Are Old Video Games the Ruins of Our Time?
Maybe it has happened to you. You are clearing out an old drawer and you find a game console from your childhood. The plastic has turned slightly yellow, the cables are tangled, and you have no idea whether it still works. But holding it brings back a rush of afternoons, friends on the couch, and the sound of a game starting up.
It feels strangely similar to walking among ancient ruins: an object that once had a clear purpose, now silent, but still full of stories.
That feeling is the starting point of a paper my colleagues and I wrote. We asked a simple question: can old video games and consoles be seen as the ruins of our recent past?
What makes something a ruin?
When we hear the word “ruin,” we usually picture ancient temples and crumbling columns. A ruin is something abandoned or damaged that no longer serves its original purpose, yet still speaks to us. It marks the passing of time, keeps the memory of the past alive, and often looks even more fascinating because it is broken.
But our idea of what counts as a ruin has always been narrow. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many artists and thinkers could not imagine the iron, glass and concrete structures of their own time ever becoming ruins. Only the stone of classical antiquity seemed worthy of that kind of admiration.
There is also a difference between ancient and recent ruins. An ancient ruin reaches us “finished”: its slow decay is long over. A recent ruin, like an abandoned factory, is still in the middle of falling apart. It sits in an uncomfortable in-between state, no longer alive but not yet history. And that, we argue, is exactly where many old video games and consoles sit today.
A short life, a long shadow
Video games were born together with the computer. In the 1970s, the first arcade machines appeared in public spaces, and soon after, consoles entered living rooms. In the 1980s, home computers let people play on the same machine they used for work or school, and handheld consoles took gaming outdoors. A whole generation of children grew up with games as part of everyday life.
Since then, the pace has only accelerated. Graphics, sound and processing power improve every few years, and each new generation of consoles makes the previous one look old. A technology that once felt like the future can become outdated within a decade.
This is what makes games such an interesting case. Ancient ruins took centuries to form. The ruins of gaming form in a few years: machines that still work, but that the world has moved on from.
Are games art?
For a ruin to move us, it usually needs some aesthetic value. So are video games beautiful in that sense? Some argue they are a full art form. Others say they lack the “quality” of traditional art. The debate is still open.
We suggest looking at games in two ways. The first is what happens on the screen: the images, sounds and stories the player experiences. These are often deeply connected to older art traditions. The flat colors and bold outlines of many classic Japanese games, for example, echo centuries-old Japanese woodblock prints.
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The second is the console itself, as a designed object. Consoles are made to look attractive and to match the games they run. Over time, their shape, colors and buttons become part of how we remember the games.
Museums have traditionally struggled with objects like these. They tend to value the unique original, the one-of-a-kind masterpiece. A mass-produced console is the opposite. And yet, museums dedicated entirely to video games now exist in several countries, treating these machines as part of our cultural history.
The pull of nostalgia
If you have noticed old games everywhere lately, you are not imagining it. “Retrogaming,” playing and collecting the classic games of the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, has become a culture of its own, with re-released consoles, merchandise, music and online communities. Many new games are even designed to look deliberately old.
Part of the appeal is simplicity. Next to today’s complex games, the old ones feel clear and direct. But the deeper reason is nostalgia: that bittersweet mix of pleasure and longing for a past that is gone.
Psychologists have found that nostalgia is not just sentimental. It can lift our mood, ease feelings of loneliness and help us feel more connected to who we are. When people describe their nostalgia for old games, they often talk about childhood, family and friends, not just the games themselves. Old game characters can feel almost like old friends.
Arcades also played a social role. Players gathered in the same space, competed, learned from each other and celebrated together. That shared experience is a big part of what people miss.
Machines that hold memories
There is something unique about a console as a ruin. Like any old object, it carries physical memories: the scratches, the worn buttons, the place it used to sit in the living room. But it also holds a second, digital world inside it: the games, the saved progress, the levels you once finished. Switch it on, and those memories appear again in front of you.
In that sense, a console is both an object we remember and a machine that remembers for us. Every player builds a personal collection of digital memories, alongside the memories of real life.
And ruins do not only speak to those who knew them. People often feel drawn to ancient ruins from cultures they never belonged to. The mystery itself is the attraction. The same happens with old games. Young players who never lived through the arcade era discover these machines with curiosity, as if uncovering traces of a lost civilization. As the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously put it, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Sometimes, so is any sufficiently old one.
Today’s modern, tomorrow’s retro
So, are old video games the ruins of our time? We believe they can be. Not because they are broken, but because they carry what every ruin carries: memory, nostalgia and a sense of mystery about a past that is close, yet already gone. Whether hidden in a drawer or displayed in a collection, these machines still hold cultural meaning.
Which leaves an open question. Everything we call modern today will one day be called retro. Will today’s consoles move future generations the way older ones move us now? Or is the speed of technology changing so fast that nothing will stay long enough to become a ruin at all?
This article is based on the paper “Video Games as Technological Ruins of a Recent Past” by R. Metzitakos, D. Panagiotakopoulos and M. Christodoulou, published in Design/Arts/Culture, vol. 1, 2021. Read the full paper.
