On the Preservation of Gaming

Just finished listening to this relatively new podcast called A Life Well Wasted, though this particular episode is not canon due to it being an slow paced, unedited interview. The interviewee happens to be a gaming curator over at Stanford named Henry Lowood. In simpler terms, he helps preserve the history of games.

All this didn't really interest me until Lowood drew a picture.

"There's a famous article that was written in Scientific America over 10 years ago and the guy who wrote it talked about leaving a CD-ROM behind that had all the information about bank assets, money that he was going to leave his great-grandchildren. 75 years later, whatever the terms are, they find the CD-ROM and they know that all their money is basically in there, but they don't have any CD-ROM players; they don't even know what a CD-ROM is. He talks about an envelope that he would leave with written instructions--on paper--telling them what a CD-ROM is how to basically put the system together...that's kind of the Holy Grail version of where we would want to get [with] this."

Just finished listening to this relatively new podcast called A Life Well Wasted, though this particular episode is not canon due to it being an slow paced, unedited interview. The interviewee happens to be a gaming curator over at Stanford named Henry Lowood. In simpler terms, he helps preserve the history of games.

All this didn't really interest me until Lowood drew a picture.

"There's a famous article that was written in Scientific America over 10 years ago and the guy who wrote it talked about leaving a CD-ROM behind that had all the information about bank assets, money that he was going to leave his great-grandchildren. 75 years later, whatever the terms are, they find the CD-ROM and they know that all their money is basically in there, but they don't have any CD-ROM players; they don't even know what a CD-ROM is. He talks about an envelope that he would leave with written instructions--on paper--telling them what a CD-ROM is how to basically put the system together...that's kind of the Holy Grail version of where we would want to get [with] this."

It's probably true, formats come and go in the blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things, yeah it's difficult to think that CD's will die out any time in the near future but within 75 years it's easy to imagine everything being on flash cards or digitally distributed etc. Luckily ROMs can be stored on a hard drive. Nice Blog!

This reminds me of the deep space satellite, Voyager.  When it was launched into space it carried a gold disc containing information, images and music of Earth.  So what happens centuries from now, if some alien life form finds the satellite?  How do they play the disc if they don't have a player?  Are we to assume that any intelligent life who are capable of space travel are also capable of building a laserdisc player?  Hell, its hard enough to find a laserdisc player today on Earth and we invented the damn things.

Man I have too many podcasts to listen to but yet this one looks interesting. I was born in 1991 and that was when CD-ROMS were starting to become the mainstream format so I've only really known CD-ROMS and later as the popular formats. However, I can understand the unknown formats of vinyl and 8-tracks. I have used all of them at some point just because I think it's kind of cool to use them. I have used tape cassettes a lot and have used laserdiscs before. It's kind of cool to think our most popular format, the MP3, isn't even a physical thing but is digital. Very interesting.

Nothing beats a good ole pen and paper sometimes I suppose.  But even as technology becomes older and outdated it does not mean its format is lost.  Its not like in 75 years we as a people will forget how to extract data off of a CD-ROM.  It might be a bit of a pain getting the resources to do so, but we can do it.

I also think our generation will be accustom to constantly updating everything we have to new formats.  I mean how many of us burned all of our music to CD's in the early 2000's just to put all of that music on to an Ipod a few years later.

And I'm not to worried about the preservation of video games.  As long as we have things like the virtual console the classics will never be lost.

To me I hope the emulation scene never dies, because the odds of having a working game console 75 years later will be extremely low no matter what.

If you take all the measures to preserve a 300 year old NES, there's no way anyone will be playing games on it.  So emulation will be the ONLY way to play these games.

Binary code is forever, unless the earth falls prey to the zombie apocalypse.

Not many people know what an 8-track is, or have the means to play one... but there'll always be Ebay.

It's interesting, although feel free to write more about it! :)

I sometimes wonder how all my friends would know if I died.  It's not like my SO could tell everyone who theoretically would like to know about such things...

I wonder about degrading systems knowledge.  In the future it will likely be a branch of archaeology, with people finding ROMs of stuff that we now think is worthless, but some day might provide some useful insight.  It sure is easier to copy things than it used to be, but we're still short-sighted enough not to know about all of the important things we have that might be interesting later on.

Just like, how many times have you felt that you would love to see just a minute of a normal day of people 100 years ago?  We now film ourselves constantly, but we treat it like a joke, or we're so conscious of the camera that we don't really record what's going on, only what we think might be interesting to us maybe 1 year later.  It's rare to see someone actually record things for posterity and do a decent job of it...