6 ms·
Here's a fucking idea. Cultural artifacts of any significance shouldn't be this easy to destroy. And corporate entities that do so should become pariahs.
by andybak 3y ago
Here's a fucking idea. Cultural artifacts of any significance shouldn't be this easy to destroy.
And corporate entities that do so should become pariahs.
- sevagh 3y agoIf you don't like it, you shouldn't buy or play Nintendo games.
- hiddencost 3y agoWe have this thing called a "society" which is empowered to make rules collectively. One way it is empowered to make rules.is through "laws" and "regulations". Amazingly, these things can and do work, often much better than free market capitalism.
- illusive4080 3y agoEvery action has costs. Laws and regulations will exhibit costs, sometimes hidden costs until the law is actually in place.
- Zuiii 3y agoAnd? I'm sure Right-to-repair has far more costs and that got passed. When you buy something, you own it. If nintendo doesn't want to pay for hosting anymore, the ethical thing would be to dump the server code and the levels so that players can host the servers themselves. Given how nintendo, activision, and other publishers have been acting the past decade, I really think its time for a Right-to-play law.
- CaptainFever 3y agoConcretely, I think this sounds like a combination between AGPL-like "server must have source code" and the data portability law in the GDPR.
- sevagh 3y agoAh, yes, the secret 11th commandement, "Nintendo shalt not shut down the online services of their video games."
- peeters 3y agoStepping in with regulation doesn't necessarily imply forced support. It could be more like "though shalt not claim copyright over a game thou hast ceased to support, and thou shalt remove all security barriers from thine code when thou chooseth to cease supporting it".
- CaptainFever 3y agoI agree, though I don't understand what this has to do with capitalism. Copyright and DRM is supported by laws themselves. And archivist efforts are often voluntary.
- teeray 3y agoUntil the next bean counter at a different game company entirely decides an online product burns too much to be profitable. Or maybe the store for all those digital goods isn’t quite making its quarterly targets. Right now, I can head down to my basement, jack two AAs into my Game Boy, and play Pokémon Red, a 28 year-old game. I have zero confidence that will be possible with any of today’s games in 28 years.
- crtasm 3y agoWhy wouldn't I be able to boot up my Switch game carts 28yrs from now?
- vages 3y agoBecause a lot of Switch games require downloading the finished game to be playable. See which here: https://www.doesitplay.org/switchCartsRevisions https://www.doesitplay.org/switchCartsRevisions
- Beldin 3y agoThanks! My switch is (and will remain) offline. I wasn't aware some games may not play - even some first-party games like super mario 3d allstars needs updating, according to this.
- crtasm 3y agoThat link does not say the update is required to play all-stars.
- crtasm 3y agoThat's an important point for the games it affects but there's only eight carts there that require an update to play. Any number is too many, I agree.
- CM30 3y agoThis seems a bit misleading, since for many of these games they work fine without downloading the updates. If you don't connect Super Mario Bros Wonder or The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to the internet, then version 1.0 is a perfectly playable, full version of the game. And from my experience, I can just refuse the update every time. Heck, from a speedrunning perspective it's probably better not to update them, since the updates patch out a bunch of tech that makes them more fun to mess around with (easy item dupes in Tears of the Kingdom, easy out of bounds in Mario Wonder).
- bagels 3y agoWho decides what is significant?
- pests 3y agoFuture people, after seeing what is important to them. It must be available for them to save though. If Hitler stayed in art school we probably wouldn't have cared much about him. But he didn't, so now we think his life or belongings and events are significant. But it might have been insignificant too. Who knows? Time must play out.
- CaptainFever 3y agoHonestly, everything. IIRC archivists archive as much as possible because we can't know what will be significant ahead of time.
- tacocataco 3y agoNot sure, but I know we shouldn't leave the decision of what is significant to a uncaring, money hungry corporation.
- crtasm 3y agoThankfully fans have archived all the levels.
- Gigachad 3y agoMeh, online gaming and culture exists in the moment. Even if you perfectly archived and kept hosting everything, it wouldn’t be the same as being there when it was new and lively. There will always be plenty of new, and similar games in the future to play.
- andybak 3y agoThis attitude leads to huge swathes of culture being lost forever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lost_television_episodes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lost_television_episo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work
- michaelt 3y ago99% of theatre performances, standup comedy, live music, dance, sports, college lectures etc go unrecorded. Isn't that fine, though? I think it's good for some things to be ephemeral.
- tacocataco 3y agoAre the theaters legally preventing these recordings from taking place?
- ghaff 3y agoTheaters are probably not in a big hurry to do recordings that compete with live performances. I've been told a lot of it is rights issues associated with the performers, playwright, etc. though. Personally I find it a pity we don't have quality recordings of most theater. How many great performances are lost to time? If you're into opera, the Met's Live in HD are great. ADDED: A fairly small local theater I have a subscription to did make some digital recordings during COVID. But they were only available for a limited lime and weren't free.
- Gigachad 3y ago
- poisonborz 3y agoYes, but imagine, after like 50 years how much effort will go to maintain these ghost towns no one visits vs creating new games? Selfhostable archives would help that but that would be again a major effort to create.
- andybak 3y agoI'm fairly sure a small amount of effort from Nintendo combined with community volunteers would be enough. At the very least Nintendo should pledge to not block preservation efforts or use legal threats.
- tacocataco 3y agoNintendo could start by not prosecuting anyone trying to preserve history.
- deergomoo 3y agoNintendo has some of the stuff most worth preserving (not that we should have to pick and choose—it’s all art and should all be enjoyable long into the future). Makes it all the more galling how actively hostile they are towards preservation.
- LocalH 3y agoCopyright owners being anti-preservation are literally stealing from the public. If a work cannot be preserved to independently ensure it exists long-term, then it has effectively been stolen from the public domain. This is theft in a way that normal copyright infringement can never be.
- hedora 3y agoImagine a world where the statutory damages for destroying all legal copies of a copyrighted work was set to be 1000x the statutory damages for making an unauthorized copy. Surely, deleting the last copy of a thing deprives more people of the work (and does more damage to the original author) than failing to pay for a copy of the thing.
- kmeisthax 3y agoDestroying all copies of a work (aside from the masters) benefits the owner, because now people have to pay the owner for more copies. This is why the publishers at the top of the creative class hierarchy regularly cycle things in and out of print. Note that this may screw over individual authors, but the copyright system was not built to benefit them. Otherwise we wouldn't allow copyright assignment, we'd have "inalienable" copyright instead.
- phailhaus 3y agoAnd it's a poorly thought out idea. It's not like it was a secret that Nintendo was hosting the servers. Everyone knew it had a short shelf life, and then decided to create on the platform anyways. This is why I never got it.
- dehrmann 3y agoThis is a lost cause because of MMOs. Once the community is gone, it essentially ceases to exist, even if the servers are still running. Recorded gameplay and written accounts are more valuable.
- andybak 3y agoThere are obviously some scenarios where it's genuinely impractical to preserve content. But there's plenty where it isn't.