Play’s Republic

I recently read an article on some game studies professors who are trying to get a set of video games considered for preservation by the Library of Congress as important cultural artifacts.
Here’s a NYtimes article on this topic.

Here’s their list of their choices:
“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) and Sensible World of Soccer (1994).”

Now there are all sorts of things to talk about with this concept. The most hotly debated is what games should/should not have been on the list. Pong? Zelda? The authors (well, one of them, one who runs a video game blog) has defended some of the choices, saying that it wasn’t always the first game to do something that was chosen, but the first one which made an impact (i.e.:Wolfenstein 3D was really the first first-person shooter, but Doom was the first one to make a big splash and define the genre), but I think that debates about the content of the list will never end (Sensible World of Soccer? I’ve never even heard of that one!). But that is probably the least intersting (although possibly most fun) debate to have.

The real debate (or, at least one of them) is what good does such a video game ‘canon’ do for video game studies? In other disciplines (religion, literature, etc), a canon provides a set of authoritative texts which are considered most influential, and form the basis for all ‘valid’ studies in that discipline. Now, certainly, one of the goals of these scholars in creating this list is to give further validity to Video Game Studies as a Discipline in the academic institution. This gives an external value to such a list, a way of ‘dressing up’ Video Game Studies to be just like it’s big brothers. But is there any internal value to the discipline of having such a list, especially one with only 10 games on it?

I’m not so certain that there is. Games have a huge variety, and to limit the discussion in such a way would be harmful. There will always be comparisons made between games. Comparing newer versus older technology, open ended versus linear gameplay, and multiplayer versus singleplayer games are all comparisons that can be made. But do we need to establish a set of games which will form the core of game studies? I don’t even see how this could be done, in any real academic sense.

I think that calling it a canon is a mistake. Call it a list of important games, call it a list of cultural artifacts that need to be preserved, but trying to give it an academic label such as ‘canon’ will cause problems. Especially since it is not the NYTimes writer who called it such, but one of the creators of the list, although he was a game designer, not an academic.

What are better ways of creating a canon? Perhaps creating two, one of Narrative or genre based approaches (puzzle, adventure, fighting, etc), and one of ludic or gameplay approaches(first person, text based, linear, etc), and games could then be discussed as the intersection of various elements of each list. Then they could be compared to other games with such characteristics. The canon would be the elements (or units, to link with this weeks reading) that would be used for the discussion of the relationship between that game and other games, or other cultural elements.

However, you can’t get a genre recognised by the Library of Congress, so this approach doesn’t help with the legitimization function, which is probably what they were mostly concerned about.