(Disclaimer: This is a reworking of an old Twitter thread of mine)
What are your favourite games that only exist as a set of tweets or a screenshot of the notes app?
Or just a PDF download of a Google Doc in your "rpgs" folder with no identifying information that you have no idea how you got in the first place?
Or two long messages in Discord and you have no idea what the designer is up to now since they left all social media?
Or a friend showed you in their notebook once but they said it wasn't ready even though it seemed amazing and now they don't play games much anymore and just give an embarrassed chuckle when you tentatively inquire about the game they were working on?
What's your favourite deleted itch game?
Favourite dead blogs that you still have some pages of rules and game bits saved to your bookmarks?
I've been thinking about the ephemeral nature of games and game texts. Back in August 2021, I was asking around about a game PDF I had saved of a Google Doc I probably found on Reddit or some other forum (I still haven't found out where I got it from!). More than I year ago now, I went to share a link to an itch game page and discovered it was gone.
I think about how a bunch of lyric games that hit me aren't on any kind of "stable" platform like itch.io and are kinda hard to find now. I think about threads of "old treasures" from the early days of tabletop RPG zines, games that weren't digitized, one-off convention games, games that were put online but not in any way that's captured by our current platforms. I think of all the games from early eras that didn't get preserved because they weren't "notable" or made by "notable" people or quoted as inspirations by other "notable" games. I think of how archaeology can only see that which was "valued" to preserve.
I think of how many games that I and my current cohort of designers have made, entries for numerous game jams, that will be thought of in 1, 2, 5, 10 years time.
I was also thinking about game design and the act of playing games as necromancy. Since you can't get other people to re-play or re-experience a game session you had exactly, all you can do is give them some tools to maybe try and re-conjure, resurrect, a similar game.
Games die all the time.
I don't think my answer to this ephemeral nature of games and art productions is just to push for more archiving and permanence (lol sorry archivists and historians), though yeah let's try to do that too. I'm kinda okay that some things get to die and be lost. Their body gone, but their memory and mark on us persevering.
One thing that I keep coming back to is (I think) Brendan Keogh's thoughts on if we want to treat games as art rather than just products, we have to allow for games to be the equivalent of a drawing stuck on a fridge, or a poem written in a greeting card. That feels true to me. That some games can just be for a certain person, time, place.
I want more people to see gamemaking as a practice and art that they can engage with on whatever terms they choose, not just whatever terms "the market dictates". To make games with no thought whether they would be "notable" or remembered. To make games for the sake of having this thing exist, bursting and fading like a firework.
If that comes with the cost of ghosts of games littering our spaces, then so be it.