LogFAQs > #979028698

adjl posted...

That's the point he's making.

It's a flawed point, though.

Using "To Kill A Mockingbird on a projector with the original film" or "War and Peace as a first edition" as examples ignores the fact that the only reason you can watch To Kill a Mockingbird on anything other than the original film reels or read War and Peace in later editions is because they're both continually reprinted or updated as new media evolves. But the same thing happens with games - in precisely the same way you might have a film reel copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, a VHS copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, and a DVD copy of To Kill a Mockingbird (and you need specific and unique hardware to play all of them, and none of them are cross-compatible), a popular game like, say, Halo gets released on the original Xbox, gets an updated port for the 360, gets released as part of the Master Chief Collection, and so on.

Combined with virtual libraries becoming more and more common on both consoles and services like Steam, and tons of past games are still perfectly available to modern players on modern systems even if you don't own the original hardware a game was on. And that's not even taking emulators into account.

Sure, there are games that eventually slip through the cracks, but that's true of every other media as well. For every To Kill a Mockingbird, there are tons of movies that don't get later updated releases (and which most people may have completely forgotten the existence of) - and there's a reason why this page exists:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_films

For every War and Peace that gets repeated in dozens of editions across 100+ years, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of books that will show up on bookshelves, disappear, and mostly are never to be seen again. Even many critically acclaimed (at time of release) books by extremely notable authors stop getting reprinted eventually, and modern readers may have no idea they ever existed (even now, this is a huge problem for fans of New Wave sci-fi from the 60s and 70s, which rarely gets reprinted).

We have a skewed view of how well media was preserved in the past because we really only remember the things that were preserved. Most of us have no idea just how many shows, films, or books were published before we were born that have simply vanished and will never be seen again. Or even ones that still exist, but which are relatively difficult for the average layperson to access without using archival means.

Games may have a greater rate of loss, and have unique aspects (like abandonware being a thing), but overall it's not that qualitatively different from any other form of media.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_television_broadcast
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work