Where Have All the Games Gone? Explorations on the Cultural Significance of Digital Games and Preservation

Barwick, Muir, and Dearnley's paper, presented at DiGRA 2009, contends that digital games are undervalued as cultural artifacts relative to film and television and remain largely absent from digital heritage preservation. The authors ground this claim in the sector's commercial scale, citing $22 billion in US sales in 2008 and £4.03 billion in UK consumer spending, alongside the games' broad popularity. They attribute the neglect to two forces: an industry culture oriented toward disposability and a persistent negative public image of games. Their central question asks whether digital games possess a history worth preserving and a culture worth studying.

The paper's answer is affirmative, supported by interviews with academics, researchers, and industry figures conducted in 2008 and 2009. Interviewees describe growing acceptance of games as legitimate objects of scholarly inquiry, evidenced by 329 game studies courses listed on UCAS in 2009. The authors also identify an urgent problem: material from the 1970s and 1980s, the formative era of the medium, is disappearing without systematic archiving. They present this loss as a rationale for immediate preservation and for collaboration among the games industry, researchers, and heritage institutions.

The scope is primarily British and American, with reference to institutional efforts such as the Library of Congress, Stanford's Cabrinety collection, and the UK's National Videogame Archive. The authors acknowledge the difficulty of predicting future cultural significance, noting that attitudes toward media can shift, as they have for lost television and radio. They conclude that the fragility of digital media makes prompt action and explicit selection criteria essential, and they identify further dialogue with institutions and industry as the necessary next step.