Comment by eckesicle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eckesicle | Hacker News Reader

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My father was a printer his entire life. I went with him to work one day when I was around 12 years old. He loaded up a box of, what seemed to me a random selection of flyers, booklets and other printed goods in his car, and together we drove to the National Archives (in Sweden).

He explained to me that every media artifact of cultural significance would be stored there in three (I believe) copies for future generations to enjoy, or researchers, or historians.

I was given a tour by an archivist there and this became a core memory of mine.

I was always at unease growing up, wondering what would happen to video games when they no longer became popular. Would I be able to enjoy them when I got older? Would my children ever be able to play the games that shaped my teenage years?

The discussion around the matter of Stop Killing Games always devolves to one around free labour or around infringing the rights of the creator, but at some point, when a game, or a film, or a book is no longer monetised, makers of cultural works should be obliged to archive and ensure that our shared cultural heritage and identity is preserved for the future.

Film makers, authors, printers, ad agencies, music producers, and many others are already obliged to do this in many countries.

Why should video game producers be exempt?

It's just better for all of us, and our children, if these works of art are preserved, and that at an insignificant effort and cost, compared to the cost of developing it.

> I was always at unease growing up, wondering what would happen to video games when they no longer became popular. Would I be able to enjoy them when I got older? Would my children ever be able to play the games that shaped my teenage years?

The worst thing, at least to me, is that the worst case scenario, as long as the devs don't go out of their way to kill a game permanently, is still not all that bad.

There's emulation, there's virtual machines, there's dicking about with config files, and there's just buying the old hardware outright. Even old, obscure and fiddly games can be played if you put in the effort. Even the old and obscure will very often be out there on the web, and even if it isn't, you can eventually get hold of a physical copy (and then make a good example and make it available yourself!).

But the moment there's a clown server dependency involved, that's it. You've lost before you've even begun. Sometimes a miracle happens, or someone dedicates their entire life to restoring that one game, and we thank them, for they are doing capital G God's work. But preservation can't depend on miracles.

I think in the AI age, it might not be so bad. There's a small online game that I played years ago that I checked in on 2 days ago to see if it was still running, it was with a handful of people playing it. So I downloaded the client to pop in. It had aged really poorly so I thought, fuck it, let's see if Codex can reverse engineer the client, maybe I can build another one. I let it cook and came back an hour later to check on it. It had pulled out all the assets, a bunch of enums for different game states and animations, etc, and had started doing network protocol reverse engineering by building a bare bones client and pointing it at localhost. It had figured out how to authenticate and was already figuring out how to decode the game state from raw packets. I shut it down so my IP wouldn't get banned, but I was floored it was able to do that much in an hour.

Games in general are a very difficult thing to preserve because of how they are often "on-going" things rather than definitive objects like books or films. Minecraft has gone through 27 major version updates, most of which having had in the range of 3-10 sub-versions. So that's potentially ~100 versions, just for Java edition. Should all of those be archived? Or just the final version, when it one day arrives? At this point, the Minecraft from 2014 and from 2026 are completely different games. And at least for Minecraft, there's mostly just stuff added. What about games in which major features regularly get removed, like Fortnite? There, the "last" version will lack many of the games most famous attributes.

Maybe we should just accept that big online games are more like cultural happenings than media objects. In the future, you simply might not be able to play Fortnite, in the same way you can never visit Woodstock again. It's just something you had to be at.

> So that's potentially ~100 versions, just for Java edition. Should all of those be archived?

Minecraft is a great example here, because the answer it brings to the table is yes. You can play any version of Minecraft (barring some really early versions that are lost to time) natively in the launcher. Yes, even the stupid sub-versions. If Minecraft can do it just fine, I see little reason other games can't (barring licencing issues, ugh).

> What about games in which major features regularly get removed, like Fortnite?

Give the option to revert back. Provide the relevant files so someone can do it by themselves. Be a decent human being.

> Maybe we should just accept that big online games are more like cultural happenings than media objects.

Fuck off. You had to be there for WoW Classic too. Doesn't mean we can't still have it. There are WoW Classic server up right now, with people playing it. Not that that has much to do with Blizzard (they caved only after illicit Classic servers became stupid popular, and it's not like setting up those servers was an easy feat).

I don't think there are any major problems with the current system except the length of copyright. If copyright got reduced to 20 years after the creation of the work I think that we would have a more dynamic economy. Old games could have their servers reverse-engineered (in 5 years this will undoubtedly be incredibly easy unless AI hits a wall for no reason). Companies would have to work on something new - no more 50 years of a franchise. Enough resting on the laurels!

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