From Cultural Sustainability to Culture of Sustainability: Preservation of Games in the Context of Digital Materiality

Key insights

7 takeaways

01
The authors argue that sustainability has expanded beyond environmental and economic concerns to include social and cultural dimensions, and that game cultures face distinctive challenges within this framework.
02
Games have been more successful at teaching sustainability principles than at applying them within the video game industry itself, which faces criticism over its energy footprint, including computer gaming's share of residential electricity use in California, and over crunch-time labor practices.
03
Digital games depend on physical infrastructure, storage media, and hardware that decay and generate electronic waste, placing game preservation within the context of the Anthropocene.
04
Current game preservation concentrates heavily on playability while neglecting paratexts and physical artefacts, and proposed environmentally sustainable approaches such as deduplication and scan-on-demand have been advanced in the research literature but not broadly adopted.
05
The Finnish Museum of Games at Tampere's Vapriikki Museum Centre is presented as a sustainability model that avoids nostalgia tourism and relies on crowdfunding and community collaboration, yet it still lacks a formal long-term preservation strategy and sustainability policy.
06
The museum's digitization is modest, under one gigabyte of cassette and floppy-disk material, while oral histories and ethnographic projects such as the BatMUD study pose greater storage demands than the digitized artefacts.
07
The authors conclude that culture should serve as a root concept for a broader culture of sustainability and suggest the field may soon need to move toward resilience thinking.

Summary

This study examines video game preservation through the lens of cultural sustainability, arguing that sustainability has broadened beyond environmental and economic concerns to encompass social and cultural dimensions, and that game cultures face distinctive challenges within that expanded framework. The authors situate the video game industry's substantial energy footprint, which includes computer gaming's share of residential electricity use in California, alongside criticism of crunch-time labor practices, observing that games have been more successful at teaching sustainability principles than at applying them across the industry itself.

Central to the analysis is the dual material and digital nature of games. Digital artefacts depend on physical infrastructure, storage media, and hardware that decay and generate electronic waste, placing game preservation within the broader context of the Anthropocene. The authors contend that current preservation efforts concentrate heavily on playability while neglecting paratexts and physical artefacts, and they note that proposals for environmentally sustainable approaches, such as deduplication and scan-on-demand, have been advanced in the research literature. Legal constraints and the dominance of Western narratives in game history further complicate heritage work.

Finland serves as the primary case study, with attention to the Finnish Museum of Games at Tampere's Vapriikki Museum Centre. The museum is presented as a sustainability model that avoids nostalgia tourism and relies on crowdfunding and community collaboration, though it still lacks a formal long-term preservation strategy and sustainability policy. Its digitization efforts are modest, under one gigabyte of cassette and floppy-disk material, contrasted with the far larger holdings of photographs across Tampere museums, while oral histories and ethnographic projects such as the BatMUD study pose greater storage demands.

The authors conclude that culture should function as a root concept enabling a broader culture of sustainability, and they suggest that the field may soon need to move toward resilience thinking. The work's scope spans digital game history, preservation practice, and environmental impact, grounded in the Finnish context and informed by foundational sustainability literature.