When Henry Lowood, curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University, started preserving video games and video game artifacts in 1998, he thought it was closer to professional oblivion than a bold new move into the future. In just a few years, however, Lowood's notion that video games were something with a history worth preserving and a culture worth studying has gone from absurd to worthy of consideration by the Library of Congress. Earlier this month at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Lowood announced a game canon, an idea that grew out of a proposal submitted to the Library of Congress in September 2006 by a consortium made up of Stanford, the University of Maryland and the University of Illinois.

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