The 500 Year Video Game

First, I am indifferent to the usage of the space between video and game, please proceed however you prefer, and trouble me about this no further.

Second, the purpose of this document is to think about what a 500 Year Video Game even is, or could be. It is not a guarantee of being able to describe or recognize one, much less provide instruction for how to go about making one.

Third, a relatively strict definition: the 500 Year Video Game is a single player computer game that can be deeply played for at least 500 years.

We already have several 500 year games sans video, including Soccer (not technically of age quite yet, but), Chess, Go, Backgammon, etc. Poker is making a good run for it as well. To the best of my knowledge, these are all multiplayer games. But the thing that the computer contributes to the broader human endeavor of games is the complex and "impartial" moderation of an activity or activities, and accordingly, the number of single player games in the post-computer world is radically different from the pre-computer world. More than art or sound or even "interactivity", enabling this explosion of single player games is unique to computers.

Fourth, an honest attempt to identify traits or properties The 500 Year Video Game is likely to have or not have...

The 500 Year Video Game will probably be relatively "abstract." It is unlikely to include or involve skeletons or red keys. It will almost definitely not involve space marines. Looking at Chess and Poker, it's possible the design could lean on ancient civilizational hierarchies or cultural universals, but likely in only the vaguest of ways. Looking at Soccer and Go, it's possible you won't even get away with that.

The 500 Year Video Game will not be able to have a single dominant strategy, even moment to moment. What you do at any given step as a player will depend on a deep but necessarily incomplete understanding of the "field" and the orientation and distribution of the "pieces" on it, even if these positions are "abstract" as they are in Poker. Even minor changes in the state of the "field" might require radically different strategies from the player. The designer's and computer's roles in moderating the field of play and the pieces on it is not to somehow displace or replace the inherent richness of this spatial distribution with fussy trivia, nor to stand in for the "absent" human rival, but a different third thing.

The 500 Year Video Game could be turn-based, real-time, or some strange mix of the two. While 500 year games I think tend toward the turn-based for a variety of reasons, Soccer makes a powerful and bewitching argument for the alternative, and I think you could make a case that Poker is real-time in important ways too.

The 500 Year Video Game will not require particularly advanced technology. It will not require shaders, parallel processing, networking, cloud computing, or LLMs, either in its development or in its execution or operation. The core of the design should be able to be clearly represented and interacted with even on the first few generations of microcomputers, which is both sufficient to meet the design needs expressed above, and important for various Mad Max / Butlerian Jihad scenarios.

The 500 Year Video Game will not have a "game narrative", but it will have an innate capacity to manifest deeply compelling player narratives. It will also not depend on a specific kind of music in order to be effective or compelling or involve the player. Despite the profound and immediate pleasures these bring to most of my favorite video games, they are without precedent.

Finally, the 500 Year Video Game may not be able to be made by just one person in one lifetime. Computer games are more resistant to or have some specific obstacles when it comes to this, especially compared to folk games or sports. Being somewhat abstract and not requiring specialized technology theoretically lower the barriers to generational maintenance, and you could argue that obvious 500 year candidate Tetris has done this, or this has been done to it to some degree, but overall I think it is unlikely that any kind of normal commercial game making environment, indie or otherwise, is situated in a way that could allow something to evolve or be adopted in this kind of generational and measured way.

-AA