That’s the video pitch for the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment in San Fransisco. MADE is raising money right now on Kickstarter to rent out a space where they can set up the Museum (as of this writing they had 50 more days and only $8,000 more to go.) I’ve already given money to the program. I’m writing this though to tell you why you should to.
Unlike books, movies, music, paintings, sculptures, and every other artistic work. Video games don’t have museums, galleries, libraries, or archives to preserve them. They don’t even have the recognition of being works of art in many circles. Videogames, as seen by the mainstream, are just more disposable entertainment. Sadly, this view is too often held even by game designers and publishers who have been only too happy to condemn design documents, artwork, and code to the trash heap.
This problem is compounded by videogames digital nature. Digital storage mediums degrade at a rate that would give archivists heart-attacks. The hard- and soft-ware necessary to run much of this code does not only degrade with time, but some of it is irreplaceable and no one knows how to repair or maintain it. Code can be preserved but art has to be delivered in a context and much of it is being consigned into landfills or recycled at e-waste centers.
That’s where MADE comes in! They want to not only preserve videogames as artistic works but to present them in their original context. Old Sierra On-line games running in DOS, Atari 2400s hooked up to old CRT televisions, etc.
To read more about the preservation crisis that the video games industry is facing please see John Anderson’s articles on the subject [1, 2]
I know that the space MADE sets up is going to be small. But, I can envision a day when MADE is just as large and important as the MoMA, or Smithsonian and where people will come to see and experience the work of past designers who were able to meld story, art, and interaction into what we so commonly call “games.”
I know you’ve got five dollars lying around you aren’t using, so why haven’t you clicked over to Kickstarter and helped preserved our heritage?
