Game canon is a list of video games to be considered for preservation by the Library of Congress

Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...

. The creation of this list is "an assertion that digital games have a cultural significance and a historical significance." Game canon is modeled on the efforts of the National Film Preservation Board

National Film Preservation Board

The United States National Film Preservation Board is the board selecting films for preservation in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry. It was established by the National Film Preservation Act of 1988...

, which produces an annual list of films that are subsequently added to the National Film Registry

National Film Registry

The National Film Registry is the United States National Film Preservation Board's selection of films for preservation in the Library of Congress. The Board, established by the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, was reauthorized by acts of Congress in 1992, 1996, 2005, and again in October 2008...

, which is managed by the Library of Congress. The game canon committee comprises Henry Lowood, game designers Warren Spector

Warren Spector

Warren Spector is a role-playing game designer and a video game designer. He is known for having worked to merge elements of role-playing games and first-person shooters. He currently resides in Austin, Texas with his wife, fantasy writer Caroline L. Spector...

 and Steve Meretzky

Steve Meretzky

Steven Eric Meretzky is an American computer game developer, with dozens of titles to his credit. He has been involved in almost every aspect of game development, from design to production to quality assurance and box design...

, Matteo Bittanti, and Joystiq

Joystiq

Joystiq is a video gaming blog founded in June 2004 that has since become one of the most successful sites within the Weblogs, Inc. family of weblogs. It is the centerpiece of WIN's own network of video gaming blogs, which also includes a blog dealing specifically with the popular MMORPG World of...

 journalist Christopher Grant.

History

Game canon is a project started by Henry Lowood, curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

. He started to preserve video games and video-game artifacts in 1998, and in the years following, he has noted that video games are something worthy of preserving. Henry Lowood submitted the proposal to the Library of Congress in September 2006, and during the 2007 Game Developers Conference

Game Developers Conference

The Game Developers Conference is the largest annual gathering of professional video game developers, focusing on learning, inspiration, and networking...

, he announced the game canon.

List of games considered

The initial list consists of 10 video games that are each considered to represent the beginning of a genre that is still vital in the video game industry.

• Spacewar!
• Star Raiders
  Star Raiders
  Star Raiders is a video game for the Atari 8-bit family of computers, released in 1979 and programmed by Doug Neubauer. It was also later ported to other Atari computer and game platforms...
  
  
• Zork
  Zork
  Zork was one of the first interactive fiction computer games and an early descendant of Colossal Cave Adventure. The first version of Zork was written in 1977–1979 on a DEC PDP-10 computer by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling, and implemented in the MDL programming language...
  
  
• Tetris
  Tetris
  Tetris is a puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov in the Soviet Union. It was released on June 6, 1984, while he was working for the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic...
  
  
• SimCity
  SimCity
  SimCity is a critically acclaimed city-building simulation video game, first released in 1989, and designed by Will Wright. SimCity was Maxis' first product, which has since been ported into various personal computers and game consoles, and spawned several sequels including SimCity 2000 in 1994,...
  
  
• Super Mario Bros. 3
  Super Mario Bros. 3
  , also referred to as Super Mario 3 and SMB3, is a platform video game developed and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Entertainment System , and is the third game in the Super Mario series. The game was released in Japan in 1988, in the United States in 1990, and in Europe in 1991...
  
  
• Civilization I/II
  Civilization (computer game)
  Sid Meier's Civilization is a turn-based strategy "4X"-type strategy video game created by Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley for MicroProse in 1991. The game's objective is to "Build an empire to stand the test of time": it begins in 4000 BC and the players attempt to expand and develop their empires...
  
  
• Doom
• Warcraft series
  Warcraft Universe
  Warcraft is a franchise of video games, novels, and other media originally created by Blizzard Entertainment. The series is made up of Four core games: Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, and World of Warcraft...
  
  
• Sensible World of Soccer

Criticisms

Lowood's Canon has been criticized by video game theorists and academics who consider his list limited and unrepresentative. In 2010, a featured article on Gamasutra criticized in details many aspects of the Game Canon. The list had no explanations supporting the video games selected. The review stated that in limiting the list of historically and culturally significant video games to ten, many other innovative video games had unfairly been excluded from the Canon. The article also mentioned that a Canon should include all innovative video games but also all innovations in video gaming. Gareth Mensah, founder of the Video Game Canon proposed an alternative in the form of an aggregator organizing all innovative video games and innovations in video gaming through the use of a tagging system.

External links

• News report from the New York Times
• News report from Joystiq
  Joystiq
  Joystiq is a video gaming blog founded in June 2004 that has since become one of the most successful sites within the Weblogs, Inc. family of weblogs. It is the centerpiece of WIN's own network of video gaming blogs, which also includes a blog dealing specifically with the popular MMORPG World of...
  
  
• Blog post from GameJudgment