The quest to save today's gaming history from being lost forever

[BigusSchmuck]

A very good read:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/06/the-quest-to-save-todays-gaming-history-from-being-lost-forever/1/

[cjameslv]

So you say...We shall see!

starts reading...

**Update: Ok well there is a few good points. When these systems and games are 100+ years old there is a good chance they won't work any more. Now there is questions though: So does this mean emulation will be the only way to play games from the classics? Will our collections be worthless? Kinda scary to think about it but in one way i guess it wont matter to us but rather to our kids as we won't be around in another 70-80 years to find out. I do agree with the fact that it is stupid they make downloadable content tied to just the machine that downloads it. There is some hacks already though he didn't bring up that can move some stuff already though. In terms of playing vanilla WoW when im 50 i could care less, as i would be too old to sit for an 6-8 hour raid anyway and lol at hiring actors to portray the 1990s. This guy watches too many movies.

[ccovell]

Yes, nice to see Jason Scott and Frank Cifaldi on the same page.  It probably won't be the last time, either.

[esteban]

I will have to read this later....until then, thanks for sharing.

[SignOfZeta]

It's true that video game people have grown used to a certain level of (almost total) preservation of its brief past, and it's true that games in particular are very difficult to extract in this current generation, but really this is something that effects not just games, it effects almost everything. This is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about.

The conclusion that I've come to is that persistence of vision is impossible, and it really always has been, and it's getting to be a bigger problem than before. What we need to do as a civilization is to understand this and develop means to exist within this flux. We need to do this because true archiving of everything is just completely impossible.

The Phantom Menace is a movie nobody likes, but even so it gets slightly re-edited every fucking time to comes to home video.

That news story you keep checking on the BBC. Notice how the link stays the same many times even though the headline changes and the article keeps being edited as new facts come to light?

Here's another one, this one a bit more complex, but also more foreboding. I subscribe to iTunes Match, which is basically a service that lets you stream your entire iTunes music collection on your phone. There is no iPhone big enough to hold all my music, so this is handy. Now, the way this is handled is, your entire library is scanned. If iTunes sees you have an album ripped from a CD, it doesn't bother to upload that. It just plays you whatever version they are currently selling in the iTunes music store. If it's something they can't match (such as, something you recorded yourself, or that Minor Threat church basement concert you bootlegged on microcassette back in the day) then they will upload that. This way they can offer you your entire collection and save space.

Now, many times, you get a free upgrade. If the version of the first Buck Cherry album you have came from a Napster and was 96kbs, you will only be streamed the version Apple has, which is 256kbps AAC. You win, or at least as much as someone who likes Buck Cherry can win. This even extends to the point where you can lose all your music, your entire computer even, and you can just download it all onto the new computer.

Here's the thing though, what if something is lost? I was just listening to a song I know really well and I noticed that the keyboard solo was mixed differently than what I'm used to, this is because it was "fixed" at some point and iTunes only series the "current best" version of a song. This is great if the song is Always by Erasure, because that actually was fixed (OG CD single was defective) but if we're talking about the remastered early Peter Gabriel albums they sell, that is not always good because those remasters are terrible.

Ok, so no big, because there are millions of CDs and stuff of this shit, but soon they won't be. Those Netflix exclusive series that won't be coming to DVD...where is the "ambient archive"?

They say %70 of of all silent film is lost forever. That is a depressing and horrifying statistic. Keep in mind though that there are entire civilizations where no examples of their language currently exist. It's obviously better too, to have at least %30.

Then when you get older you start to notice how news stories change their tone over time. If you keep telling people that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was because of an intelligence fuckup, eventually they start to believe it. Then you start to see how lots of events in history get glossed over and simplified and reduced to a simple axiom or theory and...that's how shit got this way. That's why people think WWI was caused by the assassination of a duke.

And maybe that's fine in most cases, as the guy in the article states, a 100 year old version of WoW won't, on its own, make much sense to the people of 100 years from now unless they understand the complete context. By the same token, if you really want to understand history you need to understand the era and absorb yourself into contemporary accounts. The scary thing is, that is probably a thing of the past (ie access to unaltered permanent accounts), so it's up to everyone to consider the context of everything rather than just take what you see for granted. The popular conception of things like WWII or pre-Columbian America is about as accurate as a Game Boy port of Ms Pacman.

[Gredler]

This is a fantastic article that I wish would hit mainstream media. Ironically topical to GameSack's most recent "Games that Need a Physical Release" episode. Thank you very much for sharing!

[esteban]

It's true that video game people have grown used to a certain level of (almost total) preservation of its brief past, and it's true that games in particular are very difficult to extract in this current generation, but really this is something that effects not just games, it effects almost everything. This is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about.

The conclusion that I've come to is that persistence of vision is impossible, and it really always has been, and it's getting to be a bigger problem than before. What we need to do as a civilization is to understand this and develop means to exist within this flux. We need to do this because true archiving of everything is just completely impossible.

The Phantom Menace is a movie nobody likes, but even so it gets slightly re-edited every fucking time to comes to home video.

That news story you keep checking on the BBC. Notice how the link stays the same many times even though the headline changes and the article keeps being edited as new facts come to light?

Here's another one, this one a bit more complex, but also more foreboding. I subscribe to iTunes Match, which is basically a service that lets you stream your entire iTunes music collection on your phone. There is no iPhone big enough to hold all my music, so this is handy. Now, the way this is handled is, your entire library is scanned. If iTunes sees you have an album ripped from a CD, it doesn't bother to upload that. It just plays you whatever version they are currently selling in the iTunes music store. If it's something they can't match (such as, something you recorded yourself, or that Minor Threat church basement concert you bootlegged on microcassette back in the day) then they will upload that. This way they can offer you your entire collection and save space.

Now, many times, you get a free upgrade. If the version of the first Buck Cherry album you have came from a Napster and was 96kbs, you will only be streamed the version Apple has, which is 256kbps AAC. You win, or at least as much as someone who likes Buck Cherry can win. This even extends to the point where you can lose all your music, your entire computer even, and you can just download it all onto the new computer.

Here's the thing though, what if something is lost? I was just listening to a song I know really well and I noticed that the keyboard solo was mixed differently than what I'm used to, this is because it was "fixed" at some point and iTunes only series the "current best" version of a song. This is great if the song is Always by Erasure, because that actually was fixed (OG CD single was defective) but if we're talking about the remastered early Peter Gabriel albums they sell, that is not always good because those remasters are terrible.

Ok, so no big, because there are millions of CDs and stuff of this shit, but soon they won't be. Those Netflix exclusive series that won't be coming to DVD...where is the "ambient archive"?

They say %70 of of all silent film is lost forever. That is a depressing and horrifying statistic. Keep in mind though that there are entire civilizations where no examples of their language currently exist. It's obviously better too, to have at least %30.

Then when you get older you start to notice how news stories change their tone over time. If you keep telling people that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was because of an intelligence fuckup, eventually they start to believe it. Then you start to see how lots of events in history get glossed over and simplified and reduced to a simple axiom or theory and...that's how shit got this way. That's why people think WWI was caused by the assassination of a duke.

And maybe that's fine in most cases, as the guy in the article states, a 100 year old version of WoW won't, on its own, make much sense to the people of 100 years from now unless they understand the complete context. By the same token, if you really want to understand history you need to understand the era and absorb yourself into contemporary accounts. The scary thing is, that is probably a thing of the past (ie access to unaltered permanent accounts), so it's up to everyone to consider the context of everything rather than just take what you see for granted. The popular conception of things like WWII or pre-Columbian America is about as accurate as a Game Boy port of Ms Pacman.

As you yourself acknowledge, this is not a new problem.

However, I think I will be Le Devil's Advocate and explain why things are *better* today.

However, before I do so, I want to note that I actually agree with your overall argument: we are in a losing battle with our own art, news, culture. "Entropy" applied to culture and knowledge, so to speak.

You hinted at a sinister side to things, as well (something that the original article does not address at all): that news/history/"written record" has been (and will continue to be) manipulated by folks with an agenda (usually those with power/influence).

So, here is my honest response:

Everything you posit is true:
(1) the powerful will manipulate facts/history
(2) cultural products will evolve/change/be lost over time
(3) we cannot completely save all culture
(4) the true meaning of culture is lost when the original participants die...the mere existence of artifacts/knowledge of "old" culture is necessary *but not sufficient* to truly understand the original meaning of a cultural product/practice.

So, this has always been true and will continue to be true.

The reason why I think we are still *better off now* is because so many *privileged* groups (you and I, but not the poor and dispossessed) have access to vast stores of information and cultural artifacts. As increasing amounts of ancient and contemporary cultural artifacts are digitized, collected into central databases, and distributed freely....well, damn, this is a huge improvement from only 30-40 years ago (where localized collections were held at gatekeeper universities, allowing only an elite class of intellectuals to access collections).

We still have "gated communities" when it comes to some knowledge: Lexis/Nexis, academic journals (publishers are to blame), etc. etc.

...but an increasing amount of stuff is bypassing the publishers/businesses that want to monopolize/capitalize/profit from information.

So, things are a lot better now.

My thoughts MUSIC/TV/FILM (pop culture) to follow (I have to make dinner for my kids! Ha!)...

[SignOfZeta]

Oh, I totally agree. The only thing that makes today look so flawed is the simple fact that we have more records proving how fucked up everything is. There are huge swaths of history where we have to rely on a single volume for complete reference. The quantity of knowledge lost from Native American history is unknowable because our founding fathers killed everyone and burned all their shit. We don't know enough to know what we don't know.

[munchiaz]

Oh, I totally agree. The only thing that makes today look so flawed is the simple fact that we have more records proving how fucked up everything is. There are huge swaths of history where we have to rely on a single volume for complete reference. The quantity of knowledge lost from Native American history is unknowable because our founding fathers killed everyone and burned all their shit. We don't know enough to know what we don't know.

your last sentence reminded me of this

[ultrageranium]

This is interesting. The discussion on the preservation of so-call media art, and that has now moved to digital/generative/software/net art, is very close to what this article is trying to express. These issues have started to be discussed more intensively in the 80s when cultural institutions realised that video art performances and installations were going to be extremely hard to preserve.

The discussion took a new turn in the 90s with the rise of computer networks and computational art, which at first gave the impression that things will be easier. Of course it was not the case, as while the means to preserve and archive cultural expressions developed, the new works themselves developed on an increasingly fast changing tech landscape. Fast forwarding today the question of digital preservation has became a field of study on its own and is the topic of academic curriculum, publications, and conferences. New terms are being coined all the time to constantly try to articulate these problems, but essentially the debate tends to stagnate around the following points, that will be all too familiar for communities into 8/16 bit gaming:

• Conservation: only works for some time, as some physical components needed will eventually be not produced anymore, or will not have any equivalent and very hard to maintain. Upgrading such missing parts with the next close technological things poses concerns regarding the legitimacy of a preservation process that end up modifying the artefact it is supposed to preserve in its entirety.
• Emulation: a popular method but that shows its limits specially when the emulation is not able to reproduce specific hardware particularities that the preserve work rely upon to function correctly. It also poses the question of how much needs to be emulated, for instance the behaviour and characteristics of the physical input and output devices as well as displays.
• Simulation: sometimes the only thing left when the other two options are not possible, therefore providing a crude simplification and attempt to communicate the core idea of the work via an entirely new systems that shares no part with its original.
• Documentation: so that the thing preserved is understood both technically and culturally, in order to provide to future audience an idea about its purpose and value in relation to its past and current context.

But in the end, culture is more than what can be captured by machines, so...

The popular conception of things like WWII or pre-Columbian America is about as accurate as a Game Boy port of Ms Pacman.

This.