One barrier I can see to the long-term acceptance of video games as a serious art form is the short-life cycles of games. Unlike books, or even movies, games tend to live the brief life of a commercial product. For most games, that period of relevance is usually less than a year. Even for a hit game, after a couple of years, it falls into a sort of nostalgia netherworld.

Look at SimCity or Myst. Both games provided some of the important context for PC gaming of the last 10 years. But neither game gets much attention these days. SimCity has been eclipsed by its spin-off the Sims, and Myst has turned into some sort of embarrassing point in history as gamers tend to look at it as an example of something low-moving and not-fun in the PC’s past.

Of course, both of these games lived with the limitations of the technology of their time, but managed to show new directions for games to come.

In the next 10, 20 or 50 years, it may not even be possible to find playable versions of these games. And even If the nostalgia attraction is great enough to keep these games memorialized as code running on current platforms, it seems doubtful that the most people will be able to see past the low resolution graphics and limited control schemes to understand why these titles were important when they were released.

So, what is the alternative?

Without a sense of history, electronic entertainment will live in steady state of the moment. Each wave of gaming will sit in its own sealed history of the surrounding years. Games will exist in a permanent state of popular culture. Without a history, and without an audience that can appreciate the art form’s history, then there is nothing to anchor thought and opinion in anything other than what you did in recent memory. Think about what this would mean to literature if new books were only thought of in terms of the recent best-seller lists, of if movies only compared themselves against the Oscars of recent memory and never against the historical high-water marks like Citizen Kane?

To a certain degree, this lack of history in games is inevitable because games are held within the gravity of technical change. As technology rushes ahead, games are pulled along for better or worse. So, from a fatalistic point of view, there might not be much to do to save games, to save interactive art and entertainment, from being trapped in a permanent state of the moment, from becoming perma-pop culture. But there do seem to be a few things that would make a difference.

What the art of games needs most of all is an electronic entertainment preservation movement . The fact that games live in a perfect suspended animation of bits and bytes is not enough. We need a professional association that acts to keep old game code available and active on current hardware. Today, that role is played in a legal grey market run by emulator developers and fueled by the passion of dedicated “classic gaming” fans. Providing a legal, and industry-supported preservation platform would help legitimize and popularize the notion of playing old games. This is the first and most important step to preserving more than an informal notion of gaming history.

Making old games available for academic review and teaching would allow scholars to create the right sort of context around the games, and to expose students to the accomplishments of the past. This context and exposure would go a long way toward creating sensitivity to the idea that games have a history.

Beyond the actual effort of building momentum around the notion of preserving games, game writers, whether writing for fan magazines or scholarly journals, should hold themselves to the standard of understand the precedents and not being afraid to refer to them. Of course, making mention of the Space War or Adventure only has teeth if people can actually find these games, and play them. Preferably in a legally accessible way.

And without history, games may have no real future.

For an example of a preservation effort, see The Digital Game Archive