Video Games Won't (and Can't!) Save Its History [SSFF] - General

I don't think this has been posted yet https://youtu.be/qBqYrmbDBgs I find this very concerning, not making any attempt to preserve old games is doing a huge disservice to the video game industry as a whole Watching this makes me want to buy some hard drives & download all the roms I can in order to preserve them

Archive.org hosts a massive amount of Dos games, thankfully. I guess it's also pretty great that nintendo's never released PC games, by that regard. honestly, we really need a pirate party. Just decriminalize piracy already.

By that same logic, museums too are in it only for the money and don't care about preservation.

Museums are non-profit organizations, were Emulradiae, loveroms, etc non-profits?

Museums typically do no redistribute their exhibits.

Not all museums are non-profit organizations.

Just so everyone knows, http://www.abandonia.com/ is amazing for old games, and a LOT of abandonware too.

the vast, vast majority of museums in the US are 501 C 3 Non-Profits dude. In fact, that non-profit trend doesn’t change much in Europe either as far as I’m aware - so my point stands. Museums are non-profit organizations, outliers don’t change that.

tbh they should

I doubt it's just outliers, most museums I know are not free. Maybe the US and UK are the outliers here.

if you buy anything from an Atari cartridge up to the Xbox-PS2-Gamecube era disc you're not making money for the original publishers or devs, either.

How exactly? In what capacity? Via travelling exhibits? Those already frequently occur (for example, a museum close to my heart has had multiple valuable exhibits visit from Europe, in one case it was the first time those objects ever left Europe). Collections need adequate storage, and one of the ways collections get preserved is by not moving them around too much. Keeping them in one climate is better long-term than moving them around all the time.

paying for entry doesn't necessarily mean it isn't non-profit. most entry fees go towards preservation and paying staff, acquiring new exhibits, ect.

museums have admissions to help cover operating costs, it doesn’t mean they’re making money. Admissions costs are actually a big discussion here in the states, one museum saw their attendence go tgrough the roof when they reduced admission to a dollar, the increased visitation axtually allowed for them to stay aflot easier.

i was thinking more 3D scans of exhibits then actually physically moving them around. isn't the same as seeing it in the flesh but it would be sick to be able to at least view items from any angle via 3D models if i am unable to view it in person.

The museum that’s close to my heart (that I interned at this past summer) has done that with some objects, really just to see them in much closer detail, I’m not sure if they made it accesible to educators now that the exhibit has been taken down.

[F]or the most lucrative medium in the world at the moment, the video game industry appears to care so little about its own history. Oh sure, you have all those retro-esque indie games and occasionally big companies porting their old stuff. And you get a few earnest efforts every now and then like the "Did You Know Gaming?" YouTube series, or a page on Wikipedia on the (fairly abridged) history of Nintendo. But no one's really explored this stuff in-depth. And with the medium attracting more newcomers than ever, there's barely any archival efforts or attempts to teach all these people about everything they missed. And this is a history that many of us were here for. This isn't ancient stuff, y'know. This is recent. This is a history that there are millions of first-hand accounts of from damn well near its inception and no one's paying attention to it. -Me, four years ago in an interview with Kotaku This has been a problem for ages. Nothing's improved. In many ways, things have just gotten worse in the past few years.

Ok so I was talking non-sense, thanks for clearing that up.

But you can't exactly enjoy a game by just looking at it's box cover on display either.

looking them up, the museums I’m finding that are focused on Video Games (Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment; International Arcade Museum; National Video Game Arcade; Huis Ten Bosch; Computerspielemuseum Berlin; and a bunch more) all feature payable games as a part of their exhibitions. Museums that are about video games seem to have incorporated interactives into their experiences well.

I for one would actually love a emulation service that let you play any game from anything at the cost of real money. But I don't think such a thing is feasible considering the legal hurtles it would have.

So you're telling me I'm supposed to go to a specific location and wait in line to play a multi-hour long game(that might take days to finish) in a museum?

How is this different from any sort of film museum that has a rare film that isn’t available on home media?

Because it's completely impractical to do so? You can have hundreds of people to watch the same film given enough space unlike video games where you have a single machine for each player. That's not even adding the fact that films don't even come close to the amount of hours required to finish as games do.(which depends on player-skill and the type of game). Also why the fuck should I be completely excluded from specific games that are digital and easily redistributed just because I live on the wrong side of the planet.

something isn’t abandonware if there’s still an active copyright on it. which brings me to the point that the museums that are displying games are likely doing so under a special agreement, which does not include distribution over the internet. video game museums are new, given time they will grow and be able to adequately meet the demands that games preservation poses - both from a distribution, copyright, and emulation perspective. But that takes time and skilled work. In addition to those challenges, museums all have a huge backlog of work with their collections: digitizing, accessioning, preserving, etc... that many organizations are struggling to keep up with as funding is not what it once was (the ‘08 crash wrecked the humanities).

You still haven't talked about how people are actually going to play these games. How can a museum attendee spend their time playing a game that takes long hours to beat? What if that specific long game is too popular to handle high player amounts? How am I going to play this specific game I want to play when it's only available in X museum in another state/country? How do they provide incentives for people to play their games in their museums when it's less restrictive to pirate it? What about multiplayer games? Arcades are basically living dysfunctional fossils in western countries and you expect me to believe that normal games have a better chance?

Even with all these subscription ideas if well implemented, you'll still be missing on a lot of the past. See the current state of GTA: San Andreas and other games that deal with licensed content, whenever they're patched and re-released there's a big chance of content going away/being missing, and restoring these games to their original states require community effort (which is argueably "piracy") or money being spent by the publishers. That isn't even taking into account IP hell, where games from dead companies being liquidated usually land at, lost source code, etc. Even with all this, even if you own the games themselves, hardware dies and software eventually becomes incompatible too, many SecuROM titles and other DRM solutions rendered these original copies dead, sometimes even on arrival. These titles, before publishers learned they can double dip, were only acessible to us, actual owners of the original prints if we decided to download these "fixes". Physical media also have a shelf life that, mind you, goes down the drain if you're willing to actually play your games. Solutions such as OPL for the PS2 actually allow me to enjoy my PS2 games on the original hardware as it's meant to be without risking destroying the original media, and even that has a lifespan, and when my console dies, all that's left is PCSX2. And I'm sick of people treating other's concerns as "whining" too, it's quite the annoying meme that only serves to talk down on people.

you’re not entitled to play those games. And assuming a work is out of copyright it is up the the individual institution to make that call - most museums focus on preservation first and foremost because it’s usually the most urgent matter. secondly, judging from mission statements the expectation does not seem for attendees to finish the games, rather to bring visitors to a better understanding of the history of gaming and how they are created. You’re right in that it’s a unqiue challenge if someone wants to finish a game, but this again depends on the aqucuistion and how it was made, who holds the copyright, etc... if they can’t distribute it, it can’t be distributed. i wanted to watch Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in 70mm, but in order to do that I would have had to fly halfway across the country to Austin and see it there in that format. As I stated earlier, the goal doesn’t seem to be to have people sit around for earlier just playing the games, but having them there to help illustrate different points in the story they are attempting to tell - from a design and history stand point. again, this again comes down to the acquisition and how it was made. As these institutions grow and mature, and more mp games fall out of copyright I can certainly see them hosting LAN style events. considering that these museums are also working to preserve arcade games, yeah they do stand a chance lol.

This isn't worth a rat's ass if people aren't able to have easy access to these works. Distribution services like Steam and GOG, and other novel ways such as Nintendo's Classic Consoles have proven that people will flog to legitimate means to consume content regardless of it being available on less "noble" means of consumption.

How about we start funding the humanities again then? In order to make things accesible you have to have the funding to actually do so, and many institutions simply don’t and have to prioritize what and when gets made accesible. Throw in copyright and you have another layer ontop of it, it sucks but you’re not entitled to things that are still under copyright. Would be nice if things weren’t as restrictive but that’s the world we live in and the one we have to navigate.