[game_preservation] "Selecting Save on the Games We Make" on Gamasutra & at PAX East

[Christian Bartsch | softpres.org]

Hi Matt,

yes, the new era of games, everything that's being downloaded or just 
offered through a service like Steam will be problematic. Especially 
with all this DRM coming in the way.

I do disagree for old titles, at least I can't say that this rule 
applies unconditionally. It is correct that for some titles you might 
have no other choice than picking a pirated copy if no other source is 
available. The article also cites blog entry by Jason Scott who coins 
the phrase "it's too late". It isn't that bad.The world isn't black and 
white, but it helps grabbing people's attention. ;-) But I understand 
motivation and dedication to the subject. We're still around, and we're 
still ingesting disks and we do have tools, both hardware and software, 
to see which state the media is in. That's some retro science, but 
there's been no one else, so we developed the technology from scratch. 
It's correct it's not going better, but in many cases the very old 
titles are in fact better than new ones. That has to do with the better 
quality of earlier disks (compare to CD-R media), as well as the fact 
that low density media can be easier read these days as there are more 
particles forming the information. The last months were very intensive 
in regard to reading C64 media and we do have a good success rate 
although there are certain brands of disks (often from certain 
publishers) that will literally fall apart when reading.

But to come back to the main article... pirated copies can be a last 
resort. But one should be aware of the risks these artifacts bring with 
them: bad cracks (copy won't work at all or break somewhere in the game 
or in the app), digital graffiti (game text altered by crackers to 
reflect their names or opinions) and missing initial states (e.g. the 
empty house of Little Computer People). We do have technology to store 
original mastering data, unaltered, verified. This might be an 
alternative people would want to look at. At least they would have the 
option to see the game as it was submitted by the author, they could see 
the LCP moving into the house for the first time and they would have to 
play against the highscores the programmers put there, not some weird 
numbers hacked into the game by a cracker.

Best,

Christian Bartsch
The Software Preservation Society
http://www.softpres.org


Am 28.02.2012 18:52, schrieb MCENIRY, MATTHEW:

> Hi John,

>

> Really enjoyed your follow up article.  I had a friend recommend me 

> your first three part series and it was one of my inspirations to 

> research further into the video game preservation field.

>

>  Maybe I'm just a pessimist on the cloud but I surmise the more games 

> that are produced for only digital consumption the more volatile the 

> formats will become.  Who is going to bail out the companies that hold 

> hundreds of terabytes of information on their clouds?  Preserving 

> paper documents seems to be easy when comparing them to a 16 gigabyte 

> game which consists of numerous variables, code, art, music, etc.

>

> I'm not sure if this article has been linked in the past, but a lot of 

> its points ring true concerning how unfortunate it is that in order to 

> save older games/technology we'd have to resort to piracy. 

> http://technologizer.com/2012/01/23/why-history-needs-software-piracy/

>

> Matt McEniry

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