural value, time is running out for the preservation of certain games. Especially those unpopular or otherwise unnoteworthy.

Copying a video game is not always as easy as copying a book. Because of compilation, taking code and turning it into 011001 binary, a process which isn't easily reversible, it can be impossible to find the source code. ROM (read-only memory, also a common abbreviation for a game file) backup devices exist, but are viewed with hostility from game manufacturers. Since they allow the copying of the physical media, and, in theory, could be used by pirates to make illegal copies, there is debate as to their legality. To copy a book, you look at the book, and write the same words elsewhere. You don't even need to know the language.

Now once you have gathered an intact copy of the game you wish to analyse, and the hardware on which it can run, you still need more to understand. So let's talk about...

Gaming literacy

cuphead-journalist https://www.gamerevolution.com/news/349777-game-journalist-bad-cuphead-given-another-shot, accessed 17.01.2025.

It is commonly overlooked by gamers that playing video games takes a high level of skill. A literacy, if you will. Not just being good at games, but basic understanding. Having played many, many, games on the Playstation family, I intuitively understand that X = jump, the south in the compass of buttons on the right of the Dualshock controller. A convention that games with a jump button follow almost religiously. Choosing a different button would be akin to shifting the reading direction right-to-left. The same applies for pressing down on the left stick of the controller meaning sprint or run. Parsing these conventions is a skill that gamers develop over time. We learn how to 'read' games as a language. And the understanding doesn't just relate to the execution of actions. The colours red and blue respectively mean 'health' and 'magic', a long bar of red tells us that the subject has a lot of health points, while a short one implies the opposite. Waterfalls are often the place for hidden paths, and sleeping implies a save state. With these conventions we and the developers communicate implicitly, we speak the same language. Understanding this language lets us understand overt messaging in games.

Not everyone grew up with video games. Entering late means you lack certain skills that are taken for granted. Frustrating as it may be to explain obvious things like “of course eating restores your health” or “why didn't you shoot the red barrel, it blows up?”, it also serves to remind us that intuition is a learned skill. A piece of cake lying on the floor of a dungeon might appear as a well-timed boon to me, a blessing of best health, but take a moment to think how weird that is. If anything, eating dungeon cake should probably upset your stomach to the point of incapacitation but nothing frightens a dragon more than time slowing to a stop while the Dragonborn shoves 8 whole wheels of cheese down their gullet, ready to fight again with renewed fervor.

I have had the absolute pleasure to play with friends who got into gaming late in life. Mostly women, owing to the continuing societal stigmatisation against women in gaming, but that is an essay for another time since I don't feel like seething with anger at the moment. I digress. Showing others how to play, accompanying them on their own journey, helps teach the things we as veterans have forgotten. The why's of our intuition. Which in turn can help us as historians. Understanding that red barrels are explosive isn't the same as understanding why they explode.

Analysing video games as historical objects requires both the skill to succeed, and the nuance to fully grasp the context of decisions made. Gaming literacy allows us to appreciate that a red barrel exploding when shot is par for the course, and that changing the barrel for a crate, or a thorny acorn, is an explicit choice. Games often have overt and covert themes, and just like reading a book and interpreting the blue curtains, games can hold meaning in every bit.

It is not a particularly hot take to say “In order to understand thing, you need to know thing”. I know. But, with video games being primarily made for the purpose of fun, they have a tendency to colour our reading of them.

Cultural evolution

They tell us things about ourselves in much the same way as a popular tv-drama would. Counter-strike has had a presence in the gaming culture since its first days as a Half-Life mod. In CS you buy guns through an interactive menu. As an example let's look at three generations of Counter-Strike: 1.6, CS:GO, and currently CS2. In 1.6 the menu for buying gave a plethora of statistics about the weapon, stats that did not matter for the in-game usage, like muzzle velocity, since bullets don't travel physically in the games. These details are all part of the game's theming.

Evolution of the buy menu from CS 1.6 –> CS:GO –> CS2 counterstrikebuymenu

With CS:GO, they cut away most of them, choosing to keep the stats relevant for gameplay, and not much flavour except country of origin. Finally in CS2 the real-world stats are completely gone, replaced with functional game stats and the flavour being descriptive of the in-game gun rather than its real world counterpart. Counter-strike moved away from realism over 22 years. There are many other points of analysis available with a culturally important game like CS, but this example shows us an evolving want to detach from the original real-world inspiration for the game, and a move towards a more stylized unreality.

Valve's choices in the development of CS can be read in multiple ways. It could be that a large shift in consciousness has made the connection to real violence unpalatable. Maybe a business analyst determined a more arcade feel would lessen criticism, or make it easier to develop skins to sell. While we can't take something like CS's evolution as absolute proof for any of these, it does prepare the ground for us to plant theories.

Games offer up a way to track the prevalence of certain ideas and moods in society. The language used in games to describe the gender of the player character, the choices given for character customization, how many military shooters are published in a year versus chill farming simulators. Art is the mirror of culture, and culture the mirror of art. This self-reinforcing relationship echoes in video games, and for this very reason they are important, legitimate historical objects. And I am excited for the possibilities they carry within.

With love -Ventus

P.s these thoughts do not even come close to covering the totality of games' historical value.

Sources

¹) Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/preservation/scientists/projects/cd_longevity.html, accessed 18.01.2025 ²) Conservation Institute Canada, https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/conservation-preservation-publications/canadian-conservation-institute-notes/longevity-recordable-cds-dvds.html, accessed 18.01.2025