Over the past few weeks, I’ve been on a throwback gaming binge. After finishing up The Ur-Quan Masters, I found the entire X-Com series on sale on Steam for a mere $2, which was impossible to pass up.  The original X-Com has always been near the top of my list of favorite games of all time, and being able to get the whole series in an easily-playable format was a golden opportunity.  In fact, I was so happy about it, I decided to make a gift of it to a friend who had never played any of them, explaining that it was vitally important that he play the original right away.

For anyone who has ever tried to share something very near and dear to their hearts, only to have it ejected out of hand, you can understand my complete dismay when a day or two later, my friend told me he had given up on the game. “It’s too confusing,” he said.  Pushed for clarification, he said he found the interface a cumbersome mess, and that pretty much halted his enjoyment of the game.

It was after that conversation that I had a sad realization: in all the talk of the cultural relevance of video games, and where they fit in the spectrum of being art, there is an often-overlooked but critical factor: accessibility.

Books and film, two other storytelling mediums that people often try to equate games with, have an incredibly rich history.  Books, obviously, have one that stretches back for literally thousands of years.  Movies have a much shorter history, but certainly a prolific one.  If a person wants to read an old book or watch an old movie, doing so is generally incredibly easy.  Most movies have been reformatted multiple times to whatever is the current media standard of the day (VCRs, DVDs, etc), and books can be reprinted again and again with little trouble.

Now, not every book ever made is going to remain available for all time, nor is every movie going to linger on; but the classics are always available and accessible.  Granted, with older books you might run into issues of archaic language, but these are usually easy to overcome (especially with well-documented translation notes).  Movies may not have too many language issues beyond subtitles, but sometimes their subject matter can be a little tough to grasp for those looking back from future times.

Older video games, unfortunately, are far harder to simply jump back in to.  First of all, there is the issue of hardware.  Old game cartridges are useless unless you have the console they were created for, and then you’ve got to deal with keeping old equipment in functional shape.  Clearly, not everyone can keep an Atari 2600 or original NES around, so then you have to look into ROMs, which can be a crap-shoot both in terms of availability and legality.  Old PC games are possibly worse, with archaic operating system and memory requirements that just aren’t compatible with modern computers.

There are some ways to deal with these issues – DOSBox makes a lot of old PC games playable – but these often involve an investment in time by the player to make sure everything is up and running as needed.  Re-publication of old games in new formats, such as through Steam or the Wii Virtual Console, does make jumping in a lot easier, but the number of titles is limited, and availability is ultimately based on economics.

Now, in the event you manage to get a fully-functioning copy of a cherished old game, ready to share with someone else, there is still another large issue to overcome – design.  Old games have the unfortunate habit of looking, well, old.  The generational divide between most games is generally evident from the moment you load one up for the first time.  Put screenshots of games for an Atari 2600, a Super Nintendo, and an Xbox 360 next to each other, and most people will be able to immediately identify which is which.

Now, for some of us, old graphics are an aesthetic to be cherished, as evident from the persistent popularity of retro-style new titles. But for a lot of people, especially those that didn’t grow up with previous generations of games, graphics really are a big stopping point.  Why would someone want to play something that looks like Pitfall when they could be playing something that looks like Uncharted 2?  If someone has a hard time looking past what’s on the screen in front of them, it’s highly unlikely they are going to enjoy the experience enough to continue playing for very long.

Beyond graphics, though, there are more fundamental issues like UI and controls that have changed an awful lot over the past few decades.  In X-Com, for example, my friend hated the fact that there were no tool tips to explain what each of the vaguely-labeled buttons did.  When X-Com came out in 1994, tool tips in games probably hadn’t even been thought of yet.  A lot of things that modern players take for granted just don’t exist in older games, and this can create a lot of frustrated players. On top of that, there are a multitude of other features that force a greater dedication on the part of the player that newer gamers just aren’t accustomed to. If a player feels they have to fight just to understand the interface of a game, they also probably won’t be playing very long.

Now, none of this is really a problem if you are of the view that gaming is simply a throwaway form of entertainment best enjoyed for a while and then forgotten.  If you want to look at gaming as something with some more cultural relevance, then it is very troubling to realize that gaming, by its very nature, tends to makes its own history less and less accessible with every step forward it takes.

Much like there are classic books and classic films – works that are timeless and fundamental to the literary or film canon – it is important that we recognize classic games; games that created genres, or defined genres, or simply did wonderful things that should not be forgotten.  If I want to read a classic book, I go to the library.  If I want to watch a classic film, I can get on Netflix.  If I want to play a classic game, I have to jump through at least some of the hoops I mentioned above.  On top of that, trying to introduce a classic to someone else runs into the same problems – they have to have the same level of dedication just to share in the experience, and for a lot of people it’s just not worth it.  Even games that are coming out now that we consider amazing works could be completely unplayable and forgotten by the vast majority of people less then ten years down the road.

With every technical advance forward, gaming seems to cast off a little more of its past.  That’s not to say that technical innovation is in any way bad, but simply that we should take steps to make sure the past is maintained.  If gaming is to hold any sort of long-term cultural relevance, I feel that this is key.

What the ultimate solution is to making this happen, I do not know.  Groups like the Vintage Game Club are a good step, helping show newer gamers that which has come before.  On a personal level, all I can suggest is that we continue to try and share the experiences that shaped us as game players, games designers, or whatever else we fancy ourselves.  It may take some patience, but the end results will be well worth it.  We cannot forget our roots, no matter how pixely or poorly documented they may be.