National Videogame Museum
Modern history? Natural History? Videogames?
Preserving videogames has infiltrated the consciousness of some game fans the way Snake infiltrates Shadow Moses, slowly and in a wetsuit—maybe not the second part. But the nation that videogames are being lost to time, and by extension parts of culture. With the march of the ephemeral digital-only offerings in the videogame industry well and truly rampaging like some dread horde, the miragification of titles (and more besides) is only getting more likely, but that’s led some people to want to do something about it. One such example could be the National Videogame Museum of Sheffield, England. The museum is rolling out the ‘Behind the Screens – the first effort to create a national archive of video game design’, the BBC reports.
John O’Shea (no, not that one Man Utd. Fans) of the Nation Videogames Museum explained that the institute maintains a lot of hardware and that ‘If you think about a game like Space Invaders, it includes electronics, computer coding, but the materials break down over time so we have our engineers caring for that’.
Nick Poole of UK Interactive Entertainment spoke of how videogames are indeed a part of cultural in the modern day, ‘This is a cultural medium that’s defining culture for billions of players around the world daily’.
And that’s certainly the case. Not all culture may be equal, and certainly the contributions of any game or developer to the collective culture over another is up for debate, but one thing that isn’t is that videogames are a current in the river, and pretty big one at that—I think that’s worth taking another look at.
Playing videogames, writing about videogames, considering videogames—that about sums it up. Videogames are the one hobby that I’ve kept since I was only little, zapping ducks on the NES or knocking out MR. X. And when I’m not enjoying classics from the bit generation of games or checking out those earliest of polygons, I’m probably playing something from today’s age of modern gaming: if I’m not complaining about it. Something I’m doing at the moment? Battling through the Bitmap Bureau Collection.
