Henry Lowood, curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University, has a proposal that has been submitted for the consideration of the US Library of Congress, the research arm of the United States Congress and what is practically the national library of the United States of America.

The proposal, to use the words of Heather Chaplin from the New York Times, is video games have "a history worth preserving and a culture worth studying." The proposal was drafted by a consortium: Stanford University, the University of Maryland, and the University of Illinois.

Video games have a cultural and historical significance. On March 8 at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2007, Henry Lowood announced a game canon, a list of important video games worth preserving. "Creating this list is an assertion," Lowood said, "that digital games have a cultural significance and a historical significance."

The video game canon: "the stuff we have to protect first." Below is a list of the members of a five-person committee that presented a canon of games worth preserving at the GDC.

• Henry Lowood, curator, History of Science and Technology Collections, Stanford University
• Warren Spector and Steve Mertzky, game designers
• Matteo Bittanti, academic researcher, Humanities Lab, Stanford University
  
• Christopher Grant, game journalist, editor of joystiq.com
  

The National Film Preservation Board compiles an annual list of films that are added to the National Film Registry managed by the Library of Congress. If the US Congress believes that films aren't necessarily tools of the devil, then maybe the world is ready to agree that video games such as these are worth preserving for the rest of human history:

• Three classic games: Spacewar! (1962), Star Raiders (1979), Zork (1980)
• Tetris (1985) (The designer, Alexey Pajitnov, won a GDC Award at GDC 2007.)
  
• SimCity (1989)
• Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990)
• Civilization I (1991) / Civilization II (1996)
• Doom (1993)
• The Warcraft series: Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (1994), Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995), Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (2002)
  
• Sensible World of Soccer (1994)

"The game canon is a way of saying this is the stuff we have to protect first," said Spector.

Emulators and preservation. Lowood explained a particular challenge. Hardware has changed so much that thousands of games can only be played using emulators - which technically violate copyright laws. It's something to think about - isn't it - that emulators and piracy are serving, in their own way, to keep the memory of old games alive. Now let me see if I can bring up Shadow President (DC True, 1994) on DOSBox.