Why Archive Old Games/Software Needs to be Done

[Dave The Man]

This Article Explains it well

http://kotaku.com/why-some-video-games-are-in-danger-of-disappearing-fore-1789609791

[think positive]

I have to admit I really miss the space pinball game that was on my first PC, and nothing beats crash team racing the original on play station 2

[David]

I agree, Dave, really crucial work. As with movies before them, it's taken a long time for people to recognise that video games are a serious art form – and unfortunately, as with so many early films, that lack of respect has led to a lot of valuable artefacts being lost. Hopefully people will be taking notice of this now.

[Tannin]

"Serious art form".

The actual appropriate term here does indeed start with "a" and "r" but it has four letters, two of them being "s" and "e".

What next? The Miles Franklin Award for misspelled leet? The Nobel Prize for farting in the bath?

It is one thing to recognise that art is not the exclusive preserve of fancy galleries and blacktie opera houses, and to admit that popular culture is every bit as likely to throw up a Mozart or a Picasso as one of the high-brow pursuits.

It is another thing entirely to abandon any attempt to filter out the commonplace and the commercial dross most things are and just accept any communicable expression uncritically as "serious art".

Art has the capacity to expand the mind, or the soul, or the heart. Always, with art, you learn something, maybe something about the art itself, maybe something about the artist, maybe something about the subject theme, maybe something about yourself - but art has the capacity to show you the world in new ways and bring you new understandings of it. Yes, it is theoretically possible to discover actual art in a computer game, but on about the same level of likelihood as discovering a cordon bleu dish in a sewer.

The real art (if any) in a video game is not something you could understand without some years of specialised study and practice, if it's anywhere, it's in the programming, and without being able to read and understand the source code, you can't even see it, let alone appreciate it. (Yes, now I'm stretching the definition of art: programming is as much a craft as an art, and as much engineering or mathematics as either. But some programmers are devilishly clever and (if can code a bit) can show you simple, completely non-obvious ways to solve problems that will blow your mind. That qualifies as art, of its kind - but it's not what we meant when we said "serious art form".

But by all means archive these things. It costs next to nothing and there are worse things to waste your time doing.

[Pi]

examples of 'serious' modern 'progressive' art that sold for millions...

http://cavemancircus.com/2015/07/30/15-ridiculous-pieces-of-art-that-sold-for-millions-of-dollars/

[David]

A lot of non-gamers are predisposed to this view because the only video games they're aware of (if any) are the most mainstream and commercially successful ones. So, it's easy to laugh off the suggestion that the medium responsible for Pacman and Tomb Raider is a serious art form; but just as easy to forget that you could say the same about nearly any other art form. If you were only exposed to the music of Britney Spears and The Backstreet Boys, would you see popular music as a serious art form capable of producing a Dark Side of the Moon or Kid A? If you were only exposed to Everybody Loves Raymond and Neighbours, would you imagine that TV could produce Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage or Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz? If you'd only seen the paintings of Rolf Harris (God rest his soul) would you think painting could be an art form capable of producing a Da Vinci or Edvard Munch?

This is what the range of PS4 games at K-Mart looks like. Even the best commercial hits like Grand Theft Auto are still only on par with, say, a Martin Scorsese film – a technical marvel, but not necessarily anything to write home about in terms of characters, ideas or narrative progression. The artistically challenging games are mostly being made away from the big gaming studios by independent producers, though a few slip through the cracks and earn some commercial success (the surreal, nightmarish Silent Hill series being a case in point). These are games with complex themes and narratives; allegories of guilt and memory, life and death.

If you, like me, are not much of a gamer, it helps to think less about what the art form is as represented by the shelves of Big W, and more about what it's capable of. Video games combine the moving image (something that didn't exist before cinema) with interactivity. It's merely another canvas upon which the great themes explored in painting or opera or cinema can be applied. If you don't see how exciting that is, consider the expansion of VR and what that could entail. Consider the rapid progress in computer graphics as they head closer to photorealism. This is more than just a time-killing exercise for kids down at the arcade; it's an art form that can do things no other art form ever did.

Ironically, the games being discussed in the article above mostly are just those basic arcade games – a far cry from what I'm talking about above. But think back to the origins of cinema: a twenty-second stationary shot of a train coming into a station isn't exactly a sophisticated artistic statement, but that film matters because of what cinema became, and it's tremendously important that it be preserved. People calling for old video games to be archived get what is at stake here.

[Dave The Man]

There been People who have Archived Retro Consoles Games into 1 Pack with just about all the Commercial Games ever made in them, You can Download them from Sites/Trackers.

Yes you can play games on Emulators but still Archiving and Backing up the Archive doing that

[think positive]

[stui magpie]

^

Unless she can use a game console controller to kill them, I'd run and get behind someone can actually use weapons.

My stepson is a legend on call of duty but stick him in that situation in real life he'd be dead in seconds

[Dave The Man]