From Trash to Treasure: Exploring How Video Games Are Moving from Popular Culture to Cultural Heritage

Lina Eklund's study examines how video games are shifting from disposable popular culture into recognized cultural heritage, using the 2014 excavation of Atari E.T. cartridges from an Alamogordo, New Mexico landfill as a central case. That dig, which recovered roughly 1,300 games, transformed a long-standing cultural myth into tangible artifacts, and the author argues that the spectacle and emotional investment surrounding the excavation gave these objects new meaning. The analysis makes clear that heritage value is socially constructed rather than inherent in the objects themselves.

The study compares two contrasting approaches to collecting and exhibiting games. MoMA pursues a selective, art-focused strategy, while The MADE, a volunteer-run institution in Oakland, seeks to preserve nearly everything and reflects an enthusiast-driven, bottom-up perspective. Eklund finds that heritage valuation in both institutions largely follows the Western Authorized Heritage Discourse, emphasizing materiality, age, aesthetics, and monumentality. The MADE partially challenges these conventions through its inclusive, community-oriented ethos, though the criteria it applies remain rooted in similar frameworks.

A central conclusion is that video games, which exist only through play and are fundamentally immaterial, strain material-focused heritage criteria and call for new evaluation frameworks. The author emphasizes that questions of power, and of whose values determine what counts as heritage, remain central to this transition. The study is qualitative and explicitly non-representative, drawing on two U.S. museum cases from 2015 and a single landfill excavation, so its findings speak to the American museum context rather than the industry as a whole.