New words, idioms and metaphors are constantly introduced to still be able to make sense of our environment. Will today's English still make sense to English speakers of the future? Will English still be around, or will we have adopted the lingua franca of our mutant lizard overlords? Language evolves alongside our rapidly changing world. Anyone who's watched someone unfamiliar with games struggle desperately with this strange lump of electronics we call controllers knows that input devices are not at all intuitive, even if they feel like natural bodily extensions to those who've been playing for ages.Ī few issues, however, games share with literature the evolution of language especially. This already begins with interfaces and controllers, which might quickly change beyond recognition. Like the operation of machines, the playing of games requires fragile know-how that can be easily lost. Some are peculiar to video games, which, unlike literature, demands constant physical input from players. Will today's games seem like gibberish to people living in a thousand years? There are a lot of factors that, if unaddressed, may make enjoyment of these games impossible. The "gibberish" of ancient texts, we are told, is fundamentally other, even quasi-magical. Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk novel "Snow Crash" runs with the idea and reinterprets the Sumerian language (in which the Epic of Gilgamesh was originally composed) as a sort of programming language that can rewire the human brain. The controversial psychologist Julian Jaynes found the mentality behind works such as The Iliad or the Epic of Gilgamesh so alien that he dedicated an entire book, "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" (1977), to the bold thesis that people living roughly before the first millennium BC did not possess consciousness, at least not as we understand it today. What is certain is that without the work of countless researchers and enthusiasts and their efforts to preserve, transcribe, reconstruct, translate, annotate and interpret these texts, they would be completely inaccessible to us today (even if the texts survived in material form).ĭespite these gargantuan efforts, old texts can be a puzzle even to the people who study them. Why these texts, and not others, have survived until now and achieved canon-hood if so many others have been discarded in the dustbin of history is a complex question that is also relevant for the preservation of video games. And it's not just historians who read them either. 1000 years old and surviving in a single manuscript which was almost destroyed in a fire in 1731), The Iliad (almost 3000 years old) or the Epic of Gilgamesh (a whopping 4000 years old). You'll have no trouble finding a copy of Beowulf (ca. Given the breakneck cycles of hype and disinterest, of novelty and jadedness, surely no denizen of a future world a millennium from now will be interested in playing, say, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare? But consider that when it comes to older media, literature first and foremost, some texts are still alive and well. Let's assume for the sake of speculation that game historians and preservationists manage to address the problem, and that, say, a thousand years from now (if we're still around by then), at least a fraction of today's games will still be playable in some form.Ī thousand years may seem excessive. But there are other issues that may be less urgent, issues that are just as real. The advance and change of technology is rapid, and, as many have pointed out, presents daunting problems regarding the preservation of older games. Revisiting them several decades after their prime with a historian's curiosity is as fascinating as it is frustrating: it's easy to bounce off old games and their archaic workings. Did games really look like that, once upon a time, in the unfathomable recesses of antiquity? Similarly, to me, 30 years old, games of the early 90s (and the machines that run them) already exude a certain alien primitivity. Demonstrate an "old" game (say, from around 2000) to a kid today, and they might look at it with disbelieving curiosity. Ask a young adult today what a floppy disk is and you'll likely earn puzzled silence.
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