The History and Future of the “Game Canon”

It could be anything from doomed pipe-dream to the next step in gaming’s cultural evolution.

MOBILIZING THE PRESERVISTS

There’s a strong argument to be made that 2007 was the video game industry’s best year of the new millennium thus far. It saw the release of Bioshock, Crysis, Mass Effect, and The Witcher, each representing the first steps of a soon-to-be-legendary franchise. Rock Band’s hi-fi take on the Guitar Hero formula convinced millions of casual gamers to shell out for plastic drumsets to augment their domestic landfill of Wii-branded plastic sporting equipment. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare revolutionized the first-person shooter genre by successfully monetizing the half-realized jingoist tendencies of America’s teenagers and the bemused curiosity of everyone else. Valve Software released The Orange Box, arguably the most influential compilation since the New Testament. I could name at least another half-dozen titles that changed the face of gaming from that holiday season alone.

Given that tremendous and international success, one imagines a lot of industry grandees were really feeling themselves and presumably expected that video gaming would soon enjoy a level of prestige and success comparable to or in excess of any other media tradition. I suppose this is what inspired Henry Lowood, the curator of Stanford University’s History of Science and Technology Collections, to petition the U.S. Library of Congress for federal recognition of the medium’s cultural and historical significance. Inspired by the National Film Registry that curates and preserves noteworthy works of American filmmaking, Lowood envisioned a government-supported “Game Canon” that might similarly curate and preserve significant achievements in the ludological arts.

Above: the committee responsible for the 2007 Game Canon. From left: Steve Meretzky, Christopher Grant, Warren Spector, Henry Lowood, and Matteo Bittanti | Source

The LoC, presumably looking to the dragon’s hoard of revenue that the games industry was accumulating around that time, decided the idea was worth a pilot program at the very least. They authorized the formation of a committee to decide on the foundational composition of such a canon, and Lowood got to work. He assembled a crack team of industry greybeards toward said mandate and, after much debate, they arrived at the following list of titles and franchises that constituted the first Game Canon:

• Spacewar! (1962)

• Star Raiders (1979)

• Zork (1980)

• Tetris (1985)

• SimCity (1989)

• Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990)

• Civilization (1991) and Civilization II (1996)

• Doom (1993)

• Sensible World of Soccer (1994)

• The Warcraft series (1994–2004)

Insofar as condensing the storied history of video gaming into a list of ten entries is even possible, I reckon the committee did a satisfactory job. There are some undeniably legend-making games on this list, and I can confidently endorse each placement with the exception of that soccer game of which I’d never heard before beginning my research into this subject. There are a number of arcade classics from the 1980s that I might pick over some of the titles here, as well as some adventure games and RPGs from the late 1990s and early 2000s, but this is a pretty solid selection for having been composed in ‘07. And regardless of one’s opinion on this specific assembly, it was certainly ripe for iteration and expansion.

THE META-ANALYTICAL COMPROMISE

Alas, Lowood’s aspirations for a regularly updated registry of culturally significant games never panned out as such — the Game Canon looks today exactly as it did in 2007, featuring the same fifteen titles and affording no recognition to any games made after 2004. It eventually became apparent that, if there were to be a regularly updated and methodologically robust canon of video games, there was need for a bolder strategy than waiting on the U.S. federal government for timely assistance.

We eventually got something like that from veteran game journalist John Scalzo, who in 2017 founded the privately organized Video Game Canon in an effort to bring recognition to gaming history in a more comprehensive manner. Lacking the time and manpower necessary to manually sift through and curate the tens of thousands of video games that would by then have been candidates for such preservation, Scalzo opted for a meta-analytical approach in order to approximate a statistically objective measure of worthy titles. It works like this: eighty Best-of-All-Time lists published between 1985 and the present year are tabulated, and every game that appears on at least ten of them is eligible for inclusion in the Canon. A given game’s rank therein is equal to its average list ranking modified by the frequency of its representation among the source lists. We’re left with a collection of 1000 video games presented in descending order of the adulation they enjoy from prominent journalists.

For reference and comparison, here are the Top 10 from the Canon’s eighth edition, released in March of this year:

1. Tetris (1984)

2. Resident Evil 4 (2005)

3. The Last of Us (2013)

4. Half-Life 2 (2004)

5. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017)

6. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015)

7. Hades (2020)

8. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998)

9. Super Mario 64 (1996)

10. Mass Effect 2 (2010)

What I love about Scalzo’s approach is that it makes space for some more recent titles that, I think, absolutely deserve consideration in any remotely serious canon of video gaming. The catch, of course, is that the absence of opinionated curation and the ranked order resulting from the statistical meta-analysis means that we can’t really look to this list as an authoritative document of cultural or historical significance as we arguably can with, say, the National Film Registry or indeed the 2007 Game Canon. Or, in less polite and deferential terms, it reflects the disproportionate glazing of newer titles that permeates most Best-of-All-Time lists. The ordered list format is of course a natural result of the statistical approach and it probably shouldn’t be interpreted as a judgement of relative value between any two entries, but it certainly underscores the strengths of deliberate curation.

I’m ultimately very grateful that this list exists, and it’s undoubtedly an effective means of documenting the historical extent of critical acclaim for the thousand titles represented (particularly given the thoughtful archival of Top 1000 lists from each year since the Video Game Canon’s foundation).

But ought more be done? Could it be?

THE ARTISTIC UNIQUENESS OF GAME DESIGN

Here’s the thing about supposed canons of classic art: human beings have produced enduring works of great cultural import for as long as we’ve mechanically reproduced our oral traditions upon the walls of caves, and the ever-accelerating growth of humanity’s artistic corpus implies that the production of any remotely objective list of “culturally important” work is in most cases practically impossible. Take Western literature alone: even if one could convincingly winnow out every work that can’t reasonably be described as classic, the body of classics left over would still be of a magnitude vastly greater than any one person could ever hope to authoritatively canonize or, I’d argue, consume in the first place. Were the scholastic dream of an “official” Western literary canon ever to be realized, it’d require a grand and interdisciplinary assembly of trustworthy experts who’d have to be entrusted with a practically bottomless distribution of resources. Given the states of academia and interpersonal trust these days, advocates for a literary canon will have to keep dreaming. So too will proponents of canons for music, the visual arts, and so on.

But I think video game design is possessed of a significant advantage not enjoyed by other canon-worthy disciplines. As I’ve mentioned before, video game design is unique among extant forms of popular art in that its entire history is circumscribed by the modern realities of globalized, free-market capital exchange. This implies that any video game ever widely distributed was necessarily subject to documentation of some kind, whether as a natural consequence of its commercialization or (in the case of noncommercial works) from the rhythms of exchange between interested parties. Besides, the history of video gaming is still not very long in absolute terms — the artform has existed for barely a single human lifetime.¹ I think it’s no coincidence that the Library of Congress consented to the drafting of a game canon despite its never having officially recognized a canon of any other artistic tradition.

As for why the LoC never ended up supporting the 2007 Game Canon beyond its first tentative steps, I can only speculate. Its administration obviously saw merit in the idea, and obviously considered Lowood’s aspirations to be at the very least theoretically achievable. My best guess is that there simply wasn’t enough scholastic interest back then to justify the expenditures of time and money necessary to support such a thing over the long term. Now, however, video games compete with or exceed all other forms of popular media in terms of both mainstream recognition and commercial revenue. For a growing proportion of the human population, game design constitutes the foremost medium of exposure to artwork in the first place. I consider it no exaggeration to say that some video games deserve to be counted among the greatest works of art that humanity has ever achieved.

But game design is still culturally marginalized as an instrument of artistic expression because the mainstream discourse surrounding it is unduly influenced by a few actors who see in it a means of ceaseless profit above any culturally uplifting concern. Consequently, the average non-gaming consumer knows game design not as a great modern artform but as an appendage of the free market’s worst excesses. Short of comprehensively dismantling global capitalism toward the cultural ascension of artwork for its own sake — which, to be honest, sounds like a real goddamn faff at this juncture — I think the most effective way to recuperate and elevate the esteem of video game design as an artform is to engender more and better high-minded discussion of its aesthetic peaks rather than its industrial valleys.

That, by the way, is why I’m so grateful for the growing community of independent writers who’ve made it their mission to so elevate video game discourse. Substack, notwithstanding its obstinate delays with regard to officially recognizing games-writing as a publication vertical, is a powerful engine for this. In our capacities as games-writers and consumers of games-writing, we should of course continue to push for better recognition of gaming’s much-deserved place in the pantheon of human cultural achievement. Wouldn’t it be great to have a well-respected canon of the medium’s history to give voice to that impulse? I’m sure it wouldn’t change hearts and minds on its own but, by God, I reckon it’d be a damn good start.

If I had my way, I’d see the approach taken by Lowood et al. taken to its logical endpoint: establish a permanent board of qualified experts whose day-job is to strategize and effectuate the preservation of gaming history, and give it authority to maintain and expand the 2007 Game Canon (or some document based thereupon). Let a selection of civilian industry veterans — or perhaps even the public at large — nominate titles to be considered for induction into the Canon, giving final say to the board. This is essentially how the U.S. National Film Registry works, and I reckon it does a pretty good job. The only significant change we’d need would be to expand the remit to include games of any national origin.

I’m very interested to hear your thoughts. What do you make of the 2007 Game Canon and/or the Video Game Canon meta-analysis? Do you reckon there could one day be an authoritative canon of video games? If so, is it worth it? How could we facilitate it? I’ll keep considering these questions myself. In the meantime, keep up the good work and do consider subscribing to The Spieler if you too want game design brought into the esteem it so richly deserves.

Til next time <3

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Thanks for reading to the end! Feeling ambitious? Hit me with five or ten of the games you consider most culturally and/or historically significant, whether or not they’re represented on the lists I covered above. I’d love to get an impression of my readership’s own canon, such as it is. Comment below!

1. For reference, I tend to think of 1958’s Tennis for Two as the genesis of video game design, although I’m amenable to arguments placing it as early as 1950 or as late as 1962. I’ll probably write more about the early history of video game design one of these days.