[game_preservation] Wikipedia thoughts?

[Devin Monnens]

Sorry to be jumping in on such an old discussion - I've been away for three
weeks. Some comments:

-Wikipedia's decisions to cut information or edit information are
paradoxical because a) information is submitted by independent sources
(users), b) information must be verified (but the 'verifiers' here seem to
be foggy - and there IS no expert in games, for even Steve Kent's book has
errors and myths that now became history), c) information is not verified by
experts, d) outside sources are often other websites that may or may not be
accurate anyway.

-Shouldn't we just co-opt the information into a games history wiki?
Mobygames can certainly fill this function. If they want to delete an entire
entry that contains historically important information (say statements from
the designer), then just save it elsewhere and abandon Wikipedia. Academia
doesn't accept Wikipedia anyway, even though most of the information is
accurate.

-Buggy game information is important to the history of a game (especially
modern PC games). Game bugs can affect sales, user experience, and game
meaning. It tells us a lot about game culture and game design as well - a
game must meet a certain launch date in order to make up development costs,
gamers are willing to buy a buggy game, but the game is still 'WIP' until
the major bugs are fixed. Each patch is therefore important, and should be
noted.

On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 9:55 AM, Andrew Armstrong <andrew at aarmstrong.org>wrote:


> Neat bit of history :) someone really needs to write a book about

> programming games over the years. There are books which mention certain

> programmers, but most just detail the design, art, music sides of games (if

> they look at development at all - usually they are just looking at the

> gameplay and story).

>

> Since I didn't grow up then, I don't have the knowledge of those systems.

> Certainly I'll be looking into them sometime or later in emulator form

> though :) now that'll be fun, in a way, hehe.

>

> Andrew

>

>> I have an entire bookcase of my software collection dedicated to games

>> that wrung every last drop of performance out of a machine notoriously

>> difficult to program games for (the original IBM PC with CGA).  Games like

>> Starglider, Turbo Champions, Elite, Interphase, Flight Simulator, Chuck

>> Yeager's Advanced Flight Simulator (and CYAFTrainer, after the original name

>> got them sued :-), ICON: Quest for the Ring, and others are truly works of

>> programming art for that platform.

>>

>> [soapbox]A lot of people think the original PC, with it's 5MHz 16-bit

>> processor, would be easy to write fast software for; in reality, it took 4x

>> as long as a C64 to access memory and 6x as long to perform most simple

>> calculations.  Add to that an odd graphics memory structure and no graphics

>> hardware assistance at all, and you have a nightmare to program

>> for.[/soapbox]

>>

>> I am probably the only historian here who has a category for "most

>> clever/efficient programming" for software history...

>>

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-- 
The sleep of Reason produces monsters.

"Until next time..."
Captain Commando
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