I enjoyed reading the blog post and normally with such long articles I only skim-read over it. So thumbs up for that.
However I am with the majority here. I don’t really care for or think about video game preservation a lot. And I also somewhat think that most of the interesting stuff is actually well preserved. Maybe not really everything in detail, but chances are, that I wouldn’t have checked these things anyways.
I can understand that something like that is frustrating for a reporter / editor. And this also reflects in this blog post. However Felipepe merges his own perspective a bit with “what is generally good for human kind”. I mean, yeah, we might not care too much, but that’s not because we are ignoring that this could lead to the end of the world. What would be Felipepes nightmare (that some of the oldest designers die and some of their oldest records vanish) would not even be noticed by most of us. So it’s hard to motivate people to act differently.
It actually might be pretty similar to climate change where the “bad stuff” is not really affecting us right now, but might affect people’s lives drastically in the future. Just with the big difference, that with gaming history it will just be sad or disappointing in the future to not have really everything left. But it’s not like anything really bad will happen. Like it is sad for us now, that the Vikings didn’t write down all their stories and sagas. But besides of historians it’s not really affecting us too much. Lots of people might not even know about the lack of documents in this area.
Of course this might also tilt the picture. Like mentioned here in this thread it might give glory to some games, and give some mythical aura to some others, like with the Vikings, “this mythical game we know the name and its influence, but nothing else about”
And while I agree that it’s sad to see stuff getting lost, I wouldn’t go out and ask people to get up and do something against something, which probably doesn’t really interest them.
I remember that a couple of years ago, I listened to a podcast-interview with Richard Garriott, but the site which did the podcast went down after just a few episodes. So when I wanted to show it to a friend, it was already gone. But I didn’t really think like “these bastards! Why didn’t they preserve this?” (exaggerated), I was just disappointed that it was gone. In that case I was lucky as I still had it on my hard drive and uploaded it for the friend (those interested can find it
here. But I didn’t think about making it available as a good deed to human kind, and besides of the friend I didn’t really show it around a lot.
Another good example is that just before reading this blog post I discovered that “Die Höhlenwelt-Saga – Der leuchtende Kristall” is apparently a pretty cool Adventure of the 90s and I checked how to get it. Well GOG doesn’t offer it and will never offer it as it is German only. But you can get second hand versions via amazon.de and ebay, not really cheap but there is a way (besides of pirating / abandonware)
It’s not as ideal as having the game on gog, sure. But I just accepted it as it is how it is. I didn’t come to my mind that this could be the first step towards the end of the world as we know it.
So personally I think it’s good that people are so interested into that, that they gather stuff and preserve it, and I am interested to read and watch some of it. But I don’t feel an urge to contribute to that myself.
-Kordanor, who instead preserves almost every hour of his gametime by recording it
