Let Games Die

One of the mantras that the livecoding people I spend time around repeat a lot is Let Code Die (which has its roots in other writing about the web and coding). This is an invitation to not be precious about or become attached to the code that you write, and it serves two purposes, I think. First, it emphasises creation as the important verb, rather than editing, fixing or improving. If code is broken, it can be deleted. If you don't remember what it does, it can be deleted. Rather than worrying about the code you wanted to write, you can instead trust yourself to write something new that is still fun and interesting. Second, and particularly important for the collaborative livecoding we do in London, is it discourages you from getting attached to any code you wrote. If you are in a performance with six other people and someone deletes your code - who cares. Let that code die. Focus on the new code. This new code will die one day too.

A few weeks back I was at Goldsmiths' Games Library Night, where they put on themed collections of talks about games. That night's theme was games preservation, and it included four great talks about the topic from different angles, including curation, games preservation through audio, archaeological methods for play preservation, and a personal account of preservation and how it relates to retro games today. I think games preservation is interesting and difficult work, and I think it's more important now than ever. But the talks, especially the first one as Fede talked about his experiences learning Japanese and playing obscure, forgotten titles, also got me thinking what it would mean to stop preservation altogether. What would it mean to Let Games Die?

A Losing Game

I'm a pretty sentimental person. I'm not averse to throwing things away, and especially now that my tiny flat is at the limit of what it can store I'm a lot better at it, but there are particular kinds of things I do not want to let go of, especially things that are unusual or curious or that I might want to show someone else one day. Games preservation can be thought of as partly rooted in a similar kind of anxiety or fear, a worry that one day we may not be able to relive something, remember something, or convey it to other people. An archive is a safety net - it reassures us that something is there if we need it. No-one has seen every item in the collection of any major museum or gallery, and no-one has played every game in the big archives of retro ROMs, just like no-one has played every Steam game or owns everything on itch.io. But the archive tells us that if we need something tomorrow, we can find it.

We want the archive for many reasons. We want to be able to learn from games, not just in terms of their design or craft, but also the politics they reflect or the stories they tell us about the people that made them. We want to be able to relive certain moments from culture and connect or reconnect with them in the future. We want to be able to acknowledge people who made those games, and make sure their work and effort is remembered in the future as well. You can probably think about a game you wouldn't want to be forgotten, and you can probably think about games that perhaps have been forgotten or lost, that you wish had been preserved better.

But preservation is a lossy process. There were 1,749 games released for the SNES, and the platform has been fairly comprehensively emulated. There are, at the time of writing, 1.3m games on itch.io, developed with hundreds of different libraries, targeting several different platforms. A significant percentage of them are probably already unplayable. There is no way to preserve the current state of games in its entirety, and I don't think any games preservationist aims to do this. However this changes the role of preservationists, retro gamers and you and me, from people who choose what to preserve, to people who choose what dies. When we hold up an obscure title, a cult classic or a venerated creator as worthy of preservation, we are implicitly choosing to let other games die.

Post-Mortem

Who preserves chess? The rules of chess are on Wikipedia (interestingly they are not on the page for chess, they have their own page) but you probably do not have a book in your house that states the rules of chess, and you probably didn't learn by reading Wikipedia or an encyclopaedia. You learned chess by someone teaching you, with a board they found in a waiting room or a relative's house or a charity shop. Chess is not a game we actively preserved, as such, yet at the same time chess is preserved to such an intense degree that it feels impossible to kill, even intentionally. Chess is preserved culturally, through remaking, replaying and resharing - the chess we have today is a result of earlier versions of it being left to die.

'Let Code Die' is rooted in trust, a trust that if we have code that we like and we lose it, we can write it again - or write something better. What would it mean to trust ourselves as game developers, designers, critics and players in the same way? Games preservation might still exist, but it might look a little different, maybe something closer to oral tradition, or the preservation of chess. Preserving a game would mean remaking it, trying to recapture what you think is important about it, however imperfectly that might be. For a single person, maybe working at an amateur level, they might not be able to recreate much of a game - but what they did recreate would be important, and the way they changed it (consciously or not) would be valuable and add another layer of meaning and interest on top.

The purpose of these remakes would not really be to preserve the original as it existed. Instead, the aim is to recapture what mattered to the person or people remaking it. There is no way they could possibly preserve a game in this way, and that realisation that they cannot perfectly recreate it provides them a freedom to accept this, and thus leave their own marks on their version of it. 'Let code die' is an acceptance that preservation is impossible, which also grants people the freedom to actively change things too. In the end, the goal of such work is to create something new, through the process of remaking something old. While some of them might succeed in recreating games accurately, at least on a surface level, most of them will instead be new things that are created through the process of trying to recaptured something that mattered to them.

There's an episode of RadioLab that always sticks with me, with a story about memory and how each time we rememeber the past our brain rewrites the memory, changing it slightly. The more we remember something, the less accurate our recall of it becomes, and yet we remember things more often because they are important to us. Retreading the same path changes it, but it doesn't change how beautiful or important it is to us, or our desire to walk it again.

We might even attempt this process of preservation-through-making without ever having played the original game - doing so from screenshots or videos of it being played or accounts of how it worked. What would that look like? Take a moment to look at these three screenshots:

How good a sense do you have of this game from these three screenshots? You certainly cannot recreate an accurate version of this game from these screenshots alone. But the proportion of the game's spirit that you could capture from seeing just three 256x192 pixel screenshots is quite impressive. Now imagine seeing 30 seconds of gameplay footage. I think this would make a pretty fantastic game jam concept, actually - choose to recreate a game you've not played for at least 20 years, or find three screenshots of a game that is at least 30 years old. Then make a new version of it in a game engine of your choice.

This isn't preservation - it's not trying to be. We are letting those games die. Instead, it is a different way of approaching the core of what preservation means to us. These recreated, remade, misremembered new games are not copies of the thing they are inspired by, because that would defeat the object, it would be simpler to just do traditional game preservation. Instead they try to take what we think is worth preserving about that game, and infuse something new with it. The game dies, and a new game takes its place.

Speculative Execution

Florence Smith Nicholls (who spoke at the Goldsmiths talks evening) taught me about the concept of anticipatory grief - the idea that we are grieving for something we haven't lost yet (sometimes also used to refer to the idea that we are anticipating people in the future might grieve for something we have now). Grief is a part of how we deal with death, but we cannot actually stop people from dying. The idea that we can immortalise people with AI has provoked a visceral reaction in most people because it feels instinctively wrong - but we do memorialise people in other ways. We find ways to remember them that are imperfect, but that allow us to take them into the future with us.

This weird quasi-oral tradition of imperfectly remember-making games provides us with all the things a good archive does - it allows us to learn lessons from the past and pass them on to the future, it allows us to reconnect with past culture, and to acknowledge and honour the work of people in the past as well. It provides fewer guarantees, though, and a more unpredictable sense of failure. This is scary, but this potential for loss is what prompts us to grow and to protect what we most want to pass on. The knowledge that every game will eventually die not only drives us to create them anew - it also drives us to create our own things, to contribute our own works to the cycle of games being born and dying.

The fact that so many games were made in the past, and that we love them and want to preserve them, is beautiful. Hearing people talk about their favourite games and why they want other people to experience them, is compelling (which is why YouTube is full of people doing it). But the reason people care about preserving those games today is because people in the past made them. The reason we have games that 'need' preserving is because the past had a culture of making, experimenting and playing games. We have that culture too, moreso than ever, which is why itch.io has more games on it than you and everyone you know will ever play.

We cannot return to the 1980s, 1990s or 2000s. The only true way to preserve those eras is to remake it in the present. Big companies know what the past means to us, and are already engaging in this remaking of the past in place of preservation - but it is done in the name of marketability, not love. For us to remake a game that matters to us, we are seeking to recreate it not as it once was, but as we remember it, and as we now see it today ourselves, however imperfectly that might be. The best way to preserve Tetris is not to record its code, or to purchase original hardware it can run on, or even to talk to the players or its designers or to watch a film about it or put it in a museum. The best way to preserve Tetris is to play it, to enjoy it, to be changed by it, and then to make something entirely unlike Tetris, something entirely of your own, that is different because you played it.

60 games are released on Steam every day.

There are 294 game jams active on Steam as I write this.

Preserve nothing. Make more.

To make is to preserve.

Let games die.

Thanks for reading!

My book is out in a month! I'm very excited. It's about procedural generation in games, it's about being creative with digital tools, and it's about some of the best games anyone has ever made. You can preorder it at your favourite bookstore right now, and if you're in the UK there are some links here.

This blog post is inspired, as stated up top, by the London livecoding community and particularly Lu Wilson's writing about livecoding, pastagang and coding. It also owes a lot to everything Florence has taught me about games preservation (and anticipatory grief) and also to Phil and the VGHF who, contrary to this post's tongue-in-cheek tone, I think are amazing and do amazing work.

This post is not entirely serious! I think games preservation is great, I think curation and archival work is important, and I think history matters for a wide variety of reasons. Of course, in other ways it is entirely serious! I think it's great to think about other ways to engage with digital culture, I think games preservation prioritises the idea of a 'canon' of games, and I think it's always good to think of creative and different ways to get around the problems of preserving the digital past.

The game I showed screenshots of is Cavemania on the ZX Spectrum. I will probably run the game jam I mentioned here at some point! I have a lot of other things to do right now though, unfortunately. My arm is feeling better and better each week though - I wrote this whole blog in one sitting, can you believe it?