Over the past decade, a community of researchers, technologists and memory institutions such as libraries and archives have made substantial progress towards ensuring the long-term viability of digital content. Individuals routinely hold terabytes of material; organizations hold hundreds of terabytes. The ones that plan for the future have a reasonable level of confidence that they can, with vigilance and some good fortune, keep these collections safe and usable for the next generation. But these collections are fairly simple in form – images, photographs, office documents.

The digital age has seen a rush of change – creation, emergence, false starts and firsts. Digital content, software and technology have gone beyond creating documents, producing audio and video, capturing data or performing analysis. They mediate artistic creation, community, social interaction and the closest human bonds.

Perhaps the most remarkable of these inventions is the computer game, with its outstanding artistry, simulated worlds with rich physics, automated players, sophisticated narratives that reflect player choices, and real social interaction between human players. These deeply complex digital objects touch the lives of hundreds of millions of people and have given rise to major commercial enterprises and multi-billion dollar industries.

Digital art provides additional challenges. In part, this is due to the creative experimental nature of digital art. Artists often collaborate with data analysts, scientists and engineers. They encourage each other to push the boundaries of what can be done. For the current volume, this means that they challenge what can be replicated at all – much less preserved.

Simulations and their visualizations have become an essential component of policy formation and decision-making as well as the basis for understanding their consequences. They are also a key component of exploration and discovery in both scientific and commercial domains. In fields from archaeology to x-ray crystallography, both expert scientists and the general public rely on visualizations that they can manipulate to deepen their understanding. Every simulation and subsequent presentation, however, makes simplifying assumptions and approximations; has poorly understood boundary conditions; and is subject to misrepresenting a situation either intentionally or unintentionally. As a result, it is critical to preserve the simulation itself for future understanding and analysis of the results.

In spite of the importance of these artefacts, there are not yet effective methods of keeping and preserving them for future generations – or even recommercialization and study today.