The goal of the video game committee in the New York Times article is to create a game cannon for America. The biggest challenge seems like it would be cultural rather then technical. As Hayley pointed out in her post she disagreed with the choice of the soccer game. All of the games were released before I was actually playing video games, and my experience with the games on the list comes mostly from the sequels.
Since their list didn’t hold a lot of meaning for me I wanted to make my own personal game cannon. Where I experienced a genre first, and the kind of impact it had one me. This is also a bit of an expansion on the first day of class when we all shared a video game.
The first computer game that I remember playing is Age of Empires. It is a real time strategy game based on the medieval era. I lost a countless number of hours in elementary school playing this with my friends. It was the first in a long line of addictions to strategy games.
The first console game I played is lost to memory but two stick out. The first is Goldeneye for being the most memorable FPS I played. Goldeneye also represented my first experience of competitive multiplayer gaming. The other game that stuck out is called Rogue Squadron. The game was a star wars themed dogfighting game. I often judge the controls of flight games I play based on how similar they feel to Rogue Squadron.
The last game that needs to be added to my cannon is Diablo II. It was the first RPG that I played. It gave me an appreciation for procedurally generated environments, collecting items to become ‘rich’, and the process of leveling up a character.
There are quite a few genres that are missing from my cannon, like sports, puzzle games, platformers, and simulators. I never really got as interested in these other genres. I’m sure that if other people created their own game cannon’s they would also wind up with missing genres. Which might explain the exclusion of one genre in the NYT article: MMORPGs
Your mention of Goldeneye reminds of a class similar to ours at the University of Mary Washington, where the professor (Zach Whalen, whose work on music in videogames we’ve read) has his students create their own canon as well. And Goldeneye is often one of games students include in their own canons. In fact, Whalen’s students are creating an exhibit about their own archive (using the same software we’ll be using for our Portal exhibit).