Join The Club
It's important to archive things for future generations—books, culture, music, film, and hey, absolutely videogames. The awareness of the very latter being a hot button topic per the Stop Killing Games movement. The British Film Institute (BFI)—a charity funded by our national lottery which, among many other things, maintains the world's largest film archive—has similarly expanded its scope to, well, British memes.
No, really. Per this video from last week, the BFI now has an online video archive to conserve the best and brightest of online culture: "First came the Cinema Age, then the TV Age, and now the age of Online Video. Digital film created for distribution online is today’s most dynamic, influential screen form," the site reads.
"Encompassing much that’s new, from ASMR and Unboxing Videos to Twitch streaming and TikTok twerking, it’s also breathed new life into older film forms, filling our screens with fresh takes on advertising, journalism, satire, public information, campaigning, training and much else that’s been with us since time immemorial, and variously taking the forms of comedy, drama, documentary and animation.
"It’s become embedded into every aspect of UK (and world) society." The collection, which is currently 60 videos strong, includes a lot of classics. There's Weebls Stuff's "Badgers" video, Charlie Bit My Finger, I Can't Believe You've Done this, and a couple of videos related to gaming, too.
Take this granny having a rampage in Grand Theft Auto to exact terrible vengeance on British Gas—and here's where the site's value makes itself clear, because wouldn't you know it, I actually wound up learning something: "British Gas Rampage was a skit made to mimic the ‘Let’s Play’ style of gaming video … it was masterminded by the award-winning creative duo Dom Moira and Kieron Roe."
History's not just the big, overarching stuff—but the little things, too. Take the graffiti in Pompeii, for instance. I'm not saying that Limmy's Purple Burglar Alarm's going to be immortalised in the ashes of a volcano (and if it is, we've got bigger things to worry about), but rather the mundane nonsense we get up to in our spare time's as much a part of our history as the wars we've fought.
As far as I'm concerned, people getting a nan to yell "you British Gas bastards! I'm gonna blow you to hell!" while a helicopter blows up a power station in GTA for a lark, and Theophilus being told not to get nasty "against the city wall like a dog"? They're one and the same.
Besides, the collection does have some more reflective videos—essays and the like—which will be worth preserving, too. You can delve into the whole thing on the BFI's website.
