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U.S. Copyright Office rejects DMCA exemption to support game preservation
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this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2024
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When preserving culture is criminal, or punishable, ya might want to reevaluate your laws
In the meantime, people are gonna do it anyway 'cause why ask permission to back up and preserve your own stuff? And when the law finally catches up, some will be grateful to those that did so despite the earlier wrongful laws that tried to discourage them.
Video games are probably thought of more as "tech" rather than "culture." And obsolescence is a part of tech.
I don't agree with it, but that is what I think their view on it is.
we also should be supporting open source games---if it's open source, it's preservable! these people are already essentially giving up any revenue just to make something for someone else, we should be lifting them up, too!
I mean, many of us are trying. It's fuckin' hard tho when your opposition has billions of dollars and politicians in their back-pocket and our side's greatest asset is the voice of Gordon Freeman from Ross's Game Dungeon presents Freeman's Mind.
Arguing that game perservation is cultural preservation gets messy.
Let's use a somewhat recent example: Overwatch. A lot of us LOVED Overwatch during the first few years. Then there were enough changes to balance out teams for competitive play that a lot of us feel it is no longer the same game and bounced off of it. Similarly, Darkest Dungeon 1 was kind of infamous for some major balance changes during early access that proved the true horror was gamers.
What is the answer there? Is it to back up every single version of every single game? Ha! You've fallen for my trap card! (also, remember when yu-gi-oh wasn't a game where it is about building a deck so you can turn one wipe the other player?).
Because youtubers like Josh Strife Hayes who specialize in MMOs and multiplayer games have talked about this to varying degrees. Josh can play a really interesting MMO where he is literally the only person online for most of his recording session. But... that means he can only talk about the mechanics of the MMO and can't really talk about progression or what it was like to play.
And that extends to "normal" games. There was a time when EVERYONE who was playing Tunic (and La-Mulana before it) was in chat rooms and message boards trying to understand the secrets. And countless video game essayists will acknowledge this. That coming back to a game in 2024 is very much about trying to understand what the game was in 2004. Hell, Illusory Wall has done some great videos where he actually researches this and points out how many misconceptions people have about what the players of Dark Souls 1 were doing which... is amazing.
Which gets back to preservation of culture. Shakespeare's works are undeniably influential. But what is preservation? Is it the script? Is it the 1968 film where we all saw some boobies? Probably not, but that is what we see in high school. Is it the 199t movie with a Sword 9mm? I actually have a lot of arguments for why it should be but...
Because also? Most of what people learn about Shakespeare completely ignores the... for lack of a more humorous term, cultural aspects of it. Almost everything that man (allegedly?) wrote was a commentary on politics of the day. And you can read an annotated copy that will add in these references Pop Up Video style (remember that?) but that still lacks the meaning of the dimwitted young actor playing Juliet who doesn't realize and the veteran playing Mercutio who is keeping an eye on the audience and is ready to bolt if people get angry or some cops show up and decide it is too on the nose and go to beat on Billy S.
But also? Who is to say that is any less culturally important than a 10th grade Brit Lit class putting on a performance where Tybalt both decided it would be funny to pretend he is Keanu in Bill and Ted AND spent all night playing Tribes and never memorized his lines so he is just over-emoting while trying to read off a bunch of cue cards in his sleeve? And the class is equal parts amused and pissed off while the teacher takes sips from a flask because this is the third class that day who did something stupid.
And, going back to games: Who is to say that playing Dark Souls by yourself is any less culturally relevant than watching the influencers of the day lose their shit and get mad at chat because they can't beat Ornstein and Smough?
Because media is not in a vacuum. Media's impact on culture is informed by the people who consume it.
Which is why I increasingly think that, from a game and cultural preservation standpoint, youtube and twitch and the blogs of the day are actually MUCH more important to preserve.
The only reason we still have Shakespeare is preservation.
Interesting points, but you're missing an important point: This isn't necessarily about the definition of what SHOULD be or MUST be preserved, but whether studios should be allowed to PREVENT it from being preserved by those who want to.
Preserving a game isn't about preserving the culture around it at the time of its release. It's about a set of rules that the player can interact with that tend to lead to a certain type of experience. People playing Marvel vs. Capcom 2 will fall into basically the same meta that the game evolved into about 15 years ago, because those rules encourage using those characters.
Yes, we should have more distinct versions of updated games that we can choose to upgrade to, or not, by our own choice. It's absolute garbage that you can have a version of Overwatch that you enjoy that can just be taken away from you on a whim.
Which I don't disagree with (even if I suspect I do tend to lean more toward not making extra work for overworked devs than many)
The issue is arguing that you are preserving the culture when that very much isn't Because what "meta" is there in MvC2 without other players? We all had our moment of "I am really good at Tekken" when we played against bots.. and then were completely demolished by some kid at a truck stop who actually knew combos.
Which gets to what we see in reality where we DO have basically every version of MvC2 because it was before software patching was common. I would need to check what is popular for specifics but, like with all games, some versions get played and some don't. And it doesn't matter if you have every single revision of Karnov's Revenge AND two different fan patches to rebalance it: if nobody plays it the meta doesn't exist. MAYBE you can get a hotel room play of a version or two as a curiosity at Combo Breaker.
But you aren't going to get a proper meta unless it is someone referencing a text guide that was also preserved. And that isn't actually a "meta". That is someone knowing combo strings or exploits. Because the meta that builds up around a fighting game involves people learning those combos and learning how to counter them and determining what is best and so forth. Otherwise? You are the kid who can consistently do a dragon punch up against the guy who can't even do a hadouken.
Which gets back to the difference between preserving games/bytes and preserving culture.
The way they patched those games in the 90s was to call it a sequel. It came out about a year, sometimes sooner, after the last one. And in doing it that way, we got to keep every version. PC games used to give you installers for every patch. If patching is done sparingly, and focused on minor changes or bug fixes, this is manageable. I'm sure plenty of devs would argue that this doesn't work for their game, but the alternative is that we just lose it all to time.
MVC2 is preserved as long as you've got at least one other person to play it with. With a Discord server, you could fill out a lobby even for a game like MAG that has over 100 players in a match, provided they actually gave you the server to run it yourself.
Actually quite a lot of games had multiple revisions even as far back as cartridges. That is why you'll often hear a speedrunner say "This is done on the 1.01 North American version" and the like. Mostly my point was more to say that there is no question of "did every single patch get archived"
And as a huge Dawn of War fan: you can have every single patcher from Fileplanet and STILL not have a snowball's chance of getting the version you want. But that is more comedic than not.
Because:
You can play MVC2. You can't preserve the CULTURE of mvc2. Because, to switch gears to Third Strike: You and me probably aren't going to do the kind of insane crap that folk like Daigo are able to do.
But also, like I mentioned above: You can get a hotel room game going. You won't have anywhere near enough thoery crafting and experience to really run into cases where one character is noticeably better than another.
Let me tell you something as a Tribes 2 player. I can basically get a full server most nights of the week. But all the folk who are still playing Tribes? They never stopped. So the experience of hopping into a game in 2024 is absolutely nothing like it was back in 2004. It is a completely different kind of amazing but it is not "Tribes 2" from a "cultural" standpoint
The multiple cartridges is splitting hairs. Often they just output at different television standards or fixed a rare game breaking bug. They didn't add a new character or change how many are on a team, which is a fundamentally different game design.
If you sit two people in a room long enough with Third Strike, they will end up playing Yun and Chun-Li. If you sit two people in a room long enough with MVC2, they will end up playing Magneto, Storm, and Sentinel. No one had to tell me to play Fox in Melee before I had any idea that there was a Melee "scene"; the rules of the game steered me that way after hundreds or perhaps thousands of hours. That's what you preserve when the game can still be played.
I mean, that all sounds to me like a really good argument for preserving copies of every single version of every game. To go back to your Shakespeare example, it would be a massive loss if any of those adaptations were not preserved to be found by those who went looking, so all we had to go on was records of people talking about them. In fact, there are at least a few examples of exactly that: Homer's Illiad and Odyssey are only parts of a much larger series which we only know exist because we have other records discussing it.
Yeah, just taking snapshots of everything isn't going to let you perfectly recreate the culture surrounding a game at any point in time, but having those snapshots around is important for giving context to other records you have.
But how feasible is it to have a recording of every single time any high school brit lit class put on Shakespear? Uhm... okay, the NSA got you covered but you get my point.
But, again, is a copy of the state of WoW on October 25th 2024 all that important when you consider that what really matter are the players and... I dunno, I guess they are talking about the expensive mounts?
Which gets back to the argument of preserving the games themselves (which I think has a lot of merit) versus preserving the culture around them. And people tend to conflate the two because they think "we are preserving culture" gives them a stronger argument.
Because they are very different problems. And conflating the two is how you end up losing masters because "there are VHSes with it on it".
More feasible than it ever has been before, if not for the evil motherfucking copyright gatekeepers who would steal it all from us!
significantly less so than video games, which are digital files that are at least for a while all stored on a companies servers
You wouldn't be copying a specific date, you'd be copying a game version. Opinions on how granular it should go vary, but in a game like FFXIV for example I'd say every major number patch. I'd quote like to go back and remember how things looked, felt, and we're back then even without the players, which are the least important part of preserving that game world to me
Ah, I think I get what's happening here: video games are culture. Youre misinterpreting it as meaning "the culture around games" but we mean it literally as "a work of art/part of culture", like "high culture art" or similar phrases. People preserve paintings, why not games? Both are culture
You're the only person conflating them
Or, don’t treat it like culture but slop to be consumed and discarded. If law is not there, put pressure on publishers to release games under licensing that allows preservation after predetermined amount of time. Maybe make slop ineligible for game awards and remove it from review aggregators. There are ways I’m sure.
…Who am I kidding, nobody is going to do because it would require too much cooperation and people are selfish.
Copy that floppy!
This is great and advisable.
But what about online only games that can be nuked whenever the publisher feels like it?
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
Probably depends on the game. I'm pretty sure more popular games or games with a sizable amount of dedicated fans, like the TF2 community, have probably already found a way to make their own private servers or at least are working on it.
TF2 has official private server support, from day 1 I think.
Had absolutely no idea. Good to know.