Yep. (Destiny)

by MacAddictXIV , Seattle WA, Wednesday, January 16, 2019, 08:16 (1939 days ago) @ Kermit

But a living game is less like buying a movie and more like buying a pass to an amusement park. Bungie didn’t change anything “at your home” they just changed the details of where you go for leisure. I don’t think the SW example fits either side of the argument very well. But I do think this brings up an interesting point regarding the separation of production and consumption in the scheme of things. It highlights a difference in the location of the identoty of a thing.

Amusement park is a great example. People think they own software because they have a copy of it. A disc is just a ticket to use the software. a digital code is just access to the amusement park. There is art in the making of an amusement park too, but it's meant to amuse the user. If the owner of the park decides to change it and hires engineers to tear down a section and make something new, does that mean that we as the customers are required to preserve it? I mean, no in my opinion. We don't own it.

For the sake of this comparison, let's redefine amusement parks. Let's say that they have traditionally been prefab affairs that you install in your backyard for you and your family to enjoy. Do the people who designed it and sold it to you have the right to change it from it's original state or otherwise render it unusable? Maybe--I mean, yes, that's what all those legal disclaimers we agree to are about. That said, it's reasonable to expect that some people aren't going to like this. Consumers usual expectations about games they "own" aren't being met. It's also reasonable for historians to want to preserve in some fashion examples from previous points in time.

I get where you are going with this, but at the same time I feel like this is an idea that you are trying to hold on to but isn't reasonable. This might be possible for a small subset of games, especially older games where digital upgrades weren't possible. But that is rarely true in modern games and especially a live game like Destiny.

I speak on this as both a gamer and a software engineer. It's easy to say that we should preserve art when talking about games because that is something you can latch onto as something that is felt very personally. But art is a small part of what a game is. Games are software. Which means, logic, which means bugs. There is so much of a game that is encompassed when you say that you think a game should be preserved in a certain state at a given time.

You as a gamer look at how it played, felt, what content there was, even the bugs that affected it. That is a memory for you that felt good, and you want to keep it in that state. I can totally get behind this as a gamer. If I could have snapshots of and play certain parts of Destiny in it's history, that would be fun.

However, I am also a software engineer who understands that It's not so simple as keeping your Destiny 2 disc so you can keep playing it as it was and if you can't it's Bungie's fault for not allowing you to do this. Destiny as a game is dependent on so many things. The Xbox hardware, the Xbox Operating system, or Bungie's servers to name just a small amount. All of these things change and render parts of Destiny code obsolete or dysfunctional. This is the realization of software and thus digital games now. I can understand the want to make modern games like old school games where you had a set piece of hardware and a disc or cartridge and things never change from that. I just don't think it's reasonable to expect a studio to do that.

I wanted to also talk about fixing bugs and upgrading content as a natural need for developers, but I'm all debated out. I'm sure it will come up later.