I found this topic so fascinating and I was wondering what the rest of the RB community thought of it. I think this video has so many points that are worth expanding on, I really need to make a list/outline of them
Great! Glad you got this posted so quickly! I have some thoughts but I'll leave room for others to comment first.
Everyone should watch this panel.
FYI for those who are interested: Before the panel I interviewed Dr. Lowood for an hour long podcast on the topic of game preservation, and will be posting that interview sometime later this year. I also interviewed Chris Mellisinos about the Games as Art exhibit and the debate around "games as art" in general and will be posting that interview next month. It would be great if we could dive into an ongoing discussion about game preservation for the foreseeable future. In fact, I think it would be great if we could come up with some ways for our own community to get actively involved in these efforts.
noiseredux wrote:I wish there was a DL link for this.
There are a handful of websites/pieces of software that will download Youtube videos for you...
I'm DLings the compressed MP4 from Youtube right now (my original HD WMV was 4GB) -- it's 913MB, so I'd probably need to make a torrent or something to distribute it...
I just finished this. I was surprised that no one mentioned emulation unitil the very end when someone asked a question. The one panelist admitted that yes, no one is considering real hardware for the 100 year time frame and talked about "migration". And that was about it.
But in the long term, that's what it's going to be. Emulation, or hardware reimplementations that are sometimes less accurate than emulators. How you preserve the experience without the hardware is the most interesting question to me. I have gone to pretty great lengths to get original hardware for most things, and I'm repairing stuff all the time. (dunno if I'll have a working mac in time for Deja Vu next month). Anyway, it's clear that real hardware is on its way out.
So what do you do? Are multi-emulator boxes going to be the future? Will we just play everything on our Dingoo 3000?
One thing I felt they missed entirely is the question about which port do you keep. Archivists need to keep all the ports. If you go back to a game like Donkey Kong which was ported to a dozen or more platforms, there's a lot of difference between the ports. That's information worth preserving, it can tell you about the hardware capabilities of a platform, or the quality of a game publisher at the time.
We are prepared to live in the plain and die in the plain!
noiseredux wrote:I wish there was a DL link for this.
There are a handful of websites/pieces of software that will download Youtube videos for you...
I'm DLings the compressed MP4 from Youtube right now (my original HD WMV was 4GB) -- it's 913MB, so I'd probably need to make a torrent or something to distribute it...
yeah I had a Firefox plugin that did this -- it seemed to screw up viewing youtube vids for me though oddly. I think I'll reinstall it though and try again, unless you're able to host the vid somewhere for DL (I have no clue about torrents).
noiseredux wrote:I wish there was a DL link for this.
There are a handful of websites/pieces of software that will download Youtube videos for you...
I'm DLings the compressed MP4 from Youtube right now (my original HD WMV was 4GB) -- it's 913MB, so I'd probably need to make a torrent or something to distribute it...
yeah I had a Firefox plugin that did this -- it seemed to screw up viewing youtube vids for me though oddly. I think I'll reinstall it though and try again, unless you're able to host the vid somewhere for DL (I have no clue about torrents).
I use http://www.keepvid.com/
It works very well for me, and you can chose some different formats.
I posted some of this before. Source code is great and best of course. In principle source code can always be compiled.
But I think it is important that in exhibits and so on, a playable form is preserved. Just like with movies the cells and so on are good but a viewable form is important.
I also made before this comment that I really think Piracy is going to have a major positive outcome of playing a role in preserving a LOT of the stuff that these fancier museums won't (because they can't store everything etc). Same goes for emulators.
Some games have physical bits that defined them as well. For example, ROB, the strategy guides that came with Earthbound, the letter you have to dip in water for StarTropics, the back of the case for MGS, or the batshit insane Steel Battalion controller. How would those be considered in regards to preservation?
MrPopo wrote:The life lesson here is jobs will come and go, but Earthbound will always be there for you.
