Dice have functioned the same way for thousands of years: Roll a die and receive a random result. From determining how far you can move in Monopoly to whether you pass a speech check in Disco Elysium, the generation of random numbers to decide a discrete outcome remains central.
“Games today are just the latest incarnation of a long tradition chipping away at different genres, forms, and approaches to the development of interactive media,” says Doug Brown, director of the Games Academy at Falmouth University. “A tradition whose analogue gaming roots extend back further than most literature.”
Whether we should preserve Neolithic dice is not up for debate, so why is the importance of video game preservation so difficult to quantify in the mainstream, despite the precedent of similar efforts in other media?
I ask Michael Pennington, curator at the National Videogame Museum in Sheffield, why we should preserve games at all. “It would be practically impossible to tell the history of the late 20th and early 21st century without discussing the cultural, economic, social, and technological impact of video games,” he says. “It is vital that future generations of game developers and game industry professionals have access to historical game development resources and reference material.”
WIRED asked preservationists about video games, and what they’re doing to ensure that future generations have access to the cultural artifacts shaping society today.
