Game preservation is an active topic of discussion, and I’ve touched on it before, but what about a temporary games, a games fundamentally designed to go against that idea, that when it’s done, it’s gone forever.

What are you talking about?

We think of games as art, and there are pieces of art that are temporary in this same way.  Some are obvious and simple, like fireworks displays, ice sculptures, or lights shining on city hall to celebrate a local sports team. There are also much larger, more complex art installations:

Jim Denevan is known for creating large circles in sand.

Amazing to see until the tide, or the wind, erase it.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude lined California and Japan with thousands of colored umbrellas in 1991.

Yes, this is the one that was mentioned on the “Outsider Art” episode of The Simpsons.

Nele Azevedo creates 1000 little ice people to place on steps, intending for them to melt as a statement on climate change.

Merging installation art, ice sculpting, and performance art, this has been repeated in multiple locations.

These show how each form of art can blur the lines into each other.  What each of them are can’t be so easily defined.  Each of them, though, for what undeniable complexity they have in their creation, don’t get considered with the same level of effort and engagement that a Video Game would strive to attain.  That doesn’t mean that a Video Game can’t challenge its own definition in a similar way.  Weather by a twist of fate, passing of time, or intentional design, there are games that are themselves forms of temporary art.  Some day they will be completely lost, never to be re-examined.

Passing of Time

The most apparent type of game that will one day be inaccessible are MMOs.  The only way an MMO works is if you have the client and a server for it to talk to.  If the server is gone, then the client won’t do anything.  There are some MMOs out there that have gone away but have fans that have created their own servers, and other projects are active to get fan servers of games up and running.  However, the simple fact is that most MMOs will not get a fan run life after death.  Either the developer won’t be willing to release the server code, the technical hurdles will be too high, the interest won’t be enough to sustain the effort of getting the server running, or even if the fan server is brought up, it too will likely end service some day.

An example of lack of interest. Anyone remember this? This one even has an emulation project that has 1 update post from 4 years ago. I doubt this will ever be run again in any way.

Even in an emulated form, though, MMOs are based on having a community of players.  Can it be called the same game when it has only a few players?  When the game itself becomes the hobby, rather than the playing of the game with others being the hobby, is it still the same thing?  It may be for some, but it won’t be for others.

Also worth remembering is that there are MMOs that have celebrations when they close down.  Star Wars: Galaxies erupted into a final, winner take all war between the Empire and the Rebellion.  The results were based on server control, rather than having one overriding conclusion, but it served to put an emphatic end point on the SWG experience.  In part it was because of the community of players that made it an event that could only happen once, and can never be repeated.

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