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Video games need to be preserved
In 2015, over $20 billion were spent by Americans on video games (also including accessories and hardware) (ESA, 2016), whereas the Western European game market is expected to generate earnings of nearly fifteen and a half billion euros in 2016 (Newzoo, 2016). The global video game market is estimated to be worth approximately 120 billion by 2019 (Newzoo, 2016).
Besides being a worldwide money-making business, video games can be considered cultural artefacts (Greenfield, 1994), educational and learning tools (Squire, 2003; Gee, 2003), "a new lively art" (Jenkins, 2000, p. 118) and, finally, of course, an enjoyable activity. Despite having been partially disregarded (Wolf and Perron, 2003), games have increasingly become a serious and recurrent subject of study within academia.
Yet, regardless of their economical and cultural weight, video games normally go from being a lucrative asset to requiring specific strategies of digital preservation in a short span of time. Games are constantly menaced, similarly to many other digital objects, by digital obsolescence.
Preserving such digital objects, which constitute an important expression of our contemporary culture, is fundamental to allow future historians and scholars to study artefacts of the past from a privileged point of view. Game designer and researcher Bartle (2014, pp. 13-17) summarises this point by considering that future scholars may want to analyse a digital object:
* to understand and learn from our culture;
* to learn more about our technology (e.g. how it was made, how it worked and how it was designed); and
* to appreciate it from an aesthetic and recreational perspective.
Moreover, digital games - often defined as complex digital objects, being "composed of more than one type of component" (Hedstrom and Lee, 2002, p. 219) - are becoming so increasingly elaborated that they can be employed as a sort of reference point for investigating digital preservation. Henry Lowood notes that video games are inherently linked to other types of digital media:
There are all kinds of layers to the software, relating to other kinds of software. [...] So, one argument [that] can be made for tackling [video games] digital preservation is-to put it bluntly-if you can solve that problem, you can probably solve any other digital preservation problem (cited in Enis, 2013,...