[game_preservation] Game Canon

[Rowan Kaiser]

One of the things I'm working on with my book is putting the story of games
into context. More than a list of things declared to be canonical - a term
which is problematic in many respects - but an actual traceable narrative.
Without that context, a "canon" or "Hall of Fame" is bound to be more than a
little absurd. Indigo Prophecy, really?

The IGN Hall of Fame is, in my opinion, a pretty good list of important and
great games. It's almost totally lacking idiosyncrasies and kind of boring,
but it does represent a "canon" as much as anything I've seen.
http://games.ign.com/halloffame/



On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 10:34 AM, Andrew Armstrong <andrew at aarmstrong.org>wrote:


>  Hey all,

>

> Should get back myself to thinking more about games and so forth - history

> wise - since currently all I'm doing it hard labour trying to sort parts of

> the UK's National Museum of Computing.

>

> Recently saw a link to a list of Game Canon - from a book appendix from

> 2008 - which reminded me of the SIG's attempt at it -

> http://gameshelf.jmac.org/books/canon.html

>

> Interesting reading; but in any case, should we get that restarted again?

> Or actively work on any projects between ourselves besides what small things

> me and Devin randomly do? It'd be interesting to utilize who is here if

> anyone has any time to put forward; I know we've randomly discussed things

> at GDC (although it seems the notes from 2010 have not materialized just

> yet, although I forgot myself :) ) but it's a bit more work to get something

> done.

>

> In any case, should we start some kind of informal list of game canon

> entries - notably with our own comments on each one - since Canon lists like

> the one above typically have a lot more recent games which do a disservice

> to the pioneers and in fact sometimes is oddly wrong or ignorant (even if

> the actual entries are okay to describe as good game examples) - for

> instance, in that list we've got StarCraft as the genre-defining strategic

> combat game - yet ignoring many previous much more important RTS games like

> Command and Conquer (and Dune) which literally defined the genre

> conventions, including the majority of StarCraft's.

>

> Andrew

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