This week the ESA (Entertainment Software Association) has decided that once a publisher stops supporting a game doing anything to restore it to functionality is the equivalent of hacking or piracy. The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has responded by asking the U.S. Copyright Office to make special exceptions for museums, academics, and game enthusiasts so that we might keep these games playable. While for some this may seem like a simple copyright issue and a question of who owns the original software, for others it is a question of history and who has the rights to that history.
As an teacher and a games researcher, having access to a back library of games (somewhere outside of my own sadly incomplete personal collection) extends beyond the realm and nice to have and into need to have. Last year’s launch of Internet Archive’s Internet Arcade meant that it was not only no longer necessary for me to trudge multiple systems from home (or trying to score the classics on auction/resale sites) for class, but it meant that I had entire classes of students who were able to play the games simultaneously and have first hand experience as we talked about games in a historical context. This access has been invaluable. Having hands on experience with games that were made before most of my students were born means that they also have access to a database of narratives, mechanics, and characters. Some of which were awesome, some problematic, but all a part of the history of video games.
And this history of games is important for more reasons than just being fodder for strategic re-releases of reboots like Q*Bert and Grim Fandango, but also because being aware and being able to track patterns in game development can lead not only to innovative game mechanics in new games but also to the basis for tracing patterns in game design and narratives longitudinally. This is especially pertinent for scholars like myself who want to track the evolution of the representation of African Americans in an attempt to interrogate what these representations may mean rhetorically.
A larger question remains of what is lost by the impending lack of access to these no longer supported games? Perhaps most important is accountability. If we don’t know where we’ve come from then we don’t know where we’re going. We need to know where these narratives and representations started in order to fully understand how deeply engrained this is in games and how closely it is connected with contemporary society. These kinds of investigations give us the ability to study patterns of progression and regression in areas like racial representation in games.
Access to these games ultimately means so much more than just being able to play the games that we loved and remembered from our childhoods (or before), but it also gives us the texts that we need in order to make games a proper field of study and academic inquiry. The old adage claims that history is written by the victors, in this case it may ultimately also be erased by them.
