My parents raised me
in a house built in 1775. It's hard not to grow up in an environment
like that without being taught the value of preservation. Most of the
time that I heard it growing up it had to do with physical objects,
usually buildings. My childhood was filled with tours of historic
sites, often of individual houses. Right now looking back the only
specific thing that I can say I remember learning is about why some
colonial interiors were painted bright green.
What I didn't
understand until the family trips to Colonial Williamsburg had
stopped was that the mundane everyday parts of peoples' lives can be
just as important as the major battles in whatever major war happened
in that era. With the rise the computer and digital entertainment
we've reached a point where preservation of important pieces of
culture can easily be preserved.
Since 1996 the
Internet Archive (also known as archive.org) has been taking part in
this important preservation process. It has been archiving world wide
web pages since the very beginning, and has also digitized books and
the collections of various museums. One of its most recent
developments is that it began archiving abandonware video games in
2013.
As weird as this
may sound, Urban Dictionary actually does a pretty good job defining
the term and giving a sense of how many view it
software that is
no longer sold or supported by the original publisher /
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=abandonwaredeveloper,
often found as free downloads on the internet because it cannot be
obtained elsewhere. Not legal, but often seen as morally acceptable
because the company that made it is no longer selling the title, nor
releasing it as freeware, therefore abandonware is "keeping the
game alive", so to speak.
In
April the Electronic Frontier Foundation tried to fight back against
the game publishers who did not want their games preserved. The
publishers took issue with the fact that in some cases the games
would have to be hacked to fully preserve them. This would have to
happen if the game did not have an open online component. The
EFF believes that there should be an exemption for the preservation
of video games to allow them to hack the software.
There
are even more fundamental legal issues to this however. One of the
most basic is how to even legally play the base game. With all the
good emulators out there these days its pretty easy to grab a ROM (a
digial copy the game) and start playing. The
problem is that you can't easily get the rights to one of these ROMs.
Setting aside services like
GOG (formally Good Old Games) and Nintendo's eshop the only way to
get to play most abandonware is to find your favorite sketchy website
and pirate them.
If
you want to preserve a physical object it is much more obvious what
you would need to do, however for something digital the rights are
much more complicated. In an ideal world, publishers would make it
easy for people to pay for games that they want to legally play, and
those games who nobody has the rights to any more would just fall
into the public domain. That's
really not the world we live in though.
As
I mentioned earlier, Nintendo has a service which they call the eShop
that allows users to purchase old games. While
this is a great step towards better game preservation it has a major
problem, Nintendo doesn't put all of their games on there. If I want
to go back to my childhood and experience Pokémon Yellow I wouldn't
be able to purchase it off the eShop and play it. The best I could do
is go back home, grab my gameboy color and then remember that the A
button doesn't work anymore any become sad. Hardware degrades over
time, so making these games available online legally is important to
preservation.
References:
No comments:
Post a Comment