The idea that art is somehow the audience’s is absurd unless the artist explicitly states it. An audience is free to interpret, enjoy, hate, etc. art, but it’s not theirs to own. It’s not theirs to dictate how it should be viewed or used.

I disagree. At some point the art becomes a part of the society and culture. At that point it belongs to everyone.

That's even codified into copyright law: you get a period of exclusivity, then it belongs to the public.

It doesn't 'belong' to the public - when a copyright runs out, the public is allowed to USE it. That's a completely different thing.

Art belongs to the creator. If you take someone else's art, and you make something new with it, you've now created something yourself... and that belongs to you. But the original? That still 'belongs' to the creator.

I don't see how it is completely different. When something is public domain you can:

1. Copy and distribute it at will
2. Modify it
3. Use its elements in something new

How is that functionally different than it 'belonging' to the artist? It's pragmatically the same thing.

Also P.S. art virtually never 'belongs' to its creator in this day and age. Ask JJ Abrams if he owns Force Awakens or if Disney does. Also who does a work 'belong' to when hundreds of people worked on it?

Authorship and ownership are not equivalent.

Gotta disagree on this one.

People don't get to own ideas. Even when they are "implementations" of ideas, like a specific painting, story, game, whatever. As a people, we need to reward the effort of generating ideas that move people forward, which is where patent and copyright laws come in. But the narrative is so twisted nowadays where we talk about people "owning" software, algorithms, specific implementations of ideas... because that's how many make their living. I'm not saying that's a good or bad thing, just that that is what is.

We can't forget that enforcing this is something that we, as a society, have decided. It doesn't mean it's how it has to be done... but that's how it is right now.

Cody has in the past done things like collect audio for preservation purposes. He's in that same line of thinking here -- preserving the ideas (or, specifically "art") that is within the space of Destiny. On the flip side, Bungie definitely shouldn't be required to release a disc or make that easy... As a society, we potentially lose in the long run for making an experience or game like Destiny basically disposable and unknowable over a longer period of time.

Big deal? To some. Probably not for many more. As has been mentioned here, one persons trash is another's treasure (see: commissioned art and the thoughts around certain artists in their own time). Who knows if Destiny will be forgotten in the years to come or if it's pivotal to video game history...? There is a bigger picture at work here than just "I play games, Bungie makes them. So what?"

Also apples and oranges. heh.

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.

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.

Depends on how much you care about preserving history. Preserving history is a useful end.

Sure, and I don't disagree there. It's just that the format we're talking about would necessitate an endeavor that is so impractical, for relatively so little gain, as to be irrational. And yeah, there's no accounting for taste, love knows no bounds, etc. But following that rabbit hole takes one squarely into the realm of passion project/obsession, and well out of the realm of conscientious posterity.

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.

Well, there's the wayback machine on the internet. I agree it's difficult and I think footage is what we'll likely end up with, but on the other hand, Microsoft has done a pretty good job preserving the Halo franchise's playability.

Agreed there. I rolled my eyes for years when I heard people talking about Halo Anniversary; I've known too many hardcore players of various games over the years who couldn't move on to newer games because they'd found their comfort zone and wanted to remain dominant within their playground of choice. I figured it was more of the same. And then it was actually released, and it was fun. But I'll say the MCC; since they fixed it, is a dream realized. But we're still talking games that can run the entire experience on local hardware.

PS - H2 Anniversary is better than Halo 5.

When I was doing historical linguistics crap at school, one of the greatest assets we could have are multiple revisions of a particular document.

For example, we can truly see the differences in English over a small time frame from Old English to Middle English, where, sixty years after one thing was written, it was copied word for word, except plurals were modern, or a French or Norse word was put in place of an English word.

So, I understand Cody's dread that this be lost. Every time we have a document dated from 1300 which we know is a copy of something from 800, but don't have the original, it opens so many questions.

That being said, Ma1 right here explains why it's fine that our version of the game has been lost and why it's actually fine about the Star Wars footage.

Do we have the binaries or the source of the game? No. What we have is good enough for almost any cultural and historical use though. We have billions of hours of Dinklebot footage and audio, both through Cody's efforts and through massive recording and broadcasting of the game. The game can be pieced together if necessary from footage.

We have high def theatrical editions of Star Wars pieced together from myriad film reels and sources. Examine the silver screen edition or whatever that crap is from Myspleen everyone talks about.

This is basically proof that we don't, for virtually all intents and purposes, need originals. We need enough reference materials to the originals, and the game is near as makes no difference preserved.

And let's be honest: it doesn't really matter if Star Wars is in high def in its original format. I have the original cuts on DVD, and I can watch and enjoy them if I choose (which I don't because they're mostly worse) and that's enough for history. We don't need the negatives. We don't even need DVDs, since there's laserdisc. That's 100% fine for virtually all purposes.

Don't agree with the lumping the Star Wars issue in there. That's where I side with Cody completely from a fan perspective. It's utter bullshit that I can't buy the version of the movie I saw in 1977.