It's the difference between events and artifacts, and there absolutely are differences between the two as time goes on that make even the very best preserved ma

It's the difference between events and artifacts, and there absolutely are differences between the two as time goes on that make even the very best preserved materials different in their essence. An event is experienced once and remembered as its artifacts; an artifact retains some substance allowing similar events to reoccur. But on some level all artifacts are just echoes of the event and therefore are prone to decay and lose their meaning. Making it a digital artifact just allows some of those axes of decay to slow down, like an anti-aging therapy that can't treat dementia. And so it is also the case that physically realized games are more likely to play similarly in the past and present - sports have changed, Chess has changed, and both have seen reshaping via tech, but neither one unrecognizably so in the way that video games communicate phenomena with orders of magnitude more detail today versus 30 years ago. The question, "which is better to favor, events or artifacts?" is a worthy one to ponder. Is it better to have fresh coffee available at all times, or a perfect coffee date once a month? Is it better to be able to listen to a recording 1000 times, or to attend a single live practice session? What technology has done, beyond the basic needs aspects of Maslow's hierarchy, is let us pick and choose those options more often with fewer compromises. Its biggest failing tends to be in only solving a surface part of the issue: For example, having Facebook lets you message your friends and view their postings in some ambient fashion, without direct engagement. But it doesn't organize the party or send the invitations or prepare for guests or otherwise do the real work of a friend relationship. And so in that sense Facebook is a friend artifact that produces few useful friend events, and converts all those events that occur within its domain into proprietary artifacts of the company. But these artifacts aren't exactly worthy of emulating either. Anyone who controls them is probably sitting on blackmail.