The quest to save today’s gaming history from being lost

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/06/the-quest-to-save-todays-gaming-history-from-being-lost-forever/

by signa11 • 11 years ago

67 43 11 years ago

kristofferR2• 11 years ago

Honestly, the ones doing the most to preserve today's games are probably cracking groups like RELOADED, CODEX and PROPHET.

yamalight2• 11 years ago

and GOG.com that pushes no-DRM approach (which is way better than cracking groups for everyone)

bad_user3• 11 years ago

Hey, this is the first time I'm hearing of GOG.com, don't know how I missed it, thanks.

kristofferR2• 11 years ago

Yeah. CD Project RED deserve massive props for publishing The Witcher 3 DRM-free too!

facepalm• 11 years ago

Funny idea - what if all the moves and chat messages in World of Warcraft were recorded, and in the future would be replayed for spectators to watch? It would be an exact representation of peoples lives while they were playing WoW. Somewhat eerie.

tehbeard• 11 years ago

Would be fun to watch the corrupted blood incident play out if this was the case.

toxicFork2• 11 years ago

Funny, I was doing exactly that to help someone create an emulator :D More specifically, recording all packets between the server and the client.

xwat• 11 years ago

That is an amazing idea, I wonder if Blizzard stores such data.

gray_hound• 11 years ago

Incredibly unlikely. At the current moment even 3 hours of movement/combat between 20 players results in log files of ~0.5 gb

Now there is a decent amount of it that also tracks data generated by the actions (and not actions themselves), however without it, due to RNG you will get different results (even with the same actions)

Unless blizzard decided to implement a truly monumental storage facility, i doubt they would do it (for all actions)

They do however store some of the actions, mainly with the intend of recovering items/etc.

philtar• 11 years ago

Would he interesting to see what I was doing when leeroy jenkins happened.

navbaker• 11 years ago

Tangentially related, but this recent article is one of my favorites about WoW and nostalgia: http://kotaku.com/the-people-who-still-play-world-of-warcraf...

digi_owl4• 11 years ago

Giving up the girl to kill the dragon, don't think i'll ever have that level of dedication to a game. But perhaps it was more the community thing than the game thing. I keep having the impression that what keeps many playing WoW is that it is pretty much a oversized chat room for them. That is where the people they know "hang" so that is where people need to get hold of them, and so it becomes self-reinforcing.

bad_user3• 11 years ago

Corporations claim that DRM is necessary for fighting piracy, for protecting the rights of content creators, or to keep computers safe from viruses, however there is no evidence that DRM has had any effect on any of those.

DRM is fundamentally flawed, because the user is both the recipient and the would-be interceptor that DRM protects against, so because of this it means the decryption key is at some point loaded in the memory of the user's device, which means that there's no "uncrackable" variant, but even admitting the possibility of an uncrackable DRM, you always have the analogue loophole. And because of the Internet, ordinary people can easily access the pirated copies made by other people.

The only thing that DRM proved effective for is vendor lock-in. Bought some games on Steam? Bought some books on Amazon? Bought some apps on iTunes Store? Those are "investments" hooking you in to these services for a long time.

And now DRM has infected W3C and web standards as well, because grandmas want to watch Netflix and as predicted, open-source can't join the party, because wouldn't you know, DRM is fundamentally flawed and is incompatible with open-source.

zamalek• 11 years ago

DRM is often said to get in the way of legitimate customers, which for the vast majority of cases is very likely true. Take always-online games as an example (like that one Assassin's Creed) - a pirate has the luxury of being able to play offline, where the legitimate customer e.g. loses game progress because their internet connection dropped.

digi_owl4• 11 years ago

I recall a PCGamer editorial that recommended people go and download a crack because the DRM scheme of a game came with a 30% performance penalty...

acomjean2• 11 years ago

Its odd that DRM had existed since the Apple //e days. I remember returning EA's "Seven Cities of Gold" because it wouldn't load right because the protection was so exacting it just wouldn't run on some machines. Twice it went back, I gave up playing that game. So annoying.

Then came the hackers who cracked games (and put banners up on game load..), copy tools to get around the copy protection. Locksmith was one I remember. My friend had a card with a button that would dump memory (machines only had 64Kbytes or 128) to disk, perfect for copying those games that loaded completely into memory and didn't go back to disk. You needed the card reload and play the games though.

I think some of those games survive in this era thanks to those crackers.

While some are fun to replay and important in context, The memory of those games is sometimes better than the reality. Though I miss mind-strike for intellivision though. Haven't seen anything like it.

mattdotc• 11 years ago

I think some of those games survive in this era thanks to those crackers.

If I remember correctly, a decent number of the titles Jason has uploaded have cracktros because that's all that's left (or all that we have for the moment).

Another interesting thing is that he's working with a cracker to provide crack-diaries that explore the thought processes and actions taken to break the security on the original media.

superuser2• 11 years ago

you always have the analogue loophole

Give it time. Most everything these days supports HDCP. Screens are being integrated with cameras.

HDCP + computer vision scanning of the room to ensure that only the licensed number of people (and no cameras) are present isn't that far off.

bad_user3• 11 years ago

I don't think it will work, also because of self-interest (tragedy of the commons :)), but I'm sure they'll try.

theandrewbailey• 11 years ago

Maybe, maybe not. Microsoft already has a patent on that.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121105/21564420943/micro...

logfromblammo2• 11 years ago

The operative principle here is "three can keep a secret if two of them are dead". A secret can only stay secret if everyone who knows it is unanimous in the desire for keeping it.

Alice can keep her own secrets. If Alice sends a secret to Bob, she is now dependent on Bob's willingness to keep it. But if Bob wants to share Alice's secrets with Eve, there is no scheme possible that would allow Alice to tell Bob and not Eve.

The best Alice can possibly do is identify Bob as the person who told Eve the secret, and then visit him in the dead of night and beat the willingness out of him with a PEX tube full of sand.

And if Alice wants to do that, she has to use a watermarking scheme that is undetectable to both Bob and Eve, otherwise Bob can remove it before sending the secret on to Eve, or Eve can strip it out as she gets it from Bob. You see the problem, here, since the whole reason Alice is doing this is because she has some difficulty keeping secrets. She is essentially hiding a steganographic message to herself inside her message to Bob, such that if she can detect it in any message from Eve to anyone else, she knows to pay Bob an angry visit.

Alice's real problem is that she's an abusive, crazy, dramatic, jealous stalker, to the point where Bob would usually rather deal with the shady, disreputable Eve than with her. As a result, Alice's schemes are often the figurative equivalent of "Bob, unlock your phone so I can read your mail, texts, and tweets," and sometimes even literally that exact thing.

dalke• 11 years ago

Scott came up with a theoretical case of a game featuring an enemy group logo that looks similar to that of a real-life terrorist group. After an outcry, the developer issues an automatic patch to replace the original logo with something more benign. That would be a PR win in the present, but a major loss from a future historian's perspective.

There's little need to posit a theoretical. Look to Wolfenstein 3D, which had several changes. The Red Cross objected to the use of a red cross for the health packs, so later releases used a red heart. Germany objected to the use of Nazi symbols, the dogs replaced with giant rats, etc.

I can see how a future historian might use these as data points for a research project.

digi_owl4• 11 years ago

You also have the case of Carmageddon, where the German release replaced all pedestrians with green blooded zombies...

endgame• 11 years ago

As an example of why this kind of early version archiving might be necessary, Scott came up with a theoretical case of a game featuring an enemy group logo that looks similar to that of a real-life terrorist group. After an outcry, the developer issues an automatic patch to replace the original logo with something more benign.

This isn't theoretical - something similar actually happened with the different cartridge versions of Ocarina of Time on the N64. The original music for the fire temple sounded too much like an Islamic prayer and was changed[1].

[1] http://strategywiki.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Ocarina_of...

coldpie• 11 years ago

More on that music here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U34MFcJdGCo

Spoilers: turns out it actually comes from a stock sound effects CD and was used in a handful of other games, too!

glaberficken2• 11 years ago

Is it really that much a of problem that we won't be able to run specific software from sometime in the past?

Historically relevant software should leave behind enough cultural artifacts that its impact can still be understood regardless of the ability to re-run that software as it existed originally. (video evidence, writings about the medium etc...)

Imagine the case of emulators to see how this can easily become a recursive paradox.

Today we have emulators that allows us to run most software from the beginning of computation. Will it be relevant to be able to run those emulators 100 years from now in their current form?

talmand2• 11 years ago

There's a difference between studying something based on people's reactions to the subject as opposed to studying the subject itself.

That would be like researching an old movie from just critic reviews without watching the movie itself. Depending on the purpose of the study you would want one, the other, or both.

itsybitsycoder• 11 years ago

Historians have always considered artefacts more valuable the closer they are to the original event. This is because the more steps removed you are, the more bias and mistakes can creep in, like a game of telephone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_source

glaberficken2• 11 years ago

Yes I understand the argument about primary sources =).

My point is about the feasibility side of it (or lack of it).

Why should we have the expectation that we are going to be able to archive everything just because now information is stored digitally? Seems a bit delusional assuming that it is possible at all to archive everything... well I agree that theoretically it is possible, but in practice as we are already seeing barriers pop up all the time. I would bet ancient people were faced with the same problems when dealing with written information.

patorjk• 11 years ago

There are some good gaming history channels on youtube (ex: "The Gaming Historian"). They typically cover stuff from the Atari and NES era, and tend to use the original hardware to show off the games. I hadn't even thought about how such a show might work 20 years from now. I'm glad to see someone is thinking about how to best preserve the current era of games, because gaming history is actually pretty interesting and says a lot about our culture.

RattCatcher• 11 years ago

Save the throwaway game's history!

Because really, what else compares for wasting time than fucking video games?

irishcoffee• 11 years ago

Watching a tv show? Watching a movie? Pintrest? Reddit? HN? Facebook? Twitter?

JoeAltmaier• 11 years ago

Well, video games are unique in being able to suck an entire weekend away without you noticing.

talmand2• 11 years ago

I agree. When I really need to waste some time, you know, when I want to just let the day slip away with nothing overly productive to show for it other than my own selfish entertainment, I always go with reading a book.

mattbee• 11 years ago

I'm already far more interested in reading about the _stories_ that came out of e.g. Eve Online, WoW, and the social connections people made, than ever playing those games myself.

If you ask me, it's a mistake to obsess over the digital representation of a... collaborative performance? Even if you recreated everything about an online game in 50 years, it wouldn't be the same game without the same people, the same social context.

When you're playing a bit-for-bit identical, perfectly emulated game from 30 years ago - have you ever thought "ummm, this sucks, how did I ever spend so much time on it?" What got lost - your youth, your obsession, your manual dexterity, the lack of other entertainment ... you can't bottle all of that along with the disc image.

Something always gets lost, even if you copy all the bits.

toxicFork2• 11 years ago

We should delegate "mmo historians" and give them a salary just to record significant or even ordinary social interactions or events! We already have some services such as 3d print of your avatar which is similar to an artist making a portrait.

How did we end up having historians in real life? How can we give similar incentive or motivation for mmos or other games?

Now that I thought of it, there's excellent coverage of what happens in e sports, e.g. "this team did this to beat that team", which also links back to the documentation of ancient wars.

The quest to save today’s gaming history from being lost

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