This article is part of an ongoing series about video game preservation. Read my primer on video game preservation here.
The categorization of video games within the world of media is rather sticky when one mulls it over. A popular catch-all term to refer to archives and libraries that deal with movies, music, videos, and so on is "time based media". But this categorization falls apart when you attempt to apply it to video games, to an extent which I think has been noted by very few scholars.
Think about it. What makes music and film so-called forms of time-based media? It is the fact that they have a specified duration. When you put a record on, it is only so long until the needle runs out of grooves. When you project a film, it is only so long until the leader runs through the sprockets. But does such an endpoint exist in video games? There are certain limitations and regimentations, sure. There are often levels you finish and a story with a designated "finishing" point. But nothing quite like the durational qualities of other audiovisual medias. In fact, the designation of time-based media is designed to exclude the category of a book, but books are far more similar to video games than they are to films in this way. With a book, you can deliberately take your time in certain sections, you can re-read chapters just as you re-read levels. With modern video technology you could, theoretically, perform a similar form of engagement where you speed up, slow down and reverse the footage at will. But that would defeat one of the primary qualities of a film, which is to experience the durational qualities of time. Or, in other words, they are designed with a specific time frame in mind.
The terms originates from art museums encountering the need to exhibit and preserve pieces of media with the aforementioned qualities of running time or duration. You won't find a definition in the dictionary, but you can find definitions tucked away into the websites of major museums. Take Guggenheim's definition, for example:
Contemporary artworks that include video, film, slide, audio, or computer technologies are referred to as time-based media works because they have duration as a dimension and unfold to the viewer over time. Collecting, preserving, and exhibiting these artworks poses complex technical and ethical challenges to conservators. Instability and change are inherent to these artworks, since artist-selected equipment and technologies fail and become obsolete. Moreover, many time-based media artworks are allographic by nature; rather than being composed of a unique original, they exist only when they are installed, so every iteration can be considered a different representation of the artwork. To preserve the fragile identity of time-based media artworks, conservators must proactively manage the degree of change that may be introduced to each (Guggenheim)
So, if you think about it, this designation makes sense for those who work in galleries and museums. But when we talk about long term preservation, archival standards and such, things get a bit more complicated.
Video games are first and foremost games, are they not? Even if they have a clear plot, the player is able to fiddle around for indefinite periods of time all throughout the experience. And it is even increasingly common to have so-called "post-game" content where there's still more "game" after you have completed the main story. The name is quite ironic because it is not that you are in the "post-game" but rather the "post-plot”— the game is the thing you still have left.
Video games bear some resemblance to those of their ancestors, such as board games. But board games, too, operate quite differently. While I would also exclude them from the flimsy "time-based" designation, they are far more dependent on the communal acts of rule setting and maintenance. What I mean by this is that you simply cannot play most board games alone. Once it is something you play alone, it often gets categorized as a toy.
John-Paul Dyson notes in his essay "Toys" that the computational heritage of video games is emphasized over it's inheritance of toy-like qualities. Dyson thoughtfully points out that the existence of an "end point" typically distinguishes a toy from a game, many video games do not have any designated end point at all, so are they not more analogous to games? To compare how we play video games with how we play with toys is, seemingly, to agree with the curmudgeons that videogames are "not art". But, really, it just shows us how little artistic value we see in toys, which are, too, cultural artifacts if not full-fledged pieces of art (I would certainly say they are).
Nick Montfort, in wrestling with how to define an "adventure game" turned to the famous Infocom designer, Graham Nelson's statement that "an adventure game is a crossword at war with a narrative". Montfort recapitulated Nelon's point with his own aphorism, that an adventure game "is a fiction to be solved". And while Montfort was specifically referring to the tradition of adventure gaming in this capacity, I think this is actually the most suitable definition of an electronic game I have ever encountered.
If we were to compare a video game to a toy, neither dolls nor action figures would do. I would say even more complex toys such as doll houses, war games, or card games quite do the trick. The finest parallel I can think of is that of the Rubik's cube and its children or, as they are lovingly called by their users, "twisty puzzles". A single player video game is rather like a twisty puzzle insofar as it is an object of play without a designated time frame or duration, but which does have a designated stage of "completion". We know a completed Rubik's cube when we see one just as we know what a game completed at 100% looks like (that is, if there is an end point in said game). But, even then, the object of play does not disappear. You can continuously toy with it as you wish. There's even a similar type of engagement with rules. You engage with rules designated by the game designers, and you cannot just modify them at will as one does with their "Monopoly house rules", no, breaking the rules of a video game or twisty puzzle involves actually breaking it. It is against the "rules" to take apart the puzzle, rearrange it, and so on. But there is also an understanding that if you break it open, fiddle around with it, and mess with it you have "modified it"— you have created a "mod".
So are video games "time-based media"? Emphatically: no! And neither are twisty puzzles. They are something new, something different. It is this quality which led to the most classic debate in the study of video games, the distinction between "ludology" and "narratology". Diving into that topic is an article in itself, but what I seek to point out here is that that mysterious quality present in both twisty puzzles and video games, in which one "plays" on their own within specific rules in search of a "solution" but is not bound by this search for a solution, this quality (fortunately) already has a name: the ludic.
So how should we categorize video games? How should archives and museums preserve and present them for posterity's sake? I would insist that preserving them as ludic objects will, in fact, be key. Games not only need to be preserved, but how they were played. If a museum preserves a puzzle but not the solution, how can we say to have truly preserved such an object as a cultural product? It is like preserving sheet music as if it were an illustration, ignorant of the fact that it is meant to be played, that its meaning lays dormant until it is animated. Ludic objects demand to preserved not just as objects but as objects contained in a network of meaning which players help construct.
Of course, being someone who actually believes that narratives inform the structure of our mind, I would insist that one engages with a story every time they play with a game or with a puzzle. But a game need not have a story, of course, just as one doesn't need any "lore" to understand the point of a Rubik's cube. Through the course of our playing, though, we construct a story in relation and reference to our object of play.
The twisty and puzzle-y aspects of video games, of course, do not cover their entire distinctive qualities, it is just a helpful analogy to help reframe how we think of a game. For institutions seeking to preserve video games as cultural history, there must be attempts to preserve not only the story presented in the game, but the stories constructed by the players in their engagement, as can be clearly demonstrated to us by considering the task of preserving, say, an MMORRPG.
I am not being cryptic here by insisting we must preserve video games as ludic objects. I am not being poetic when I insist the player experience must, too, be found worthy of preservation. There are very particular ways this hashes out, and there are very specific strategies I wish to explore as I write my way through the field of video game preservation.
Now that we have distinguished what I consider video games to be in an archival context, we can begin a discussion in regards to the shape video game history has taken thus far and the efforts to preserve it.