I'm with Cody on this. (Destiny)

by Malagate , Sea of Tranquility, Wednesday, January 16, 2019, 07:35 (1939 days ago) @ Kermit

To erase parts of the game you don’t want anymore, like Dinklebot or the original mission order?

For some of us, yes. And it's the developers right to do so.

So I guess you are cool with not having an official HD version of the Original Star Wars Trilogy. It's Lucas' right after all.

Honestly? Yes, I’m fine with that. I think it’s sheer idiocy to suggest otherwise. If I paint a masterpiece, put it in galleries all over the world and everyone falls in love with it, it’s still my painting, and I’ll draw little squiggly mustaches all over it if I want to. George Lucas doesn’t owe the world a fucking thing.

Do I wish we had an HD version of the original cut? Sure. But I didn’t make the goddamn movie, so that’s not my choice.

Do I wish I could go play Destiny with Dinklebot? Absolutely! But again, that’s not my choice, and I’m not losing any sleep over it.

Art is part of culture, and the bigger impact it has on the culture the more important it is. Whether you call it art or culture it's important historically to preserve Star Wars in its original form.

Everything can't be preserved. "Living world" games perhaps can't be preserved in such a form that they can be experienced as they were originally, but I understand why you would want to, and I understand the concern about it. Perhaps Bungie has archival builds. I like to think where there's enough desire to be preserve, a way will be found.

To what end, though? The population, whether by their own desire or not, will have moved on. The experience itself will have changed. The population won't be present. At some point, some group will perform the last completion of XYZ raid, and it will never happen again. Likewise with public events, etc. Games, and in particular games that make an attempt at a living world with cooperative goals, are particularly susceptible to this...temporality, for lack of a better term.

All the talk about ownership by artist is a distraction. Name an artist who wouldn't like their work to live longer than they do. Sure they have the right to modify and change what they've done--let them. The only thing wrong with what George Lucas did was his insistence that the originals cease to exist. He destroyed culture. He destroyed history. Sure it was legal but that doesn't mean it was right.

Agree here. The artist releases the work into the world and has less control over it, by default. And has no control over what the audience does with it or how it's received. Obviously the game(s) in question here are subject to developer control, but the notion still holds true for the most part.

Cody cares about the history of games. That's good. And he's right to talk about the lack of preservation given how games exist now. Where I differ with him is when he argues that any gamer should be able to have the experience they had originally forever. The game and gamer in this case can't exist without outside support. It's unrealistic to expect that to last forever or remain the same. For games of this sort preservation might not look like playability. Nothing last forever, but knowing what's gone before is rarely useless knowledge.

Just going to offer that we do have a record of the state of a given game in the countless hours of streamer footage that get archived on youtube, screencaps, etc. Demanding playability or that any piece of software be made available in a particular state after the fact is nonsense. Sure, unauthorized servers for MMOs have existed for as long as MMOs have been a thing, and they've been subject to all the perils one would expect. But that's also a bit like me saying I've seen the Cistine Chapel before restoration, and I want to erect my own pre-restoration version. With cocaine. And...you get the idea.

Archival for stand-alone software isn't a bad goal, but online-only media, I don't think there's a way to practically do it. Even any conversation about such a title will be rife with temporal caveats. "Oh yeah, X was great before Y. And then later they added Z." The experience will always be incomplete for anyone that wasn't there.