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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

Here's a fucking idea. Cultural artifacts of any significance shouldn't be this easy to destroy.

And corporate entities that do so should become pariahs.

Imagine a world where the statutory damages for destroying all legal copies of a copyrighted work was set to be 1000x the statutory damages for making an unauthorized copy.

Surely, deleting the last copy of a thing deprives more people of the work (and does more damage to the original author) than failing to pay for a copy of the thing.

Destroying all copies of a work (aside from the masters) benefits the owner, because now people have to pay the owner for more copies. This is why the publishers at the top of the creative class hierarchy regularly cycle things in and out of print.

Note that this may screw over individual authors, but the copyright system was not built to benefit them. Otherwise we wouldn't allow copyright assignment, we'd have "inalienable" copyright instead.

Nintendo has some of the stuff most worth preserving (not that we should have to pick and choose—it’s all art and should all be enjoyable long into the future). Makes it all the more galling how actively hostile they are towards preservation.

Copyright owners being anti-preservation are literally stealing from the public. If a work cannot be preserved to independently ensure it exists long-term, then it has effectively been stolen from the public domain. This is theft in a way that normal copyright infringement can never be.

Yes, but imagine, after like 50 years how much effort will go to maintain these ghost towns no one visits vs creating new games? Selfhostable archives would help that but that would be again a major effort to create.

I'm fairly sure a small amount of effort from Nintendo combined with community volunteers would be enough. At the very least Nintendo should pledge to not block preservation efforts or use legal threats.

Nintendo could start by not prosecuting anyone trying to preserve history.

Thankfully fans have archived all the levels.

This is a lost cause because of MMOs. Once the community is gone, it essentially ceases to exist, even if the servers are still running. Recorded gameplay and written accounts are more valuable.

There are obviously some scenarios where it's genuinely impractical to preserve content.

But there's plenty where it isn't.

If you don't like it, you shouldn't buy or play Nintendo games.

Until the next bean counter at a different game company entirely decides an online product burns too much to be profitable. Or maybe the store for all those digital goods isn’t quite making its quarterly targets.

Right now, I can head down to my basement, jack two AAs into my Game Boy, and play Pokémon Red, a 28 year-old game. I have zero confidence that will be possible with any of today’s games in 28 years.

You can play Pokémon Red but not save your game, because the batteries inside the game cartridge are dead.

Yeah but all it takes is a soldering iron, a Philips head, and 2 minutes to put a new one in.

Quite different to a modern game where what’s on the physical cartridge/disc may not even be playable without a day one patch from a long-decommissioned server.

My original game saves are actually still there, miraculously.

Why wouldn't I be able to boot up my Switch game carts 28yrs from now?

Because a lot of Switch games require downloading the finished game to be playable. See which here: https://www.doesitplay.org/switchCartsRevisions

This seems a bit misleading, since for many of these games they work fine without downloading the updates. If you don't connect Super Mario Bros Wonder or The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to the internet, then version 1.0 is a perfectly playable, full version of the game.

And from my experience, I can just refuse the update every time. Heck, from a speedrunning perspective it's probably better not to update them, since the updates patch out a bunch of tech that makes them more fun to mess around with (easy item dupes in Tears of the Kingdom, easy out of bounds in Mario Wonder).

That's an important point for the games it affects but there's only eight carts there that require an update to play.

Any number is too many, I agree.

Thanks!

My switch is (and will remain) offline. I wasn't aware some games may not play - even some first-party games like super mario 3d allstars needs updating, according to this.

That link does not say the update is required to play all-stars.

In a month from now Splatoon 1 will basically be unplayable on an original unhacked Wii U. Sure you can do the single player story mode, but the main multiplayer mode is going to be gone by then unless you use Pretendo. I think the Switch is actually in a better situation because it has paid online so as long as enough people pay for online for Nintendo to keep up the budget for server maintenance it could potentially last decades while Nintendo has an incentive to cut online for their older platforms that they are basically paying to keep up for free.

> so as long as enough people pay for online

This payment only funds the console's matchmaking services. The cost of maintaining dedicated servers falls on the devs for third party games, and presumably a different budget for first party ones. So the, admittedly few, games with dedicated servers (e.g. Splatoon 1) can't survive in this payment model either.

Splatoon 1 doesn't have dedicated servers, the matchmaking is done on a server but the game itself runs peer-to-peer

You're right, my bad: a quick search lead me to think that it had some server dependency that had been shut down prematurely, before the console's own online services.

I'm guessing the matchmaking is part of the Wii U's shared online services and not game-specific.

This does not affect any of my offline games, just as GP could boot up Pokémon Red.

In order to get Celebi legitimately in the Japanese version of Crystal, you have to connect your GBC to a phone and use an online service that hasn’t worked for decades. In the VC version they patched the game so that you can get it with a different method but the physical GBC game does not have all of the features it used to once upon a time.

That's an interesting note but sounds like an optional bonus, not something that prevents you playing the game?

It doesn’t but I would point out that older games are not immune to this issue

We have this thing called a "society" which is empowered to make rules collectively. One way it is empowered to make rules.is through "laws" and "regulations". Amazingly, these things can and do work, often much better than free market capitalism.

Ah, yes, the secret 11th commandement, "Nintendo shalt not shut down the online services of their video games."

Stepping in with regulation doesn't necessarily imply forced support. It could be more like "though shalt not claim copyright over a game thou hast ceased to support, and thou shalt remove all security barriers from thine code when thou chooseth to cease supporting it".

Every action has costs. Laws and regulations will exhibit costs, sometimes hidden costs until the law is actually in place.

And? I'm sure Right-to-repair has far more costs and that got passed.

When you buy something, you own it. If nintendo doesn't want to pay for hosting anymore, the ethical thing would be to dump the server code and the levels so that players can host the servers themselves.

Given how nintendo, activision, and other publishers have been acting the past decade, I really think its time for a Right-to-play law.

Concretely, I think this sounds like a combination between AGPL-like "server must have source code" and the data portability law in the GDPR.

I agree, though I don't understand what this has to do with capitalism. Copyright and DRM is supported by laws themselves. And archivist efforts are often voluntary.

And it's a poorly thought out idea. It's not like it was a secret that Nintendo was hosting the servers. Everyone knew it had a short shelf life, and then decided to create on the platform anyways. This is why I never got it.

Who decides what is significant?

Not sure, but I know we shouldn't leave the decision of what is significant to a uncaring, money hungry corporation.

Future people, after seeing what is important to them. It must be available for them to save though.

If Hitler stayed in art school we probably wouldn't have cared much about him. But he didn't, so now we think his life or belongings and events are significant. But it might have been insignificant too.

Who knows? Time must play out.

Honestly, everything. IIRC archivists archive as much as possible because we can't know what will be significant ahead of time.

Meh, online gaming and culture exists in the moment. Even if you perfectly archived and kept hosting everything, it wouldn’t be the same as being there when it was new and lively. There will always be plenty of new, and similar games in the future to play.

This attitude leads to huge swathes of culture being lost forever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_films

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lost_television_episo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work

99% of theatre performances, standup comedy, live music, dance, sports, college lectures etc go unrecorded.

Isn't that fine, though? I think it's good for some things to be ephemeral.

Are the theaters legally preventing these recordings from taking place?

Theaters are probably not in a big hurry to do recordings that compete with live performances. I've been told a lot of it is rights issues associated with the performers, playwright, etc. though.

Personally I find it a pity we don't have quality recordings of most theater. How many great performances are lost to time? If you're into opera, the Met's Live in HD are great.

ADDED: A fairly small local theater I have a subscription to did make some digital recordings during COVID. But they were only available for a limited lime and weren't free.

Does it matter though? Did we really need to archive everything ever created forever? People made such a big deal out of things like geocities being shut down, but does anyone actually ever look through what was archived?

Sure, saving some of it is useful so we can look back and reflect. But we don’t need all of it. It’s mostly junk.

I mostly favor what archivists and preservationists do. But I don't really disagree. Some things are important (and you may not know what ahead of time). But there's nearly an infinite amount of paper with black characters on it. A nearly infinite number of photos. How much video of conference presentations do people watch a month after the fact? A day?

Some stuff is interesting to preserve. I scanned a Year in Life of Development book from a long-ago company and it's a neat look into mid-1980s computer development.

But you can't save everything and you probably just need to let go sometimes.

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