Video Games as Cultural Artifacts
Mar 12

Video Games as Cultural Artifacts

Is That Just Some Game? No, It’s a Cultural Artifact: Video games now have an official-ish Hall of Fame.

On Thursday at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Mr. Lowood announced a game canon, an idea that grew out of a proposal submitted to the Library of Congress in September 2006 by a consortium made up of Stanford, the University of Maryland and the University of Illinois. […]

Mr. Lowood and the four members of his committee — the game designers Warren Spector and Steve Meretzky; Matteo Bittanti, an academic researcher; and Christopher Grant, a game journalist — announced their list of the 10 most important video games of all time:

  1. Spacewar! (1962)
  2. Star Raiders (1979)
  3. Zork (1980)
  4. Tetris (1985)
  5. SimCity (1989)
  6. Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990)
  7. Civilization I/II (1991)
  8. Doom (1993)
  9. Warcraft series (beginning 1994)
  10. Sensible World of Soccer (1994)

Wot?! No Project Gotham Racing 3?!? Doooodz, I pwn at that game!!!

All kidding aside, this is a good idea. If we’re going to name films are cultural significant, it’s only a matter of them before video games deserved the same honor.

by Deane   March 12, 2007 9:50 AM    |   Follow Gadgetopia on Twitter

Comments

by ccs178 (Chris),   March 12, 2007 11:32 AM  

Hmmm...No Space Invaders? Pong? Pac Man? Breakout?

by Sid Viscous,   March 12, 2007 12:41 PM  

Aaahh....Zork.

I remember it well - played it on my snazzy Commadore 64! Text based version of the game that was really quite impressive. I could type any comment or question and it would have some sort of response that made some sense (especially when I got the reply "real adventurers don't use that kind of language) it was a good laugh!

by confused,   March 12, 2007 1:28 PM  

Sensible World of Soccer? Did I miss something?

by grr,   March 13, 2007 8:38 AM  

Re #1: It looks like these are all computer games and that arcade games aren't included. I guess they're not significant. :p

by Mark Poling,   March 14, 2007 12:11 PM  

I would have included Myst. And yeah, "World of Soccer"? Guess they needed something from the EU.

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