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[HN] Study: 87% of classic video games are not legally available
(gamehistory.org)
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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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This is a new trend thanks to so many products requiring web services to function. Back in the day the only thing that made products inaccessible was the fact they were not produced.
Nowadays a lot of stuff is just a useless brick purely because an unnecessary web endpoint has been shut down. Especially video games.
I would say it's not new per se, just a new mechanism for an old phenomenon.
If that one problem were solved, it would improve the situation, but not perfectly remedy it. This just makes it more noticeable, it reeks pretty badly of planned obsolescence.
But it isn't the inevitable ravages of time that take away digital media. It is easier to preserve than anything before, and there's no lack of interest to do it. The real obstacle are laws that put corporate profits above public interest and demand that we expect an untenable amount of time such that old media just completely decays. Often old digital media only gets preserved in direct defiance to the law.
It really concerns me how this mindset has been spreading, where games and media get wiped away due to companies ceasing services with no interest in preservation, then people start to wax poetically about the inevitability as if this is Ozymandias' statue from the poem. Not even Ozymandias himself is truly lost to time. No, a decade is nothing in terms of cultural loss, that's not whats wiping out those works. What is responsible for it is a business strategy of disposability enabled by laws with no regards for our culture.
I genuinely think it's inevitable, with our current technological, economic and legal frameworks. While that can change, I think the amount of effort it would require far outstrips the gain.
The entire issue bugs me a little bit, actually. It only gets so much attention because its games and the internet has a lot of gamers. There are far bigger challenges to tackle though.
There are volunteer emulator developers. There are people who downright reverse-engineer online games whose servers close down. If loss was inevitable, this couldn't happen. The limitations can't possibly be so great that this is easier than, you know, the company releasing server code and technical information as they phase out projects
The limitations are not technological in any sense, and they are only economic in so far as we are subjected to whatever the interests of wealthy executives and investors are as the main priority, because those pushing back against it manage to do a lot even having very little money compared to those businesses. The biggest obstacle is the law, and the law is not unchangeable. This is just a matter of the political tendencies of these years.
While I personally care particularly about games, this isn't really just about games. As the copyright length increased, we got to a point there are old movies that also got lost because they studios behind them didn't preserve them properly and nobody else was allowed to, so they rot away. This applies to all digital media. While I could see some limits like backing up the whole of YouTube, there is no reason why major movies or online games should just become lost by delisting.
And maybe even backing up the whole of YouTube could be possible if there was a major concerted effort among international governments to preserve all forms of digital media, rather than leaving it to the efforts of hobbyist archivers. But no, apparently all that international governments will come together to is to enforce copyright and punish piracy.
Of course there are volunteer devs. Do you think each project will always have some though? Particularly passion projects that have no profit? Just because things are a certain way now, does not mean they will be 10, 20, 40 years from now, when who knows what computing looks like.
This is the technological aspect, its swiftly changing nature making everything require maintenance. It's a fundamental principle that seems like it will remain true for the foreseeable future. Perhaps I've gotten used to it simply due to the sheer quantity of projects I have seen fall by the wayside in the past decades, but it's just a lot. The basic idea is this: At no point can you just stop and say "this thing will work for the next few decades". Your software will go out of date, your hardware will break and replacement parts will go out of production. Etc etc. I feel like it's just part of tech for now.
So sure, we've identified the problem and that's great. But it has no good solutions. Which is why it bugs me as a debate. As I said earlier, the effort to fix this, the political will it would require, is just not worth the benefit of preserving art large-scale for the first time in human history. That's just not good enough to fight for, in such a problematic world. Imo at least.
Btw, thanks for the engaging discussion. I've never debated this particular topic actually.
It's true that not every game will keep being updated to play on the latest Windows and Android, and I agree that this would be an unrealistic expectation, But we do have a solution even for that. There are virtual machines and emulators and compatibility layers we can use to replicate these older software environments. I can play a 1990s DOS game or an Atari game just fine today, even if we don't have River Patrol for Windows 11.
There is also a noteworthy distinction between keeping a game updated or available. Maybe we could get to a point when nobody cares about Ultima Online or Club Penguin, although it's noteworthy that it didn't happen yet. But we could go through decades of dust gathering only for someone to become interested in it again. Why shouldn't we keep at least the codebase and assets and documentation available as they are for when that time comes? Then they could put the effort into porting it, or maybe just study it for learning and inspiration. And we have the means to do that today, it's the matter of copyright infringement that gets in the way.
I'm glad you enjoyed the discussion. It's a topic I care about a lot as you can tell.
The main problem I foresee is scaling. Right now the number of consoles that has ever existed is still fairly manageable. That's slowly changing. Once the current generations of players have died away and everyone with a personal, nostalgic relationship with the oldest art is gone, it becomes more of an academic matter for future generations.
I'm sure they'll keep some of it around, but over time I expect most of it to start to fade more rapidly at that point. It's still a very young medium. I doubt many films were lost in their first 20 years of existence. But the 20 years after, and the next, etc etc causes accumulating attrition.
I'd certainly like to see the problem solved, if it was feasible. I think the closest we'll get is long-term physical storage from pirated sources though. Which some future-dweller could then design an emulator for on whatever the current state of hardware is. I certainly don't expect corporations to care, or for us to overpower them any time soon.
Movies also have been lost for the same reasons game do, because the law is more concerned to restrict who get to keep copies of it than to preserve the cultural history. All it takes is a neglectful company or a bankruptcy and they are left to rot in a basement. Comes to mind how many works only escaped being completely lost because of people recording VHS tapes, to the chagrin of movie industry executives.
Even without formal methods to do so, people will preserve works that they love, and that's how we can keep up. This is only an issue in the case of video games because of online games that are split between the player's client and the servers that they rely on. It's why we have nearly complete collections of games released in the 1980s but completely lost many 2010s games.
If we talk about bulk of works being released as far as the inability to keep up matters, then it still seems like videos are the works that are most threatened. Games are a complex multimedia art form, so they cannot be created quickly enough such that an overwhelming number of them will exist, when you consider our capabilities society wide. A single person can keep entire collections of games for previous consoles. In what other medium is that even remotely believable? No personal library could approach the number of physical books created during a decade. As much as technology goes obsolete, the digital format gives games a huge advantage when it comes to preservation.
It's downright impressive to consider things like Flashpoint, where collections of games were preserved even despite obsolete online technologies and that most of them came from small teams and hobbyists. If this is what volunteer archivists can do, our society is capable of much more than that. Which shows that when a high profile game disappears, it has nothing to do with how technically difficult it is to preserve it, and everything to do with deliberate obstruction.
Yes, I'd like to move past the heavy emphasis on how corporations and their regulatory/legal capture are making it happen. That is fully understood and someone would have to be a little bit dense not to understand it, imo. They are entities that exist exclusively to create profit, they will pursue all legal means to do so, and attempt to influence the law to their own ends. This is simply the logical thing to do, in their situations. I can't blame them for it, generate profit is what we create them to do. I'm about as anti-corporate as people get, I fully expect them to obstruct to preserve every penny of potential gain they could ever possibly have, with a preference towards being short sighted. This constant criticism of them feels like shaking a baby for crying. It's just what babies do.
Unless you have some kind of plan? I understand your passion, but ... it'd be cool if we could keep moving forward instead of constantly looping back.
You did get me wondering exactly where the line should be drawn. All art is clearly not equal, shouldn't it be the ultimate responsibility of the property owner to preserve it? Whether the physical holder or the intellectual owner? Not legally speaking, again I give no fucks as I expect the law to become compromised by money, but practically speaking?
Regarding the online service games you mentioned, I hadn't even considered those, but I do know what you mean. I've played a few that are long gone now, to my dismay.
I wouldn't compare companies to babies. Not only because they are organizations controlled by rational human beings, but if it is to treat their chase of profits as an inevitable urge, I think an animal is a more fitting metaphor, particularly regarding their disregard to human concerns, their potential to cause harm and that we sometimes need to restrain them for our well-being. It's deeply dysfunctional of our society when companies are only bound by law as far as it guarantees maximum profits to investors, when that often comes at the expense of the rest of society. If they can't help themselves, they should be treated accordingly and regulated.
When it comes to the particulars of how to effect preservation, the users themselves already do a lot of the work in preserving, they just need the protection to do so and not be punished by the law for it. The only requirement towards the companies, which makes for the greatest hurdle, is that companies which charge for online games ought to be obligated to release their servers on discontinuation. It already shows a certain disregard to customer rights that online games can charge players thousands of dollars for fictional digital in-game items, then they can close down the server and the value that player paid for is all gone. The player ought to have a way to retain what they paid for.
Of course this is a complex matter and it likely wouldn't be so simple, but it's not acceptable for things to remain as they are, when our culture is already facing losses exclusively because of the legal framework that was built.
Another thing to consider is how in the internet we are constantly communicating through derivative works which are technically intellectual infringement. Nearly every meme would count as such. But the law doesn't acknowledge it in any way, maybe because it would be a huge can of worms, and it would force them to recognize that copyright cannot be so strict as it has been codified, as it doesn't represent the moral values and habits of average people in today's society.
Corporations aren't babies. Criticizing a corporation for behaving like a corporation feels to me like shaking a baby. The corporation is fundamentally innocent--pursuing only its basic programming. It can do nothing else. It's not even legal for it to do otherwise, it has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders, violating that subjects it to lawsuits. It's basically required to be evil and greedy by law.
What if we just dropped patent and copyright protections down to something like 10/20 years? That would kick pharma companies in the nuts too. I'm aware it would stifle innovation somewhat, but frankly I don't care. At least it would be a longer-term solution, where we wouldn't have to deal with whatever the next generation of this problem looks like in another couple decades.
Yes, now that you mention it, people should be able to copyright a meme. Not much point though, I don't think. Mainly an enforcement problem, we'd need AI tools just to keep up with the content produced. And for what gain? Hard to monetize a meme, and value is what everything is about at the end of the day. Not identity or structure, just how much money its worth.
On a side note, AI tools are going to make piracy a lot harder soon, I'd imagine.
It's less that people should be able to copyright a meme, though it is a creative work that might warrant it, but more like a whole lot of memes use pictures and clips from copyrighted works and the likenesses of people, and as the law is written people are not legally allowed to do that, however much it is entirely glossed over.
Dropping copyright every 20 years seems reasonable with the speed of internet culture and technology, and funny enough that's very similar to the length that copyright started as: 14 years plus an optional extension of another 14 years. It might be controversial, but that seems absolutely more reasonable than the 120 years that corporations get today. Can you imagine if people actually waited 120 years to play old Nintendo games? Chances all but a few collector pieces among the cartridges would have become rust already. It's not a reasonable length for technology-based media.
Yeah. I think you've brought me around actually. Because that is an achievable goal worth fighting for, too. It would have benefits in other spaces of society. That was my original reason for disagreeing in the first place.