Yeah, I think lobbying for better archiving and better public-facing availability for games is good. The situation of “uncommercial” films still protected by copyright contained in government-maintained archvies really isn’t all that different, though—there are many films that I would likewise have to travel to government and university archives to see in person. And in fact it’s maybe worse, because there are a bunch more nerds out there maintaining complete MAME and Intellivision sets than there are active torrents for films from the 1920s.
As a person who loves film before he loves video games (both in terms of chronology and in terms of passion), these kinds of drive-by not-actually-equivalent invocations bother me.
I am mainly annoyed about some of how the data is presented (with what I argue is a bad analogy), and perhaps even moreso with how it’s being talked about on Twitter and Bluesky
It makes sense to ‘push on both sides’ so to speak when it comes to old game preservation or whatever but my introduction to this being Frank Cifaldi tweet-storming that piracy is problematized because it requires a certain level of tech-literacy most people aren’t comfortable with made it difficult to not just think…isn’t that the thing to change then?
Especially when the study’s conclusions are essentially “The interests of commercial video games are incompatible with preservation”, seems clear the solution is normalizing & simplifying paths outside of commercial industry. But I suppose maybe this helps strengthen arguments for emulation/rom preservation etc. etc. … just the cifaldi framing…seemed a little clueless.
it strikes me as i’m watching this doc that it leverages the same curiosity that drives you to engage with the game in the first place. it’s just like pulling back yet another layer to analyze the connection of the real actors with the fake ones.
like watching it pulls me into a very similar headspace, which is a great reminder of how convincing and evocative the game can be.
