The Politics of Game Canonization: Tales from the Frontlines of Creating a National History of Games

Glas and van Vught's paper examines how the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision assembled a national games canon, arguing that canonization is a politically charged process rather than a neutral act of documentation. Drawing on the authors' own experience as expert advisors, the work frames the project through what they call the "politics of acquisition," in which practical preservation goals and socioculturally driven historiographical aims become entangled. The study situates this case within broader scholarly frameworks, including Staiger's three-part model of admission, selection, and academy, and it highlights a persistent gap: Dutch games are largely absent from international game histories dominated by American and Japanese perspectives.

The Institute justified including games in its national collection through its 2016–2020 strategic plan, which pointed to new media's importance for a representative record of Dutch multimedia production. Its legitimization drew on populist, maturation, and instrumental arguments, and the resulting canon blended commercially successful titles with obscure 1980s niche games. The selection process began with a 600-title longlist divided into five-year periods and was shaped by pragmatic archival needs. The authors find that the expert panel was demographically uniform and relied on collector-driven "mutual attestation" of obscure facts, a configuration that likely narrowed the canon by excluding female-oriented, casual, mobile, and LGBTQ games.

Public response exposed these limitations. Feedback submitted through the canon's website and by email criticized the selection's representativeness and its regional and diversity imbalances. The absence of explicit selection criteria and the reliance on a small, largely unknown expert group left the process open to challenge. In response, the Institute expanded the canon to roughly 70 titles and broadened its expert base. The authors conclude that canonization, by consecrating selected games, carries political weight beyond its stated goal of documenting national heritage, and that the episode reflects the politics of acquisition more than a neutral account of the Dutch industry's history. The accompanying bibliography also notes the Netherlands' modest but real influence on 1980s gaming, rooted in the demoscene and software piracy rather than commercial hits.