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.

When a word like "addiction" is pasted right after the words "internet" and "game", you know it's not going to be all that great. This new article on CNN discusses addiction to using computers and consoles, with a Stanford study recounting just how bad addiction to computing (rather than computers) can get.

Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, head of the Impulse Control Disorders Clinic of the Stanford University School of Medicine, mentioned how their earlier poll of people got to them.

As Aboujaoude notes in the article,

We are seeing more people who lost their jobs because of too much time spent surfing the Internet during work. More relationships are breaking up because of spouses sneaking out of bed to check e-mail in the middle of the night.

While this does seem specifically pointed towards just surfing the net, you have to remember that game consoles are also computers, technically speaking. Previous reports have mentioned that symptoms of addiction have shown themselves when gamers play, and let's not forget the personal accounts of people who've gotten attached to World of Warcraft.

While computer use still doesn't have the "mental illness" tag on its head, the symptoms do happen to be there. Gaming might be good for us in moderation, if one study is to be believed, but fostering good relationships outside individual pieces of tech will definitely help to keep gaming a venue to have fun rather than a place to get a fix.

Xfire finally unveiled the winners of their World of Warcraft Summer Movie Contest last night at a special Machinima event and screening at Stanford University (special because I didn't get invited). The winners, who were chosen by the WoW gaming community, Blizzard, and Xfire from a multitude of entries from around the world, each got to take home a portion of the total US$23,000 pot.

The contest was started to give recognition to outstanding Machinima movies. According to Xfire CEO Mike Cassidy, "Machinima is an extraordinary new art form that allows anybody with time and talent to create great works of entertainment which can be instantly distributed to a global audience."

The finalists for the contest got viewed over one million times on Xfire, so just imagine how many views the overall winners got. Anyway, the winners from each of the contest categories are as follows:

Best Overall & Best Drama/Action
Jason Choi
"The Edge of Remorse"

Comedy
Ryan and John Ebenger
"The Brother's Tauren 2"

Music Video/Dance
Brandon Dennis
"The Anti-Elf Anthem"

Short Film
Jun Falkenstein
"The Ballad of the Noob"

Don't forget to check out the movies. We especially recommend "The Brothers Tauren" and "The Ballad of the Noob." Those two are definitely laugh-out-loud funny and deserve a few viewings.