Gaming & Culture —

Ars Asks: What video games will still be widely played in 100 years?

Do any of today's titles have the staying power of Chess... or even Monopoly?

In today's inter-holiday news doldrums, the Ars IRC channel has descended into a deep debate over the kind of question that seems perfectly suited for a late-night dorm room bull session. It's a question that seems simple on the surface, but it requires investigating issues of game design mutability, the evolution of taste, commerce, and even digital code preservation to unpack fully.

The question is this: What video games that exist today, if any, will still be widely played for fun by people living 100 years from now?

The germ of the question came from Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov, of all people, who used a trip to South Korea's Youth Mind Sports Fair to tweet about the longevity of chess, as compared to today's hot "e-sports." While Kasparov was respectful of video games and their unique artistic qualities, he was skeptical that any digital game could have the centuries-long impact of a board game like chess.

"Tough for chess to overtake League of Legends, the most popular game here, but I don't think they'll play that in 100 years. Chess, yes!" Kasparov tweeted. "People get bored with a computer game as soon as a new one comes out with slightly better graphics. Chess has captivated us for centuries."

Chess is not alone here. The best board and card games show a surprising resilience to being passed down from generation to generation for hundreds of years, more so even than literature. Classics like Go, Pachisi, Shogi, Backgammon, Checkers, Bridge, Poker, Dominoes and more can trace their histories back for centuries. More recently, corporate-controlled games like Monopoly and Scrabble have stood the test of time across multiple generations and seem likely to endure well into the future as well.

Which brings us back to Kasparov's assertion. Will your great-grandkids still be playing League of Legends, or any current game, to fill up their idle time? Extending it even further, could any digital game last the 1500 years or so that Chess has existed?

Ground Rules

<i>Call of Duty</i> may be popular in 2114, but <i>Call of Duty: Black Ops 2,</i> specifically, probably won't be.
Enlarge / Call of Duty may be popular in 2114, but Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, specifically, probably won't be.

To answer that question, we need to lay down some ground rules to clarify exactly what we're trying to answer. First of all, let's assume that these games will be playable in some form on whatever hardware is available a century from now. This is far from a settled question, for sure, and making sure today's games are still in a usable form well into the future will require a lot of dedicated work in digital preservation and emulation. For the sake of simplifying the argument, though, let's assume that such emulation will be possible, or that someone will be able to remake today's games from the ground up for that far-future hardware, in a form that preserves the basic gameplay.

This raises another potential wrinkle in the question: How much can a game change over the next 100 years before you start to consider it a different game than what we're playing today? People who play Chess, after all, aren't playing the same game that people played when the game was introduced in seventh-century Persia. Everything from the initial board setup to the way the pieces moved was in constant flux in those early years of the game and remained so for centuries. The rules to chess weren't widely formalized internationally until the 18th century, and variations on esoteric elements like castling and stalemates were up in the air until the 19th century. Yet the game was still considered "chess" for that whole time.

You could argue that video game franchises work the same way. If a series like Call of Duty lasts 100 more years (which is far from a given: 100 years is a very long time), the 2114 version will probably differ wildly from what we consider Call of Duty today. Yet there will be a lot of similarities, too: the basic idea of running around and shooting people in the face as a team will likely endure, as will the most basic types of weapons and game modes.

Still, I'd be hard-pressed to consider those century-separated editions of Call of Duty to be a single "game" that has existed for 100 years. Despite all the complaints about yearly sequels being essentially the same game dressed up in newer graphics, each iteration of a long-lived game franchise brings important changes to the core game that amount to more than just rule tweaks and refinements. It seems unlikely that we will ever reach a standardization point where the Call of Duty franchise is no longer evolving and changing significantly from year to year. Even if it does, it's clear we are not at that point yet.

These evolving franchises definitely share widely held elements of a genre, and game genres, from first-person shooters to MOBAs, will likely continue to exist in some form in 100 years. But we're more interested in which specific games will still be played in an essentially unchanged form after all that time, rather than what games will inspire genres that will continue to exist.

The line can be fuzzy here, what with remakes and spiritual successors and graphical upgrades that make surface changes without altering the basic gameplay much if at all. Still, just because a franchise lasts through 100 years of sequels doesn't mean the original game, as it existed initially, can maintain its popularity for that entire time.

True timelessness

The hardware and presentation might change, but <i>Tetris</i> as a game will likely outlive us all.
The hardware and presentation might change, but Tetris as a game will likely outlive us all.

And that brings up the final issue: what do we mean by "widely played." Many of today's games will (hopefully) be of historical interest to some future researchers and hobbyists, but we're more interested in what video games will actually be popular entertainment for a mass audience of lay people in 100 years. These games don't have to be the most popular pastimes that far in the future—as Kasparov noted, chess is currently a lot less popular than Starcraft in Korea. But the game should at least be familiar to and occasionally enjoyed by millions of people out of the billions on the planet to qualify for our question.

This is a difficult bar to get over, and it eliminates all but the most timeless of entertainments. For reference, think about what kinds of movies, books, songs, and even games were wildly popular in the early 1900s. Then consider how few of those are even given passing familiarity today. Now try to look 100 years in the future and predict which games will still endure.

The first game that jumped to my mind, after considering all of these caveats, was Tetris, a game that feels fully contained and likely to have the same addictive appeal to far-future generations as it does today. Classic arcade games like Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man are also arguably timeless enough to endure for a century. More linear, story-based games will have a harder time standing the test of time, but there's an outside chance that early titles in the Final Fantasy or Legend of Zelda series will be remembered similarly to great, early 20th-century children's literature in 100 years' time.

That's just off the top of our heads, though. We're sure the Ars readership will have plenty of other nominees to argue over. It's not an easy question to answer, but it's definitely a fun one to consider. Put your pick in the comments and help us come up with a picture of gaming in the far future.

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