In this article from The Escapist (yes, where we get all those lovely Zero Punctuation reviews), writer Rob Zacny tells the story of his history of gaming, and what organizations like the U.K.'s National Videogame Archive and services like Good Old Games are doing to preserve his, and everyone elses.

Smashing good read if you're up for it.

Although gaming has been erasing its history for as long as it's been creating it, there has been a very recent awakening in various sectors of the gaming press, academia and the industry itself that this is actually a problem and an opportunity. Within the last year, two new preservation and revival efforts have launched in response to the situation. The National Videogame Archive approaches all of gaming with an eye towards preservation and study, while Good Old Games focuses on PC gaming of the 1990s (although quite a few more recent titles have made their way onto the service).

While they take very different approaches to curatorship of gaming history, they represent a growing movement to slow, and even partially reverse, the disappearance of our shared gaming past.

Gaming's misfortune is that it is inevitably connected to, and confused with, technological progress. Measuring the medium by the technology that supports it, Newman argues, gamers devalue and misunderstand their past.

chautemoc via escapistmagazine.com »