Pokémon's collaboration with Daniel Arsham is a reminder of games' most existential threat
Preservation is not a problem unique to video games. We've lost Homer's Margites, Shakespeare's Cardenio, and the end to Austen's Sanditon. We've lost Hitchcock's The Mountain Eagle, and London After Midnight, and a film nominated for five Oscars - including Best Picture - in The Patriot, directed by Ernst Lubitsch. And we've lost music, like the deeply influential work of Lead Belly.
But where games are unique, in their ability to slip so desperately through our fingers, is that they can be lost while still being so incomparably young. Game Boy cartridges last about fifteen years before their batteries give up. Unreleased versions of games are locked away in vaults. Even right now, games we "buy" evade true ownership. Our massive digital libraries are stored on Steam or PlayStations and Switches and Xboxes for only as long as we're granted a license to them.
The idea that your Steam games might just up and disappear is, obviously, a little alarmist. It's hard to imagine Valve or anyone else pulling that kind of stunt without an almighty stink. But the point remains the same: there is something distinctly transient, distinctly ephemeral, about the way in which we buy and play and collect our games. How they can become obsolete or locked down to specific platforms and how those platforms - Game Boys and PSOnes and unsupported old versions of Apple's iOS - become a little capsule of time in their own right.
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