When does something become history? At what point do we, does society, recognize a cultural object and invest resources in preserving it? In a digital world where our objects of culture are expressed in bits and bytes, do video games belong in a museum? The beauty of the digital medium is that images don't fade and manuscripts don't decay. However, file formats do change and old disks lose data. The possibility exists that in a generation or two there will be no working machines that could play pong.  

An article in this month's Atlantic Monthly documents the efforts of various organizations in the historical preservation of video games. The Library of Congress and Linden Labs, the makers of Second Life, joined forces two years ago with a consortium of universities to develop standards for the preservation of video games. The University of Texas has a video game archive that collects more than code. It collects developer notes, boxes, sketches, all the objects involved in the game development process. There's a video game museum in Berlin.

Most of these efforts acknowledge that a video game is more than its data, more than the code that makes it run. A team at Georgia Tech recently created an emulator that plays old games on current computers but gives them a fuzzy, grainy look as if they were being played on an old TV.

Is preservation of video games the same as the preservation of old movie ? Yes and no. It depends on the type of game. Aside from Pong, which carries historical importance as the first, there are games where enjoying the game mechanic is the only goal. But there are games where the mechanics are means to an experience. The next generation wont get excited about playing duck hunt, by then games will be completely immersive and totally realistic, but if the games are preserved properly they  will appreciate the experience of duck hunt the same way we appreciate an old movie even though it's not in 3D or surround sound.  

It's about preserving the experience of the movie, the emotion it creates. That's what the team at Georgia Tech appreciated. The fuzziness of their emulator isn't a gimmick - it's about re-creating the experience beyond the code. It's about the memory of sitting in my friend's basement in front of a tiny TV with square controllers wired to a box and playing Super Mario Brothers for endless hours.

This is an important notion for us at the MDM, for creators. It's so easy to get caught up in the capability of technology, the features you can add, the new mechanics you can create. Often this feature creep is at the expense of experience. A feature in a website or a mechanic in a game is only valuable if it adds to the experience, the emotion of the moment. It's only when we can achieve this that our creations deserve to become objects of history and will be worth talking about generations from now.

Ryan Nadel is a second year student in the MDM program