The 500 Year Video Game
A Thought Experiment
Assuming there are people around 500 years from now, and they still do this kind of thing, are there any video games from our time that will still be around, and played, and talked about? If so, what are they? If not, why not, and could we make one?
That’s the question my friend Adam just asked. There are so many things I love about this question.
First of all, it’s such a good hard question to think about it. It’s got a certain clarity — you know that there is (or is going to be) a simple, factual answer. The question replaces all of these nebulous and ambiguous feelings about aesthetics and culture and history with a straightforward, concrete prediction exercise. Not that these nebulous feelings are unimportant, it’s just nice to be made aware of them. When you try to take the question seriously and make a real effort to make your best prediction as if it really mattered, you can feel these feelings creeping in around the edges. You can feel part of your brain saying “ah, here’s a big empty space where I can stretch out and make some points. What points do I want to make here?” You have to actively try to shut this part of your brain down to think clearly about the question as a simple matter of fact and not an opportunity for the TED talk part of your brain to give a little TED talk.
There is a tricky relationship between our aesthetic judgments and historical facts about which works get recognized, celebrated, acknowledged. We know that there can be truly great works of culture that get overlooked, that go unappreciated. But we would never say: “This poem is truly great despite the fact that no-one anywhere has ever liked it, and no-one anywhere ever would like it.” When we say a poem (or painting or song or game) is truly great despite being overlooked or underappreciated we are suggesting that, under the right circumstances, some specific group of people would acknowledge and celebrate it. And not some arbitrary group of people with random opinions, but people whose judgments fit together and confirm each other within a coherent, mutually-supporting arrangement. All of our aesthetic claims have to bottom out in claims about critical consensus within some community somewhere.
There is a tension between the private and subjective reality of our personal sensations and the external reality of what other people say and do, and this tension is a necessary and unavoidable ingredient in aesthetics. There can never be a totally private aesthetics in the same way that there can’t be a private language.
Then again, of course critical consensus isn’t an objective, pre-existing feature of the world within which our opinions must fit, it’s a dynamic equilibrium that is shaped by our opinions. By making certain claims and arguments we are attempting to nudge the arrangement in one direction or another. It’s all very recursive and nebulous and potentially frustrating and annoying. But, for me, there is something very valuable in making a sincere effort to see historical facts about critical consensus as if they were an objective feature of the world, unaffected by my own opinions.
So, will there be any video games that people play for 500 years? Could there be? What does the question actually even mean? Let’s get specific.
Adam clarifies that by “video game” he means “single player computer game”, which makes a lot of sense. The question we want to ask is about the new kind of games that the computer makes possible. We aren’t asking if there are pre-existing games that just happen to get played on a computer, we want to know about this genuinely new category of game, the one that includes Half-Life and Diablo and Minecraft and The Sims. One of the main features of this new kind of game is that it uses the computer to generate a lot of the complex dynamics that analog games get from other players. But I think that if we hold ourselves to the spirit of the question and make sure we are focused on “genuine” video games we can soften this constraint enough to avoid getting distracted by definitional quibbles. Is Civ a single-player game? Well, it’s a video game, and for our purposes that’s what matters.
Adam is interested in whether there will/could be a video game people play “deeply” for centuries, but this is another constraint I think we could loosen up on. People have played Tic Tac Toe for thousands of years, were they playing it “deeply”? I think it’s enough to ask whether a video game could get actively played for centuries without begging the question of what type of play that would entail.
One plausible answer to the question is “no”. Maybe video games are by their nature ephemeral, temporary things. Maybe by virtue of their being software they are destined to become obsolete. Maybe by virtue of their being commercial products they are destined to be “seasonal” — periodically retired from the shelf to make room for shiny new products.
But I don’t think this is obviously the case. Despite being software products video games are also games. Players have ways of relating to video games that exist outside of these limitations, they find ways to emulate old platforms, they reinvent and reimplement games in ways that preserve the essence of the game’s identity beyond technical and commercial contexts. The name “Tic Tac Toe” is only a couple of hundred years old, but the underlying game of three-in-a-row is the same one that was played by ancient Egyptians. I think the essence of Adam’s question is whether any of these new kinds of games we are making might have a similar fate.
And why not? Why on Earth not? One of the amazing facts about games is that they can persist, as living culture, for so long. Right now, all over the world, people are playing, for fun and entertainment, Backgammon, a game that was invented 5,000 years ago. Games can have a kind of vital longevity that far surpasses stories, songs, or any other kind of cultural works.
Is there something uniquely impoverished about video games that would prevent any of them from surviving as culture in this way? That doesn’t seem possible to me. When you think about video games abstractly — as interactive systems comprised of rules, goals, and materials — they are obviously formally complex enough to support the centuries of play and study that emerge from long-living analog games.
Maybe this is just a question about what we want from video games. Do we want some of them, any of them, to persist in this way? The TED talk part of my brain wants to say that we should want this, that video game designers aren’t ambitious enough, that trying to make something as great as Citizen Kane is child’s play, we should be trying to make things as great as Backgammon. Shut up brain! Shut up and look at the world for once. Try, for once, to see it clearly as it actually is.
So are there any obvious candidates that currently exist? Adam mentions one obvious one and I totally agree — Tetris. I will also say I think there’s something intriguing about the way DOOM is continuously re-implemented on every possible computing platform. It also wouldn’t totally shock me if an oracle told me that Pokémon was still alive and kicking half a millennium from now. The TED talk part of my brain wants to see this question as a referendum on formal complexity and aesthetic depth but the part of my brain that wants to make correct predictions understands the importance of broad popularity and the way that network effects can amplify arbitrary features into the foundational topology of our shared cultural landscape.
I just love this question. I love how trying to take it seriously forces me to take a sideways perspective on the questions I’m already struggling with on a daily basis. What kind of games should I make? What kind should I play? Is there something troubled and problematic about video games as a cultural category or are they just fine? What percentage of Steam wishlists get converted into sales?
I see this question as sharing a basic sensibility with the overall project of The Long Now Foundation which challenges us to take a wider view of the world and our place in it. I want there to be a far future. I want it to have nice things in it. I want some of those things to connect that future to our current time. I want cool teenagers in flying cars to drop my name in an attempt to get laid. Is that too much to ask?
I hate to take a seemingly tough question and give an obvious, easy answer but that’s just what I’m going to do.
(First, set aside the problem of platform. I assume platforms exist that allow games — specific games — to be played. Also, eliminate adaptations of existing tabletop games. That’s just cheating. Only true videogames allowed.)
The game most likely to be played and discussed in 500 years is Tetris — the one game I would take with me to that desert isle we all fantasize about.
Think about it:
1. It couldn’t exist as anything but a real-time game. It is unique to the videogame medium.
2. It isn’t an adaptation of anything but a wholly original work.
3. It was the ur game of a genre, having created real-time puzzle games.
4. No two games will ever be alike ensuring that it’s playable forever.
5. It has no content so it can never get dated.
6. Though it has no designed narrative It encourages player narrative, a hallmark of video games.
7. There has never been a platform Tetris WASN’T on. No other game can make that claim.
8. It’s just damn fun regardless of how you define that basically useless word.
Some games can make some of these claims. No other game can make all of them. Gotta be Tetris. It’s a well nigh perfect videogame.
Well, when it comes to procedurally-generated single-player games, Patience is almost halfway there already at around 240 years old. To point out the current of how humans play this game and its family, we of course first have to abandon the product-shaped idea that "The Game" has to have a singular form without any changes, or only improvement matches that don't "fundamentally make it a new game," and maybe compare the thing we're talking about to the slow pace of change in tafl games, or chess-likes, or ball-and-hoop games, or whatever -- and then ask how digital technology and the context of markets alter that pace, fragmentation and separations into distinct works. If 868-BACK lasts a very long time, does its "age" start with 868-HACK? With Zaga-33? With Rogue?