Waste of the Day: Throwback Thursday: Video Game Conservation

Topline: The word “conservation” usually applies to wildlife or the environment, but in 2011, the federal government spent $113,277 on a conservation survey of 6,900 video games. The grant to the International Center for the History of Electronic Games would be worth $161,573 today.

How do conservation and video games go together?

That’s according to the “Wastebook” reporting published by the late U.S. Senator Dr. Tom Coburn. For years, these reports shined a white-hot spotlight on federal frauds and taxpayer abuses. 

Coburn, the legendary U.S. Senator from Oklahoma, earned the nickname “Dr. No” by stopping thousands of pork-barrel projects using the Senate rules. Projects that he couldn’t stop, Coburn included in his oversight reports.   

Coburn’s Wastebook 2011 included 100 examples of outrageous spending worth nearly $7 billion, including the quarters eaten by arcade games.

Key facts: The Institute of Library and Museum Services awarded the grant to examine video games and “determine the current condition of both the physical artifacts and their virtual content.”

The International Center for the History of Electronic Games is part of the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. It “collects, studies, and interprets video games, other electronic games, and related materials and the ways in which electronic games are changing how people play, learn, and connect with each other, including across boundaries of culture and geography.”

The two-year project took screenshots and video captures of games made before 2005 using “best practice conservation” techniques and wrote “maintenance manuals” to preserve the games in the future.

How the grantee defended itself

Search all federal, state and local government salaries and vendor payments with the world’s largest government spending database at OpenTheBooks.com. 

Supporting quote: After Coburn called out the grant as wasteful spending, the museum responded with an argument that  “Video games are influencing society just as much as novels did 200 years ago or movies did 100 years ago … Despite this recent criticism, we pledge to continue, and even to increase, our preservation efforts in the future.”

Summary: Playing an arcade game like Pac-Man or Space Invaders is only supposed to cost 25 cents, not over $100,000.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.