• 1  To name but a few: Erwan Cario, Start! La grande histoire des jeux vidéo, Paris, La Martinière, 20 (...)
• 2  As we recently observed with the exhibitions MuseoGames at the Conservatoire national des Arts et (...)

1Since their creation in the 1950s, video games have become popularized and made their way into many homes. Along with music, movies, books, comic books, they are one of the cultural products the French consume the most. Boasting a sixty-year old history and evolution, video games seem to have finally gained some recognition. There has been a noticeable increase in the number of scientific studies on video games, even outside the field of psychology, which traditionally analyzes the impact of video games on players from the perspective of graphic violence. Moreover, there are now numerous works that attempt to trace the history of this medium.1 Video games are also the object of exhibitions hosted by major cultural institutions,2 among which are Museo Games at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (Cnam) and Game Story at the Grand Palais.

• 3  For instance, arcade games have almost completely disappeared from public places. Moreover, their (...)
• 4  A stance taken by authors such as Hovig Ter Minassaian in his article: Hovig Ter Minassian, “Les j (...)

3This phenomenon appears to grant video games a heritage status. We call “granting a heritage status” the process through which any object is imbued with a heritage quality. This is done by and for amateurs and although emulation is quite far from being a perfect means of preservation, it allows for the distribution of a heritage that, at least in part, would have been lost or unavailable to the public.3 Despite numerous drawbacks, such as the loss of the original preservation format or alteration of the gaming experience, we have observed that emulation allows for the “viral” preservation of video games, for everyone can store a piece of that cultural heritage on their personal computer. Rather than taking a global stance on the process through which video games are ascribed a heritage status4, this paper will deal with the emergence of an “amateur” heritage status.

• 5  Jean-Pierre Babelon and André Chastel, La Notion de patrimoine, Paris, L. Levi, 2008, p. 72.

5In France, although we have adopted an administrative perspective on this topic since the issue in 1830 of the Guizot report —then Secretary of the Interior— calling for the appointment of a historical monuments inspector,5 heritage is both an administrative and scientific movement characterized by verticality. Integration into the national heritage is decided by a state institution, which is the only authority in terms of heritage status.

• 6  Jean Davallon, “Comment se fabrique le patrimoine: deux régimes de patrimonialisation,” in Chérif (...)
• 7  Francesco Bandarin, “Notes d’ouverture,” in Chérif Khaznadar (ed.), Le Patrimoine, oui, mais quel (...)

6However, limiting the issue of heritage to their depositary institutions would be simplistic. Heritage, and by extension the process of granting the heritage status, have far more general definitions. Indeed, heritage can be defined as a “social construct: heritage is what agents regard as heritage”6 and owners, depositaries and users may deservedly be considered as agents. Therefore, it is the community that initiates the process of granting heritage status or, more precisely, it is the community which, through its action, determines what is likely to become heritage. Therefore, the act of granting the heritage status defines what becomes heritage, not the intrinsic value of the object. This definition allows to broaden this notion from the mere field of arts to heritage beyond the historical and esthetic dimensions of objects, whatever they may be. We then pass from heritage to heritages. As pointed out by Francesco Bandarin, Director of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre: “Through the notion of intangible heritage, we have established that the value of heritage is not necessarily defined in the light of a universal scale of values, but in the light of the value it is ascribed by the communities that determine heritage according to the feeling of identity and continuity they derive from it”.7 It is indeed the integration of intangible heritage that confirmed this notional swing.

• 8  Aloïs Riegl, Le Culte moderne des monuments: son essence et sa genèse, Paris, Seuil, 1984.

7Consequently, as foreseen as early as 1903 by Alois Riegl in Le Culte moderne des monuments8 [The Modern Cult of Monuments], we are heading towards the all-embracing heritage. In this sense, it is quite irrelevant to wonder what is likely to be —not to say worthy of being— considered as heritage. As soon as a given community is willing to preserve and pass on to its future generations, there is heritage. We have switched from an essentially vertical process, according which prescribers would determine what was to be preserved, to a more horizontal process through which users grant their goods a heritage status on their own. Institutions such as UNESCO are playing the role of guides rather than prescribers. Contrary to the 19th century, when historical monuments inspectors would criss-cross France to identify what real estate was likely to be listed as a historical monument —however arbitrary this method could have been—, the process of granting a heritage status is no longer based on choice but on the identification of objects, or customs in the case of intangible heritage, that are likely to be integrated into the world heritage and preserved as such.

• 9  Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction: critique sociale du jugement, Paris, Minuit, 1979.
• 10  Bernard Lahire, La Culture des individus: dissonances culturelles et distinction de soi, Paris, La (...)
• 11  Nathalie Heinich, “Les arts premiers,” in Nathalie Heinich, Roberta Shapiro and François Brunet, D (...)

8As a result, the link between the recognition as heritage and legitimization, in the way Pierre Bourdieu9 and Bernard Lahire10 define it, is thinner and thinner. Admittedly, whenever a cultural object is showcased in a museum exhibition, it is granted a form of recognition (as is the case of non-occidental arts11 or comics), yet the current definition of heritage clouds the issue. In the absence of an institution in charge of legitimization, the process of granting heritage status to an object no longer results in the nearly systematic categorization of the latter as a legitimate cultural object. Even if a protected monument is undeniably conferred an aura by its heritage status, this does not apply to video games, which even when granted a heritage status, remain illegitimate forms of culture, as this status is not conferred or supported by an institution endowed with enough “legitimizing power” to induce a change in the status of the object. In this respect, legitimization becomes a process that is more dissociated than the granting of heritage status and whose implementation requires adapted tools.

• 13  Jean Davallon, “Comment se fabrique le patrimoine: deux régimes de patrimonialisation,” in Chérif (...)

176. transmission.13

• 14 Patrice Flichy, Le Sacre de l’amateur: sociologie des passions ordinaires à l’ère numérique, Paris, (...)

18The rise of the digital enables amateurs to take charge of some —if not all— of these steps. As Patrice Flichy states in his work entitled Le Sacre de l’amateur: sociologie des passions ordinaires à l’ère du numérique, thanks to the internet, amateurs have acquired great visibility in many areas of interest,14 ranging from electronic music to digital photography, including writing, politics and medicine. This list is ever-expanding. Although Patrice Flichy does not formulate this question explicitly, we could wonder why amateurs would put aside heritage? Why suppose that they would not actively participate in the preservation of what constitutes one of their pastimes?

• 15 [online] http://www.comics.org/ [accessed November 2013]. (...)
• 16 Like other references, this one is taken from an article posted on Patrick Pecatte’s blog. He is an (...)
• 17 [online] http://inducks.org/ [accessed November 2013]. (...)
• 18 [online] http://www.pulpmags.org/about.html [accessed November 2013]. (...)

19We can already find numerous examples of this kind of practices outside the field of video games. In the case of comics, we can already find noteworthy websites such as the Grand Comics Database,15 which lists around 900 000 comic books. The community that has gathered on this platform has also scanned and uploaded over 430 000 covers, so much so that it is now a reference website for all the researchers working on this type of publications.16 In the same way, the Inducks17 website lists all the Disney comics and pulp magazines project18 all the so-called pulp magazines. The digitization of covers on the latter is quite considerable.

• 19  This particular type of memory only allows for reading, writing is impossible.

20By analogy with these websites, we witness in the field of video games the emergence of websites dedicated to emulation, which host thousands of dematerialized games. When used in the context of video games, the term emulation refers to the reproduction of the functioning of a console via a computer program. This program allows players to read ROM (Read-Only Memory) files19 taken from original formats such as cartridges, CDs or tapes and run games that were originally designed for arcade cabinets or consoles on personal computers. Contrary to websites that list different kinds of comic books, they offer complete access to the object and not only to metadata on the object. They are “digitized” video games, so to speak, that computer users can easily share.

• 20  A task force on video games was recently established by the Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Di (...)
• 21  In this sense, the switch from 2D to 3D games made possible by the commercialization of 32-bit con (...)

23We have only begun our research work on the latter, but it seems that, given the success of this industry, “the find” partly results from an awareness of public authorities,20 which eventually find video games economically attractive, for they are now fully acknowledged as cultural products, just like music, cinema or comics. We may also attribute “the find” —the quotation marks being particularly relevant in this case— to the very age of the object, which makes it all the more valuable to the audience’s eyes. This audience does indeed idealize old games and considers them as “more pure” because they are more difficult, less focused on graphic innovation than gameplay. Today, video games are old enough to undergo a process that is similar to the one affecting other cultural objects, that is to say that, throughout the ages the present time has been held responsible for mediocrity and the lack of new masterpieces. We keep on glorifying past works, not only because their value inherently increases with age, but also because critics have gained enough hindsight to make a selection and retain only the works they have deemed worthy of interest.21 Concerning this step, we could also mention the publishers of video games who increase the value of their past products on their own by republishing them on more recent platforms, or the cultural agents producing musical or cinematographic works that potentially draw on video games and therefore contribute to this change in their status.

• 22  For three years now, the OMNSH (Observatoire des Mondes Numériques en Sciences Humaines) and the j (...)

24The second step, called “the study of the object,” seems to result from the age of scholars rather than that of the object. The generation now accessing academic positions has grown up playing video games and is not prejudiced against them. On the contrary, inspired by Anglo-Saxon researchers’ works, they strive to overcome the initial complaints made against video games, such as violence and addiction, to point out other perspectives contributing to the academic recognition of this object.22

• 23  For instance, USB cartridge-drives were developed and commercialized in the 16-bit era, which made (...)

29Although this phenomenon can only be partially explained by the gamers’ desire to preserve what is part of their cultural heritage, it demonstrates their attachment to these historical objects, most of which are now unavailable on the market or hard to get. The success of emulation websites is the expression of the gamers’ wish to replay old video games. They are indeed ascribed a certain value as, from a technical point of view, these games can be considered as obsolete. They also show that the people who have invested themselves to upload these games have technical skills —although the uploading process is way easier nowadays23— and a strong will to ensure the durability and transmission of these games. In fact, in the long-term, the entire global video games library could be stored using this method.