Picture your life and interests. Let’s pick out as part of it your interest in, knowledge of, and enthusiasm for video games. In the future, after you’re gone, what will be left of it? What will be remembered of what you know and have seen? Where will all of that go? Have you considered that, the way the internet is, a lot of that will simply disappear, tracelessly?
Websites die, and when they do, they leave very little in their wake. The early days of the web was filled with an overabundance of fansites and web shrines, and most of those are gone. The demise of Geocities, the decay of free web hosts in general, and the loss of online service web communities and hosts like Compuserve Ourworld, has resulted in the large-scale deletion of huge swaths of content, and the loss of web directories as a thing, combined with Google Search’s slide into senility, means what survives is a lot harder to find.
This is a discursive lead-in to the work at WikiData in cataloging games and game sites, which is summarized for 2022 here. Information on their efforts was written up here.
I wish I could say more, their work seems very important, but I’m just starting to learn about it myself! Apparently there is a means of querying their information to answer questions, like which game series has the most games? More on this in the future.
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