US Senator Attacks Democratic Administration on Video Game Preservation

A Senator in the United States has singled out video game preservation as one of the wasteful projects that the United States government is spending money on, as part of a bigger report criticizing the Democratic administration.

The video game related grant that Tom Coburn, who is the junior Republican Senator from the state of Oklahoma, is worth 113,277 dollars (86.636 Euro) and was given to the International Center for the History of Electronic Games, based in Rochester.

The grant was given back in May and was designed to allow the center to develop the methods that other entities, from museums to libraries, would then use to make sure that old game related property was preserved for the future.

In a statement the Senator said, “Video games, robot dragons, Christmas trees, and magic museums. This is not a Christmas wish list, these are just some of the ways the federal government spent your tax dollars.”

Jon-Paul Dyson, who is the director at the Rochester Center, fired back saying, “If we do not act now, many of the early electronic games and the record of their influence on society will be lost. Video games are stored in digital formats that don’t last forever. The lifespan of tapes, disks, cartridges, and CDs is measured in decades, not centuries, and the software and hardware running these games is becoming obsolete.”

The report from the Senator is not binding in any way but in the coming months, before the 2012 presidential election, the United States will see a lot of fights over how money is used by the government and such grants might be targeted for elimination.

During 2011 the International Center for the History of Electronic Games received a number of donations linked to video games and the issues of preserving the rapidly decaying history of the genre has become more visible.