Video games are classified as a cultural heritage by the National Library of France

by time news

Video games displayed in the French National Library |

AFP

The French National Library in Paris, along with old books, films and audio documents, owns one of the largest collections of video games, with about 2,000 of them, such as “Juke Boxes”, “Game Boy” and “Magnavox Odyssey”, carefully preserved and classified as a “cultural heritage”. In every sense of the word.”

Those interested in playing these video games should visit one of the four towers, each 79 meters high and comprising 22 floors, in the François Mitterrand Library in southwest Paris (named after the former French president who ruled France from 1981 to 1995).

In the midst of the phonographs and jukeboxes, about ten devices to play video games that reflect the history of these games, including the “Game Boy” from “Nintendo”, “Atari Linux”, “Sega Saturn” and the rare “Magnavox Odyssey”, were displayed inside two interfaces. It was introduced to the US market in 1972.

“We keep these video game players in order to make future researchers who will appear in ten to hundreds of years to understand how we played these video games and what equipment was used while playing,” says Laurent Dublois, head of the multimedia department at the French National Library.

He added, “The library’s administrators consider video games as important as the historical documents displayed in them, and give them the same attention because they represent a cultural heritage in every sense of the word.”

This library move remains somewhat secret, as tools for old video games are collected and preserved under a 1992 law that provides for the “legal deposit” of multimedia documents.

Although the text of the law does not clearly mention video games, interactive programs have been included within this preservation mechanism, and thus video games, and the library should include two copies of each video game, the first is used for preservation and the second is made available for visitors to preview.

The library was able to collect two thousand similar documents annually thanks to the work of a team of twenty people entrusted with this task, in addition to group officials, warehouse custodians and engineers.

No physical copies

In addition to the video game players on display in the library, the library houses thousands of games stored in dark storage rooms at a temperature of 19°C and stored in a way that protects them from moisture.

The games are put back into custom boxes, and each game has its own classification to be indexed in the public library directory.

It includes various media formats (ROM cartridges, discs, CDs…) all kinds of games starting from the popular educational game “Adibo”, through the first version of “Tom Rider”, thanks to which the character Lara Croft became world famous, all the way to the latest version From the adventure game “Assassin’s Creed”.

But how will these games be saved forever while the media that play them are gradually dying out and threatened by technological obsolescence?

The library relies on groups of gamers to develop software that allows old games to be played on modern computers, based on the digitization of analog games and “emulators,” explains Laurent Dubloy.

He adds that “the department responsible for multimedia in the library includes two engineers who are constantly acquainted with this issue to find emulators and make them work and compatible with video games.”

It is expected that the library’s administrators will face other problems, most notably the lack of availability of games in physical copies, but rather playing them based on cloud computing (“cloud games”), which are increasingly imposing themselves as the dominant video game model today, such as the game “Fortnite”, which cannot be played with. Only online through a dedicated platform and with regular updates.

“We are negotiating with publishers and some platforms to find a way to recover games saved under the legal deposit law with physical copies,” said the library official, noting that this new model imposes limited techniques.

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