Over the last hundred years, several large fires have ensured that large parts of American film and music history have been lost. The 1937 Fox Vault fire ensured that virtually all silent films from the studio from the time before 1932 were lost forever. In 1965 there was a fire in MGM’s archiveswhere hundreds of films from the studio’s early history suffered the same fate. A major fire at a federal National Archives complex in Maryland in 1978 led to large amounts of donated film material burning up and disappearing for posterity. The worst affected is possibly Universal Studios, which has had up to several fires on its premises with the accompanying loss of archive-worthy material. The last big fire in 2008 fortunately did not cause as great a loss to the film and television industry, as it was digital backups that were lost at the time, but around one hundred and fifty thousand master tapes of music were consumed by the flames. In addition to American film history, film archives in both Brazil and India lost as a result of fires.
Such disasters have partly meant that both the industry, the politicians and the ordinary cinemagoer have woken up and fought for better measures to preserve films for posterity. After over a hundred years, film has long since been recognized as a cultural expression that is considered worthy of preservation, and it is not difficult to gain a certain understanding that even films without commercial success or recognition are worth preserving, if for no other reason than for their art historical value .
“That game belongs in a museum!”
One would think the same applies to the gaming industry, but the news from the Video Game History Foundation this week shows that the situation is far more critical than one would think. After taking a random sample of 1,500 games released before 2010, the organization that works for the preservation of gaming history was able to tell that only 13% of them were commercially available to today’s American gamers. Availability is worse the further back in time you go, where for example the Commodore 64 (which was a fairly popular platform in Europe in the 80s) only has 4.5% of its total game library available to the general public today – a number that goes down to 0.75% if you remove the games that are available digitally via the Antstream Arcade service. Game Boy games actually dropped from roughly 11% to 4.5% earlier this year, when Nintendo decided to shut down the eShop for 3DS and Wii U. Even relatively newer consoles like the PlayStation 2 only have 12% of their total library available for today’s players.
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Fortunately, the numbers do not mean that 87% of gaming history has been lost forever. These are numbers that tell something about how easy it is for today’s players to get hold of a game legally, and the big companies hopefully have some internal archives where their own history is well preserved for posterity. Nevertheless, these are grim numbers that should make more people wake up in the same way that the film archive fires have done in the last hundred years.
“Games are art and culture,” we gamers often like to point out to highlight the value of our beloved medium, and yet these figures show that the industry itself does not take this seriously. Part of the explanation lies in the fact that the games industry is an industry with a lot of turnover, where studios are established and closed down at a rapid pace so that various games end up in a rights limbo where it is not clear who owns them. However, the main reason for the lack of access to the game history is that this is largely about interest – or the lack of it – from the companies themselves. This puts the game’s history at risk.
The gaming industry is a creative industry, but first and foremost it is a commercially driven industry. This is very incompatible with the conservation of cultural history. It is not commercially interesting for the companies to make their games available at all times, because most of us have no interest in games that are even older than six months. The closure of the PSP digital store and the Nintendo eShop for Wii U and 3DS are just the latest glaring examples of the industry’s biggest players keeping their digital libraries alive only as long as they deem it commercially viable, and the closure of these stores shows how huge reams of gaming history are lost to the general public like tears in rain in a flash. The amount of history that will be lost the day access to PlayStation 4, Switch or Steam is hypothetically closed is almost unfathomable.
With the Wii, Wii U and 3DS, Nintendo has proven that they are only interested in supporting their gaming history as long as it is profitable for them.
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Preservation of games as cultural history stands in many ways in opposition to the industry it itself represents. It is not about the large crowd, the broad public appeal or the financial profitability, but a special interest for those who want to safeguard history for posterity with a view to research, knowledge and the like. We therefore cannot entrust the preservation of game history to commercial actors who may shut down when we least expect it or close access to their own games when there is no longer commercial interest in it. If we are to take the claim “games are art” seriously, we cannot accept that large amounts of art history are lost in this way.
Emulation and piracy are of course possible, but there are several disadvantages to this. First, emulation requires a lot more effort than the average gamer thinks is worth going through. Second, emulation rarely gives anything back to those who actually developed or published the game. Thirdly, it is not a given that the emulation is able to reproduce the gaming experience 100%, which is part of the reason why interest in FPGA-emulated hardware such as Analogue Pocket has started to grow. Finally, we have the most obvious reason that there are a number of legal issues associated with emulation and piracy, where the line between the two is often thin and varying from country to country.
The latter is also one of the reasons why the preservation of game history is difficult, especially in the United States. There, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) ensures that the making and distribution of copies of digital works is quickly brought down as illegal piracy. It is true that libraries and researchers can get exceptions precisely with regard to archiving and research, but games are not included in these exception rules, partly due to strong opposition from the industry interest organization Entertainment Software Association (ESA). Again we see that the industry itself cannot be left to guard its own cultural heritage.
If the authorities do not take responsibility for preserving their country’s game history, organizations such as the Video Game History Foundation must be given free rein to do the job for the community.
Preservation of gaming history must therefore be included on a national and international political level. A political interest must be aroused in taking care of gaming history in the same way as other cultural expressions, and solutions must be implemented for how this can be done both for each individual nation and entire regions. Norway alone can of course do little more than make an effort for Norwegian gaming history, but if the EU and/or the USA come stronger on the field, the situation will be quite different. A solution where the games industry is required to contribute copies for archival purposes will not necessarily be particularly popular within the industry, but I would still like to claim that such a solution is better than the one we have today, where access to game history is at the mercy of the fact that it has a commercial interest. Exactly how this should be solved in practice must of course be discussed, but an archive or museum solution where the material is made available to the public in one way is a start. Alternatively, the legislation must open up so that voluntary interest organizations can do the work on behalf of the community without being opposed or, in the worst case, committing illegalities. It is not optimal to entrust the work to such private actors, but it is at least better than continuing on the negative track we are on now.
2023-07-18 10:37:32
#Comment #Preservation #games #left #games #industry
