It's easy to underestimate the humble door. You open it, you go through. Sometimes, you must find the key first, and for many games, that's the whole extent of the player's interactions with doors. They're something to get past, something that cordons off one bit from the next bit. A simple structural element, of special interest to level designers, but not the ones who turn the knobs.

And yet, the fundamental nature of doors that makes them seem so mundane also imbues them with a kind of magic. How do I open it? And what could be behind it? A good door is a locus of challenge and mystery; mystery that could give way to delight, wonder, or even a good scare. A good door is a teasing paradox that does everything in its power to entice and invite, but also puts up a decent effort to keep you out, at least long enough to intrigue and fire up your imagination.

Some games highlight the versatility of doors by turning them into especially dense knots in the possibility space. In games like Thief, Dishonored, Prey, Deus Ex or Darkwood, doors can be lockpicked, hacked, blown to bits or cleverly circumvented. In emergencies, they can be barricaded, blocked by heavy objects or even taken off the electric grid. For the tactically minded, they can serve as choke points to lure enemies into traps or ambushes, while the patient can use keyholes to spy on the unsuspecting, or simply get close enough to a door to eavesdrop on an important conversation.

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Ask a young adult today what a floppy disk is and you'll likely earn puzzled silence. To them, they are ancient artefacts. Demonstrate an "old" game (say, from around 2000) to a kid today, and they might look at it with disbelieving curiosity. Did games really look like that, once upon a time, in the unfathomable recesses of antiquity? Similarly, to me, 30 years old, games of the early 90s (and the machines that run them) already exude a certain alien primitivity. Revisiting them several decades after their prime with a historian's curiosity is as fascinating as it is frustrating: it's easy to bounce off old games and their archaic workings.

The advance and change of technology is rapid, and, as many have pointed out, presents daunting problems regarding the preservation of older games. But there are other issues that may be less urgent, issues that are just as real. Let's assume for the sake of speculation that game historians and preservationists manage to address the problem, and that, say, a thousand years from now (if we're still around by then), at least a fraction of today's games will still be playable in some form.

A thousand years may seem excessive. Given the breakneck cycles of hype and disinterest, of novelty and jadedness, surely no denizen of a future world a millennium from now will be interested in playing, say, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare? But consider that when it comes to older media, literature first and foremost, some texts are still alive and well. You'll have no trouble finding a copy of Beowulf (ca. 1000 years old and surviving in a single manuscript which was almost destroyed in a fire in 1731), The Iliad (almost 3000 years old) or the Epic of Gilgamesh (a whopping 4000 years old). And it's not just historians who read them either.

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The first games I played were games of memory. My English grandfather was full of them. Parlour games, mainly. There was one in which each chair in his living room became a station and his family became trains. He would stand in the middle of the room and direct the trains between the stations, and you had to remember which train you were and where the station you were headed to could be found. At five or six, I found it overwhelming, but also intoxicating. (At 39, I now look back and suspect my grandfather wished he hadn't spent his life as clerk of the local magistrate's court.) Then there was another game - I've since learned that it's called Kim's Game, but as a kid I assumed my grandfather had invented it - in which he arranged a tray with bits and pieces from around the house, gave us a minute to study them all and then covered the tray with a cloth and quietly removed one item. When he uncovered the tray again we all had to spot what was missing.

God, memory is just fascinating. At times - these times may be called "the speedy approach to being 40" - it feels like memory is the most human of topics. It's where so much of what we are lays tangled together. Tangled and knotted. I think of Kim's Game and I am instantly back in my grandfather's living room. I can remember so many of the items that served time on the Kim's Game trays - a silver toast rack, a plectrum, a music box with a clown printed on it, a bright purple brazil nut chocolate - and then these items bring their own memories along with them too. I remember looking at that plectrum and wondering what it was for. I think of the toast rack and I can almost smell the gas hob and the marmalade that scented the kitchen of that house. I remember that I was allowed to eat that brazil nut chocolate once that particular game was completed.

Games and memory belong together, I think. There is the way they are stored in the mind, for starters. I tend to remember games the way I remember architecture or poetry: fragments set adrift, occasionally bumping into view, distracting and sometimes faintly troubling. Just as I remember a warm tiled corridor with iron banisters rising at the turn, or a gentleman, clean favoured, and imperially slim, I will suddenly from nowhere recall a cathedral that hangs from chains, or a cavern where visitors are intermittently crushed between slabs of disco-pink quartz. I remember pieces, and the pieces are often more interesting than the games they force me to track down. A door that held an entire ocean behind it. A book that sent me back to the start.

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Humans have gazed up at the sky and wondered about their place in the cosmos since the very beginning. Do the same in a game like, say, Breath of the Wild, and you're presented with vivid images of clouds, stars, the sun and the moon. It's an important part of this and many other games that helps to create an illusion of a continuous space that stretches beyond what we actually experience within the confines of the game. The sky implies that Hyrule, despite being a fantasy world, is a part of a cosmos very much like our own, and we accept this even though we cannot fly up and check.

Since it matches our own experience of the sky so closely, we won't spend a lot of time thinking about how the universe around Hyrule is structured. There are quite a few games, however, in which the cosmos moves from the margins to the centre. These games take a close look at, for example, how their worlds were created or might end, the rules by which they operate, or simply how the experiences of the player fit into a larger world view. In other words, they create and explore cosmologies.

Cosmology, the attempt to describe the nature of the universe, didn't start with the advent of modern astronomy, but was present throughout all of human history. Always, real observations about the world were seen and interpreted through lenses of ideology and assumptions about how the world works (even our 'objective' study of the cosmos cannot help but be coloured by our very human perspectives).

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UPDATE 2.35pm: Dark Souls Remastered has unsurprisingly just been confirmed for non-Nintendo Switch platforms as well.

It will arrive on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on the same day - 25th May.

ORIGINAL STORY 2.00pm: FromSoftware's legendary Dark Souls will get a new lease of life on Nintendo Switch.

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