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

I really wish we somehow could do something serious about this. I mean, i could easily start archiving and tracking down backstories from development. But it's all just gonna sit somewhere because i'm not able to start hosting shit. That said, we actually DO have actual gaming historians. Best one i know is Matt Barton. He only really covers PC gaming, Mostly RPG's. But he does go all the way back and he gets the people who made them to talk and record how they developed it, what drove certain decisions and often also their personal contexts as well. As a side-note, i find it weird that it was Kotaku of all places that printed this article. Less than 5 months after publishing this, they'd be all up in arms about objectively evil gaming and objectively evil gamers LMAO.

And this is where communication breaks down as this is something we can't fundamentally agree on. Yes I do think I'm entitled to these games if the copyright holder doesn't give enough of a fuck to make their products accessible in modern marketplaces and I am also entitled to finish games I want to play if I have access to them. Maybe it's my dumb millennial brain talking but we live in the INFORMATION AGE. Why do I need to physically be somewhere for anything? Yeah have fun watching Indiana Jones by flying to Austin but I can just access that by renting it on Amazon. Which makes actual financial sense because I don't know if I like Indiana Jones and I shouldn't shell out hundreds of bucks just to experience something I don't even know I'll like.

Yeah, seems like I got in to talk with them at just the right time; I'd posted the original version of the timeline a few months before GamerGate really blew up (there's actually posts of me working on it in some old Nintendo threads on here around that time). Though one thing I noticed following the controversy is that the guy I talked to and who wrote the article; I never saw his name come up once during the whole fiasco. Guess he was a decent guy who just happened to work there.

You have missed the point - 70mm is a type of film, and watching a movie on film has different qualities than watching a cleaned up blu-ray edition/digital edition. Yeah you’re watching the movie at home (which is a perfectly fine experience mind you), but the way you are experiencing it is different. By watching it on a film print, you’re experiencing it the same way it was originally released. I can’t just set up a 70mm projector in my home (well technically I could, but the cost is another matter entirely). think of the games like that movie. Yeah you can play it on an emulator, but emulators are imperfect. You’re not playing them on original hardware, the experience is different, Emulators also take time and expertise to develop, the kind of expertise I doubt somewhere like the Library of Congress has to make games freely available.

For preservation, no matter what we at least have mountains of videos analyzing virtually every game out there in the form of silent walk-throughs, lets plays, reviews, and deep breakdowns.

Sorry, I can't go along with this. Especially in cases that are actually happening nowadays where people literally have no legal means to continue playing even games they bought because the servers had shut down or something, and that's where the whole "you're just buying a license" defense really devolves into BS. So much red-tape, so much having to keep those damn stockholder parasites happy, and it can result in games that might as well have been completely destroyed and erased from existence as far as playing them legally is concerned. You can't just take away games like that (especially in the case of removing the ability to play existing copies) and declare that no one can play them anymore, regardless of what any EULA says. I don't even care if it's the law, either - those very same laws were probably lobbied into existence by the same people who are trying to limit access to this stuff, so it's ultimately only them saying it to begin with and they just have the money to bribe the right people to technically make it the rules. Regardless of your opinion on Jim Sterling, he did a great video on this, especially the bit about the Scott Pilgrim video game near the end. And while I'll almost always stick up for Nintendo, he was totally justified in hammering on them here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTcFFUDgyBk

Preservation is precisely how they make money. How can you claim those things have nothing to do with each other?

No I haven't missed the point. Video Games are a completely different medium than any of those because it fundamentally requires player input. Watching Indiana Jones on 70mm and watching it on Blu-Ray are different experiences but it's not a ridiculously wide gap compared to watching a Let's Play of DMC3 and actually playing DMC3. The only medium with as close to that gap are probably Live Performances and Paintings, and even then you're not missing much from not actually seeing it in person. Basically to answer your question, yes I do feel the same way with other art-forms because if any of them are not providing me with legal convenient channels to access them.Then it's fair game because they obviously don't care enough to get my money.

my post is entirely regarding museums and distribution of their collections. It has jack shit to do with people not being able to play games they’ve already bought (which is something that shouldn’t be happening).

And if the games aren't able to be bought in a legitimate way anymore, let alone a way that actually makes the publisher any money? What about people who don't already have access to them at that point, are they just supposed to be screwed forever? If we're not legally "entitled" to play games that are now in that situation, then that law needs to change, because it's wrong.

When have I insinuated anything different? My arguments and ideas are based on what the situation currently is - I’d be all for shortening the length of time someone holds copyright (or maybe even the amount of copyrights) but that’s not currently the situation.

I know, I'm not necessarily arguing against you, I'm just... frustrated. The situation shouldn't be like this.

Oh I definitely agree. I was doing some research earlier this year for my undergraduate capstone, and I heavily utilized a specific collection from one sailor. In this collection were some photographs from his time in the Navy. I would have loved to use them in my presentation, but alas when the archive had received them they didn’t require them to hand over the copyright. As a result, I wasn’t allowed to use those pictures - even though the photographs were about 100 years old and the donation in the 1960s.

disney fucked copyright laws so hard

Losing our old games is such a scary thought to me. There's an old point and click adventure game called Obsidian, that's in my top 3 games ever, and sometimes I think I'm the only one that still has the data for it. I lost my discs years ago, and I've been copying and backing up the files to just about everything I own to keep from losing it.

[ While I agree that player input is a major aspect of games, there are plenty of things that can be teased out without having to play them yourself. Think back to the example of Ty the Tasmanian Tiger. In a cultural context the museum could discuss representations of Australian and Aboriginal culture in entertainment medium, another example would be from a game design perspective to talk about level design. Museums exhibits are about contextualizing information and objects, exhibitions usually have a goal in that regard. ] I don't really see the point of discussing aspects of video games when you didn't play it. If you can experience a video game by just showing it to someone then in the end it's just a movie which removes the very thing that makes the medium special. I've watched and played through Visual Novels. If you look at it at face value it's practically the same thing but the fact that I can choose when to progress to the next piece of dialogue adds a whole lot more depth to my involvement. Add more mechanical depth and suddenly there's so many more avenues for a player to get hooked, engaged and fall in love with a game. It's quite similar to the whole audience involvement thing that you mentioned(I completely forgot those exist), but unlike them, it's not that impractical for video game to reproduce that experience. There's no need to get various individual trained actors who all have their own lives to attend every time you boot up a game. Anyways, this kinda derailed to something else. In the end you're all about the legality of it all and the only position I can give is that the law is not functioning properly and should be thoroughly revised to make preservation easier.

Because it has value beyond just playing it. From a technical aspect they can be used as a teaching tool, and from a cultural persoectice you can talk about representations, story-writing, influences, etc... all without having to play them. If a museum is talking about American influences on Japanese culture and decides to discuss Metal Gear Solid, the museum doesn’t need visitors to have played the games to discuss its story, cultural influences, etc... It’s the exhibits job to properly contextualize their exhibits.

Piracy and emulation are indeed multi-faceted issues. I believe there has to be some unique legal compromise between company rights and consumer rights because games are truly an unique medium. I think a good basic rule would be that a company can take legal action against illegal copying only as long as they supply and support the product themselves. This would guarantee that the company couldn't legally force the death of a product people paid for, but also they can keep selling it for as long as they like.

Most museum pieces also can't be freely copied without any cost or harm to the original, so that's kind of apples and oranges.

I think video games came around at a time where consumerism was really picking up and never enjoyed the same privileges as paintings and movies as works of art and you can really see in the evolution of video games how business models around consumer products were altered to facilitate long-term profit through subscriptions or regular paid hardware upgrades. It was no longer "one in every household" because there already was one in every household, now it was all about milking brand loyalty and planned obsolescence to get money out of the same people. If you look at AAA video games, starting from the latter half of the 2000s, publishers have been experimenting with live service infrastructure and microtransactions and have been turning games less into an artform and more of a perishable money-printing platform. With copyright laws and all the property rights bullshit as they are, we will never be able to preserve these games without a crazy amount of workhours to somehow reverse-engineer the server software and allow it to run locally, not that lawyers would ever care to let such projects slide because give me free money. Given the ESA's stance on reverse-engineered server software, it's safe to say publishers have absolutely no interest in making their products futureproof, if anything they wish they could just flip a switch and your game bricks so you have to buy its sequel and the DLC and the microtransactions and the Season Pass and the special edition.