People talk a lot about their Steam backlogs. I don't have too much of a problem there. Right now, if I check my Steam Library, I find just over a hundred games of which there are only twenty I have never played at all. And of those twenty, I only paid for one, so I don't consider myself to be all that far behind where I'd want to be.
If we want to talk about Netflix or Prime Video backlogs, though, it's a very different matter, at least psychologically. Even though my Netflix wishlist is there or thereabouts the same size as my Steam Library and has roughly the same number of shows or movies I haven't even started watching, I feel a lot less sanguine about it.
There are towo reasons for that. Firstly, I'm reasonably confident the games in my Steam Library will still be there, should I ever decide to give them a try. I can't say the same for anything on Netflix or Prime. Secondly, and more worryingly, I'm culturally programmed to assign a higher level of importance to television and cinema than I am to video games.
I was thinking about that in context of the recent resurgence in interest and concern in video game preservation. Last week I read a report about the creation of a pressure group dedicated to lobby government and regulatory authorities to "crack down on games companies to ensure that abandoned and deprecated games are still at least functional on players’ own devices without the studio’s involvement or services" and only today I saw the news that Microsoft is setting up its own team to “ensure the future-proofing of the current Xbox game library against future hardware paradigm shifts” by making sure everything that can be is made backwards-compatible with the next generation consoles.
There's a clear difference between those two propositions. One's a pragmatic and realistic undertaking; the other's a pipe dream. The real question in my mind, though , is whether the kind of game preservation wished for by the Stop Killing Games group would be desirable, were it achievable, which it patently is not.
It's a curious irony that one of the great collective fears about the internet has long been that it never forgets anything, a concern that led to the demand for the Right to be Forgotten, and thereby to legislation in some jurisdictions to enforce that right. At the same time, we also worry about ephemera like video games not being preserved for future generations, who will certainly never want to play them.
There's an academic argument in favor of some kind of archival preservation akin to the Copyright Library principle long applied to print publications. Even there, though, no-one was suggesting we should keep everything that had ever been printed on paper, from the New York Times to cheese labels.
Over historical time, almost everything ever produced by humans has been "lost". That's why entire university departments exist whose primary function is to piece together a picture of the past from fragments. It's only since the advent of the digital age that it's become even theoretically possible to keep everything, but as with a number of technical possibilities, just because we can, does it mean we should?
Leaving aside the numerous practicalities of ensuring hardware and software
exist indefinitely that are capable of displaying or playing the relevant
media, there's the more cogent issue of who we'd be preserving all of this
material for. I was chatting to a friend at work this weekend about the
prospects of certain best-selling authors from twenty or thirty years ago
remaining in print and we agreed it was unlikely that much more than handful
of those prolific writers' best-known and most successful titles would endure.
Hardly anyone wants to read them any more.
Tastes change and never more so than with popular culture, even at the supposedly highbrow end of that spectrum. Few people want to read the best-sellers of the 1970s or '80s today. How many Harold Robbins novels have you seen in your local bookstore recently?
Even academia, long the only reason many books remain even notionally available, has an existential problem in that people will keep on writing new books, blast them! It's not only a question of the canon eveolving, although that has had a huge impact in recent years. It's also that there are only so many texts any course can include, any lecturer teach, any student read.
Something has to give. Things become classics and thrive or staples and endure or neither and vanish. You could argue that at least where printed texts are concerned there'll always be a copy you could find and read but in the vast majority of cases that's about as helpful as pointing out there'll always be another total eclipse. Good luck seeing one exactly when you want to see it.
I mean, I could revisit my childhood and read Freda Hurt's
series of novels featuring
Mr Twink,
a detective who just happens to be a cat, but I'd have to go to the British
Library and fill out some forms to do it. Or I could pay a few hundred pounds
for one of the handful of still-existing copies on the market. I'm not going
to do either, though, and honestly I'll manage, somehow.
I'm not saying I'm against the idea of some kind of open-access preservation of All The Things purely for the purpose of pleasure. I suppose it's hard to argue against keeping everything just in case someone, somewhere, someday wants to glance at it for a few moments. In the case of digital files, what's the harm?
I imagine there's probably quite a lot of harm in terms of environmental impact but I'm sure there are - or will be - ways to mitigate or manage the worst of that. I don't suppose static storage is going to put a huge drain on scarce resources or add too significantly to the destruction of the ecosphere. It won't be nothing, though, and in the end, will anyone really care?
Not me, that's for sure. It'd make me look pretty stupid if I tried. I care far too much about all kinds of dumb things no-one would miss if they weren't there, like my Pepsi can with a picture of Hellcat on it, for example. I used to have three other Pepsi cans with Marvel superheroes on but in a very rare fit of concern over how much clutter I was hoarding, I threw them out. A moment of craziness I have regretted ever since.
So I can see why a lot of people don't want to give up their past or the
markers that point to it. I'm just not convinced there's a cadre as yet unborn
that will thank them for taking the trouble. In the end, everything goes away.
Maybe it would be healthier to learn how to accept that than trying to co-erce
legislators into passing or enforcing laws to slow the tide of entropy.
Or maybe I could just knuckle down and watch some of the shows I've told myself I'm interested in. Or even play some of the games I've downloaded. Radical, I grant you.
Then again, by persuading myself to experience something I could quite easily have left alone and thereby possibly creating a lasting attachment to it, am I risking becoming an advocate for the preservation of something I could perfectly well have lived without?
Dunno. Ask someone else. I studied English not Philosophy. All I came here to do this morning was to write a fun post about some TV shows I haven't watched and now look where we are! This is what happens if you start thinking about stuff. I don't recommend it.
Also, now I come to read it back, I wonder if I haven't written this post
before. Oh, well. If I don't remember, it's for sure no-one else is going
to.
Time I did something useful, I guess. I think I'll go watch Spy X Family. I only added that one yesterday. I wonder if it's any good? Or Fakes. I put that on last week. Maybe if I just work backwards I can have the whole thng cleared out by summer...
AI used in this post
Header image from NightCafe using Starlight XL.
Evolved five times. Final prompt: "The far future. A student, (wearing futuristic clothing1.5), looking puzzled and bored, watching (a video game1.5) on a preservation system. Pastel wash drawing."
Posts
Tastes change and never more so than with popular culture, even at the supposedly highbrow end of that spectrum. Few people want to read the best-sellers of the 1970s or '80s today. How many Harold Robbins novels have you seen in your local bookstore recently?
ReplyDeleteI thought of this when I had trouble chasing down David Eddings' novels several months ago. There's quite a few SF&F authors that are hard to find nowadays, such as Poul Anderson, Jack Chalker, Melanie Rawn, and Katherine Kurtz. I would have added Anne McCaffrey and Michael Moorcock to the list, but both had books appear on my FLGS' stacks recently.
That makes me wonder what authors from the 60's and 70's that had faded by the 80s and 90s I had missed.
Eddings I think we still stock, although he'd be in deep range now and we'd probably only have the first and last in the series. About the only time you'd see Poul Anderson would be in one of the SF Classics series, which is where most of the names from the 40s through the 70s end up, with one or two of their most famous titles always in stock and nothing else they ever wrote in sight. We might possibly have a Katherine Kurtz or two but Jack Chalker I don't ever recall seeing and I'm not even sure I've heard of Melanie Rawn.
DeleteAnne McCaffrey though, like Robin Hobbe, remains surprisingly popular and Moorcock still has a signinfcant cachet, at least in his home country. We usually have a few of his in but of course he wrote an insane number of books, most of which are probably only available print on demand, if at all. On the other hand, some SF authors who barely got mentioned when I was reading genre in the 70s and 80s, particularly the Russians and East Europeans, like the Strugatsky brothers, people now can't seem to get enough of.
Try some of the ebook marketplaces. Clifford Simak's estate (or publishers) seem to have had a small revival of his works going on. I've been slowly picking up his more obscure stuff on Amazon for the Kindle app. I suspect that's where we'll see a lot of the 'long tail' works at going forward. It's understandable, too, since there's no overhead of dealing with a physical inventory that mostly sits there and very slowly sells. That has to be an important consideration given the rising prices of printed books.
DeleteSimak is a name I haven't seen on the shelves at work for a long time. I'll look into that because I used to really like his stuff and he wrote a lot. Must be plenty I haven't read.
Delete15-20 years ago, the supposed solution for taking everything out of print was supposed to be Print On Demand via huge machines that could literally print single copies to order. That still happens although the quality of the output isn't all that great. Ebooks are a far more practical solution so I imagine they'll replace that concept in time.
The drawback to eBooks is in the details: like games bought on Steam or streaming services, you don't own the eBook but rather are granted the right to access the eBook. You basically paid for a rental, as opposed to buying a printed or POD copy.
DeleteWhen I was a teenager, I knew another kid my age (so born around 1990) who absolutely refused to have anything to do with any music made after 1980. I think you're underestimating the appeal retro can have to some people. Sure, not everyone from future generations will want to play old games, probably significantly less than a majority, but the market will definitely exist, just the way there's a market for classical music and black and white films.
ReplyDeleteII knew a few people like that too. I'm absolutely certain there will always be someone interested in just about anything that has ever existed and the appeal of the past - especially the recent past - is absolutely immense. I listen to a lot of brand-new music and one of my biggest complaints is that it's next-to-impossible to hear anything that doesn't strongly remind me of something I've heard before. That's not because the people making it are unconsciously repeating the creative processes of the past - it's because they've listened to a whole bunch of old records!
DeleteThe thing about retro trends, though, is they mostly generate new material that builds on or replicates things that have already happened. For the most part, new interest focuses on those new creations, rather than on the original influences. And even when people do look back to the actual past rather than reinvent it, it's the relatively small number of high points they revisit, not the much larger hinterland surrounding those peaks.
As I said in the post, the classics and the staples will endure - it's the vastly larger body of decent, okay, middling, ordinary, mediocre and plain poor material that will vanish. I'm not at all convinced there's a need to preserve all of that, either for video games or pretty much anything else, and even if there is, it would only be in an archival setting. The idea as it more commonly seems to be presented these days is that anyone who ever played a video game should always have access to that game, even if the game was only intended to be played remotely via the internet. I would take some convincing that's either a practical or a worthwhile goal. If it was a case of just leaving things to run on untouched then I'd say why not? But it's clearly going to require a very great deal more work to achieve than that and it hardly seems like the best use of someone's time or resources.
That said, it's not like I'm *against* it in principle. I just think there are about a billion more important things to worry about than whether someone a hundred years from now can play Tanzia or Twin Saga, to name two games I actually liked.
I think a part of the preservation push is the realization that with this medium we can potentially save it all, unlike all the other past mediums. With those we can't tell if we lost a classic or just another 'pot boiler'.
ReplyDeleteSome of it is also the technical/culture challenge of preserving old software. Often with the older computer systems people only preserved cracked copies of things (mostly games). Those cracked/pirated copies were incomplete versions of things because the crackers wanted to stuff as much as they could onto a limited floppy disk. These days the folks making the copies preserve everything about a piece of software and will branch out to preserve stuff, such as educational software, that was never preserved before.
Certainly the whole, 'gotta collect them all' for a specific system is a familiar one to us gamers. :) It's also a doable goal for small groups of individuals. Also, we learn things, such as how copy-protection evolved over the years, which wouldn't ever have been written down. Even if we can't get everything, we sometimes can pick up more information than we first realized.
I keep thinking of the poor students and researchers of the future. Imagine the sheer, unimaginable qualtity of potential research material in a hundred years time if we do indeed manage to preserve everything! We're going to need real AI by then just to find anything in that lot.
DeleteI wouldn't be surprised if future researchers of digital material become (to us) insanely specialized if only to have a manageable amount of material to deal with. I wonder if we're in the last few generations where being a generalist is even possible?
DeleteMy pleasure reading habits only go back to around the 1800s, and other than Poe, Doyle and Dickens very little from before 1920. However, I do really enjoy a lot of that old stuff. Sci Fi, and especially fantasy, are somewhat timeless genres. It's really surprising how a lot of older authors still hold up, and how much they have enriched my life. There remains a good bit of fantasy and sci fi from 1950 to 1990 that I still want to read and have never been able to get to.
ReplyDeleteThere is also an issue that we have noticed since we started writing things down that people in a given time and place aren't all that great at figuring out what is worth preserving. The library of Alexandria comes to mind. Burned down by religious zealots that not only didn't think anything in there was worth preserving, they found it to be an active affront. In the field of medicine and human anatomy alone, there were things commonly known in some parts of Asia around 400 BC that wouldn't be rediscovered in Europe until around 1500-1600. Rhinoplasty, caesarian sections, how the circulatory system works, surgical instruments we actually still use, the first systematic disease classification system, the idea that standardized rigorous training for medical professionals is a good idea. I am pretty sure most of that was written down somewhere in the library of Alexandria. Can you imagine how different things might have been if Europeans had started there instead of with Hippocrates and the four humors?
All a very long winded way of saying that I strongly believe it's better to preserve everything and let future generations sort it out. If for no other reason than so that we have a high resolution historical record that can be mined by future researchers for insight into questions we don't even know to ask yet.
On an infinitely more trivial level, it's like the way TV networks, specifically the BBC, either discarded or recorded over what would now be considered classic shows, both because no-one at the time believed anyone would ever be interested in them after the first broadcast and repeat cycle but also because tape was expensive and they wanted to re-use it. Similarly, no-one really gave much thought to archiving movies that were only available on celluloid, even though it was known to deteriorate quickly. Again, few people believed any future generations would be interested.
DeleteAnd that's kind of my point. Practical information such as you list from the Alexandrian era is one thing but popular entertainment is another. The past already exerts a clear and disturbing influence on the present when it comes to creativity. I'm not convinced that process needs any scaffolding. The best will tend to survive anyway while the rest may be better left to fade. I suspect though, that what will happen is more along the lines Pallais suggests above: with an ever-increasing and increasingly unmanageable archive, the huge majority will remain as invisible and unknown as it would have been had it been lost, save for the exceptionally narrow interests of a few experts, whose specialisms will be absolutely irrelevant outside of their silos. I suppose on that basis there's no harm in it, although I think we're underestimating the potential costs of storage and retrieval unless and until quantum computing becomes a reality.
Totally off topic (ish) considering where the conversation landed but my Epic Games backlog is just gross. I can't not take the free games they offer every week or so, as there are some incredible titles there,but I can't even finish the games I do play.
ReplyDeleteI'm just collecting games I'll never play. And then I'll die, and they will forever have not been installed
It never ceases to surprise me, what aspect of a post catches peoples' attention. I never learn to split topics into separate posts to try to manage that, either.
DeleteOn the Epic thing, I was doing the same with Amazon's free games until they helped me out by making almost all lof them things I wouldn't take on a bet. And even then, I still take a couple every month that I know I'll never play...