Well hey, indie game marketplaces have opened the door to plausible auteur discussions in games, as well as a great broadening of subject matter, so the material is starting to get created.
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No Art Lives Forever
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The answer is both, from my understanding. Depending on which group held the power at the time (universities in the past, industries post-Industrial revolution). Academics gave the material status and noteworthiness while simultaneously putting the material up on the same pedestal previously reserved primarily for religious texts. And that evolution continued with music, with movies, with large funders seeking to make themselves noteworthy as patrons of those materials. That tradition has largely continued to the day for those materials, but has never taken off the same way for videogames. Maybe thatās due to their digital nature, but more likely itās due to their complicated relationship with what academia is now. Which admittedly is far more corporate in nature and projects that are generally not seen as making the University money are not seen as worthwhile projects - which includes a lack of funding for libraries and archives more widely, not just a lack of funding for videogames. Altogether it puts a fairly unfair pressure on games to always be sold as products, still waiting for a time where the academic community and patrons alike want to put them on the same pedestal as most other modern media.
This is of course an oversimplification and is simply meant to be illustrative of broader and more specific issues.
Also, the perception that videogames are primarily aimed at kids, which, letās be frank, they always have been. āAdultā games are mostly aimed at adolescents. And in our culture, kids are basically considered garbage, along with anything associated. Other forms havenāt had to deal with this stigma.
Except for comics, of course. And see how seriously people take those, well over a century later.
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How seriously do they take them, actually? Iām not up to date on this.
They donāt.
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idk they sure turned into a lot of money for hollywood
Superheroes did, while comics still languish as just āmeans of protecting trademarksā for warner bros and disney and easily dismissed subliterate trash if not one of the big two
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well itās a good thing the cost of production is almost nothing!
Thanks to illustrators getting paid as little as is legal
Yeah, thereās no good reason for the big publishers not to pay their talent. Thatās a huge advantage to the indie scene in games (and the other expensive form, movies) ā thereās a route to a career if you need money from making your own stuff.
But it also means that two kids cranking out work can compete with the big boys in comics but not really in the same way for games and movies, and Iām often have a sad because of this (particularly as I pile on features to my current hobbyhorse project).
Anyway. This adds to the general public reaction to GargleGrope. Perceptually, itās about a bunch of adult men growing violent because other people are playing with their not-rhetorical-at-all toys. Itās like if armed militias started to form in response to an increase in little girls playing with Lego. āTHESE ARE SERIOUS TOOLS!ā the strange men scream. āSTOP RUINING OUR LIVES!ā
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Not to be reductive about the value of games, but do archivists work on other software? Is there a professional librarian who maintains Mac OS 9 HyperCard stacks for posterity?
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Iām not sure about what those cards are specifically, but the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent a portion of their massive funding for software preservation and that seems to be providing a lot of funding for preservation projects in software. I havenāt heard of any grants specifically benefiting the preservation of videogames, though thatās not to say there arenāt any.
hi itās me
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on dat boi ask "o shit whaddup?"
classic mac preservation is a hugely fun nightmare
400/800k floppies can only be read on 68k macs (theyāre mechanically incompatible with newer drives, itās not just a filesystem thing) and getting 68k macs onto a modern network is painful; there was a SCSI->ethernet adapter manufactured for them at one point but itās extremely rare and expensive (like most 68k mac SCSI hardware), so the easiest way to do it is to actually get another Mac that supports both ethernet and appletalk for networking purposes, like a G3, and appletalk-network them together, then run a legacy FTP server on an ethernet network that the G3 can connect toā¦
and you have to StuffIt compress all of those files because otherwise copying them to any other filesystem will break the resource fork. itās great. I really need to move these out of my closet and into my office:
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I would be interested in seeing pics of the Felix Zone (office). I imagine you surrounded by tall blinking grey towers and wires everywhere
freakinā hipsters and their mechanical keyboardsā¦
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