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U.S. Copyright Office rejects DMCA exemption to support game preservation
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this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2024
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Preserving a game isn't about preserving the culture around it at the time of its release. It's about a set of rules that the player can interact with that tend to lead to a certain type of experience. People playing Marvel vs. Capcom 2 will fall into basically the same meta that the game evolved into about 15 years ago, because those rules encourage using those characters.
Yes, we should have more distinct versions of updated games that we can choose to upgrade to, or not, by our own choice. It's absolute garbage that you can have a version of Overwatch that you enjoy that can just be taken away from you on a whim.
Which I don't disagree with (even if I suspect I do tend to lean more toward not making extra work for overworked devs than many)
The issue is arguing that you are preserving the culture when that very much isn't Because what "meta" is there in MvC2 without other players? We all had our moment of "I am really good at Tekken" when we played against bots.. and then were completely demolished by some kid at a truck stop who actually knew combos.
Which gets to what we see in reality where we DO have basically every version of MvC2 because it was before software patching was common. I would need to check what is popular for specifics but, like with all games, some versions get played and some don't. And it doesn't matter if you have every single revision of Karnov's Revenge AND two different fan patches to rebalance it: if nobody plays it the meta doesn't exist. MAYBE you can get a hotel room play of a version or two as a curiosity at Combo Breaker.
But you aren't going to get a proper meta unless it is someone referencing a text guide that was also preserved. And that isn't actually a "meta". That is someone knowing combo strings or exploits. Because the meta that builds up around a fighting game involves people learning those combos and learning how to counter them and determining what is best and so forth. Otherwise? You are the kid who can consistently do a dragon punch up against the guy who can't even do a hadouken.
Which gets back to the difference between preserving games/bytes and preserving culture.
The way they patched those games in the 90s was to call it a sequel. It came out about a year, sometimes sooner, after the last one. And in doing it that way, we got to keep every version. PC games used to give you installers for every patch. If patching is done sparingly, and focused on minor changes or bug fixes, this is manageable. I'm sure plenty of devs would argue that this doesn't work for their game, but the alternative is that we just lose it all to time.
MVC2 is preserved as long as you've got at least one other person to play it with. With a Discord server, you could fill out a lobby even for a game like MAG that has over 100 players in a match, provided they actually gave you the server to run it yourself.
Actually quite a lot of games had multiple revisions even as far back as cartridges. That is why you'll often hear a speedrunner say "This is done on the 1.01 North American version" and the like. Mostly my point was more to say that there is no question of "did every single patch get archived"
And as a huge Dawn of War fan: you can have every single patcher from Fileplanet and STILL not have a snowball's chance of getting the version you want. But that is more comedic than not.
Because:
You can play MVC2. You can't preserve the CULTURE of mvc2. Because, to switch gears to Third Strike: You and me probably aren't going to do the kind of insane crap that folk like Daigo are able to do.
But also, like I mentioned above: You can get a hotel room game going. You won't have anywhere near enough thoery crafting and experience to really run into cases where one character is noticeably better than another.
Let me tell you something as a Tribes 2 player. I can basically get a full server most nights of the week. But all the folk who are still playing Tribes? They never stopped. So the experience of hopping into a game in 2024 is absolutely nothing like it was back in 2004. It is a completely different kind of amazing but it is not "Tribes 2" from a "cultural" standpoint
The multiple cartridges is splitting hairs. Often they just output at different television standards or fixed a rare game breaking bug. They didn't add a new character or change how many are on a team, which is a fundamentally different game design.
If you sit two people in a room long enough with Third Strike, they will end up playing Yun and Chun-Li. If you sit two people in a room long enough with MVC2, they will end up playing Magneto, Storm, and Sentinel. No one had to tell me to play Fox in Melee before I had any idea that there was a Melee "scene"; the rules of the game steered me that way after hundreds or perhaps thousands of hours. That's what you preserve when the game can still be played.