The Creation of a National Registry of Video Games
The Library of Congress already has an essential Registry for film and audio. These registries allow us to preserve our cultural D.N.A. as Americans. I believe that it's about time that video games join audio and film in the Library of Congress' noble effort of cultural preservation. Video games for the past 50 years have allowed people in the United States and the entire world to explore fun worlds and themselves in an interactive medium. Though the world of video games is a virtual one, it has real effects on our world.
The impact of video games has been so significant that it's felt by those who aren't avid gamers like me. In 2021 video games had a global revenue of $180 billion. There's a great preservational opportunity here with video games. Unlike film and especially music, its entire history as a form of media is relatively young. Most silent films are lost but that doesn't have to happen with video games so long as Congress makes the effort sooner rather than later.
Video games have more challenges in preservation such as dealing with a large variety of hardware architectures, so it wouldn't be as simple as taking the film into a digital format. The difficulties inherent to preserving video games only show why it is so important that action is taken as soon as possible. I hope that this petition helps bring an important cultural issue to light. It's a moral imperative that we as Americans protect our own culture and identities so that our descendants can better understand and learn about who we were and why we were. It will be up to us to make sure that those descendants can carry that knowledge into their own futures.
The impact of video games has been so significant that it's felt by those who aren't avid gamers like me. In 2021 video games had a global revenue of $180 billion. There's a great preservational opportunity here with video games. Unlike film and especially music, its entire history as a form of media is relatively young. Most silent films are lost but that doesn't have to happen with video games so long as Congress makes the effort sooner rather than later.
Video games have more challenges in preservation such as dealing with a large variety of hardware architectures, so it wouldn't be as simple as taking the film into a digital format. The difficulties inherent to preserving video games only show why it is so important that action is taken as soon as possible. I hope that this petition helps bring an important cultural issue to light. It's a moral imperative that we as Americans protect our own culture and identities so that our descendants can better understand and learn about who we were and why we were. It will be up to us to make sure that those descendants can carry that knowledge into their own futures.
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