I'd think saying "barely anyone" reads things like Illiad or Odyssey or Plato or Shakespeare or Dante's works or the Bible or the Quaran or the Torah or Confucius etc etc is...a bit of an exaggeration, don't you think?

When it comes to Illiad, Odyssey, Plato and Dante I think you'll find 'barely anyone' covers it nicely.
Shakespeare might be more widely read but only in the context that school children are often required to read it and my perception of that might be a cultural bias as I live in the country he is from.

When it comes to the Bible, Quaran and Torah then yes, it might be more widely read but then again that's probably down to fear, guilt and a wonderfully socially acceptable form of mass childhood indoctrination which exists in the context of those works

When it comes to the Bible, Quaran and Torah then yes, it might be more widely read but then again that's probably down to fear, guilt and a wonderfully socially acceptable form of mass childhood indoctrination which exists in the context of those works

Oh shit it's happening; abandon the thread! I predict the normal religious debate to follow suit shortly.

If you were to write a whole book now, covering the history of video games, what would it include?
Then, add 25 times more history, each year adding more history at an exponential rate -- and write a new book of the same size.
Now, your original book is probably going to be condensed down to a single chapter, or less.
If you had to write the history of games in one page, what would you cut out of tht first book to fit it into a page?

-pre-computer age: pong / tennis for two / etc.
-2d low colour, low res. Then more colours, more res, almost-3d modes.
-6DOF: quake.
-PS1 to PS4 era all basically merge into the same story of growing complexity.

You could also chart the formats per era -- arcade, home console, handheld, integrated into phones, home PC, net-cafés, professional e-sports etc. There will likely be more formats rise and fall in the next 1000 years... This also varies by country -- arcades are mostly dead here, but are popular elsewhere. e.g. A history of e-sport would have to include the Korean Brood War scene.

If there's an"killer app" next year that is so good that it sells 100M pairs of VR goggles, then it would likely be worth mentioning in a history of games along with milestone games like pong/quake/etc.

If people in 1000 years know of our work now, it will be from a book such as this. Is your work a milestone in the evolution of the industry?

If there's an"killer app" next year that is so good that it sells 100M pairs of VR goggles, then it would likely be worth mentioning in a history of games along with milestone games like pong/quake/etc.

If people in 1000 years know of our work now, it will be from a book such as this. Is your work a milestone in the evolution of the industry?

I think this is the key part; it'll be as "Part of History" which means you'll get things like 'first game', 'first game with sprites', 'first vector game', 'first 2.5d game', 'first 3d game', 'first game with real physics', maybe a hat tip towards camera based games, VR games once they get going, first home games would feature somewhere.

Very few games this side of 2000 would make the list, most aren't ground breaking, just building upon their forerunners and when writing history the ground breakers are where you are going to focus and even then they would be liken to games around at their time rather than now. So you wouldn't get a reference to Halo as an example to what Quake lead towards, instead you'd get Quake likened to Popular FPS of the time.

I think, before deciding what will or will not survive, you probably need to get a handle on just how long 1000 years really is.

This.

If you think about it, Jesus is only just twice as old.

It's not even sure that this civilization will stand the test of time. And soft things hardly survive the fall of a civilization. Maybe a stone Super Mario statue or some deliberately buried time capsules that archaeologists find.

When it comes to the Bible, Quaran and Torah then yes, it might be more widely read but then again that's probably down to fear, guilt and a wonderfully socially acceptable form of mass childhood indoctrination which exists in the context of those works

Oh shit it's happening; abandon the thread! I predict the normal religious debate to follow suit shortly.

maybe. time for more "atheist who feels a need to prove something vs straw fundie" action...

though, FWIW, the Torah is basically the first 5 books of the Tanakh in large-scroll form, and in-turn the Tanakh is more commonly known as the Old Testament.

as for the topic:

probably very little from this time will be remembered in the long term.

most likely, what remains will mostly be vestiges, like maybe ASCII and maybe some futuristic x86-64 descendant, likely mutated into an almost unrecognizable form.

now, why ASCII? historically, things have been a path towards convergence on the Latin alphabet, which has now spread in its use (to varying degrees) to most world languages and cultures. eventually, it will likely largely displace most other alphabets and basically take up place as a unified world alphabet. ASCII would then remain as a digital representation of the Latin alphabet, and will likely exert a similar sort of convergence-pressure well into the future.

x86 is less certain, but it is possible that machine-code may eventually stabilize in much the same way as alphabets.

however, pop-culture has historically been notoriously short-lived, and very likely much of what is going on now will be largely forgotten within decades, much-less centuries or longer.

though, for example, first-person-shooters as a genre, will likely live on. they will be updated to incorporate the technology and I/O devices of the times, maybe eventually reaching a more-or-less fixed format and style (like that of most platformers), or essentially "dissolve" and become largely unnoticeable (hidden deep in the territory of "that is just how things work").

otherwise, it is as others had noted, likely specific achievements, like people remembering parts of Doom and Quake, maybe a few early platformers (like the first few Super Mario games and maybe the first Sonic games, ...). and, apart from historians, few people will probably really know or care.

though, admittedly, I guess a question which could be asked is even if humanity (as we know it) will still exist in 1000 years.

for example, if humans move past the limits traditionally imposed by biology, there is little to say what a "person" from 1000 years from now might be or look like (say, heavily engineered likely with far-reaching anatomical and biological alterations, resulting say from incremental changes made over the course of many generations and which spread throughout the population, ...).

"now" might essentially be nearing the end of "humanity as we know it"...

future person might show up, looking really weird, but have special features like maybe 5+ component vision and the ability to directly interface with machinery and mentally communicate over futuristic WiFi and carry around large amounts of data in their head, ... like, they don't need phones and laptops, everything that a current person does with a laptop or cellphone will be built right into their head.

or, alternatively, some catastrophic event occurs, and humanity either exists as-is, is killed off, or reverts to a prior form, or some combination thereof (*cough* Adventure Time *cough*).

or such...

If you look at military battles, you can find all kinds in information on more recent engagements ( <100 years ), however as you go back in time the descriptions of the battles get more and more condensed .

There are many "ancient wars" I have read about that are condensed into 1 or 2 paragraphs, even though they lasted for many years .

What do you think will happen to the history of video games ??

People tend to capture their history- on any asset actualy, may it be sport, music, literature , art, even lifestyle. And though video games are a comodity very bound to computational device, then so is also music for example (piano).

In more time to have passed, I would say 200 years, I bet that history faculties on universities will have a department of video games entertainment history. But which of those archaic assets will be played - even as a concept, not as the concrete comodity, is hard to tell. And wheather any of games we have seen so far will be popularily remaked and played that time, with enough measure of revivality, is too hard to say.

Backgammon has survived 5,000 years, it might do another 1,000.

Other than strategy games, it's been mostly the physical combat games that survived through the millenia, such as bowling or darts, archery (hey, even on Wii) where it matters that you can throw a round boulder or an arrow of some kind (or a horseshoe!) at something, or where it matters that your team forces its way through another team's defense line (rugby, which is more like 2,000 years old, not 200 as you'd believe). The motive was of course the same one as F. L. Jahn's (in Germany known as "father of gymnstics") motive for furthering sport for the young in the 18th century. No, it wasn't philanthropy, it was getting young men in shape and ready for military service early.

With that in mind, ego-shooters are probably what will survive.