That’s a really good point too. It’s amazing how much of it is just acquirable skill instead of any kind of inherent quality, and you can’t really distinguish the difference from the starting line either.

Like, as simple an example as technical vocabulary and jargon. Without knowledge its all gibberish, but with just a little bit of time and effort, it begins to all become readable.

Well, that’s one way to retain superior talent.

But yes, it’s always specifically irritating to be around people much smarter and more talented than you. You literally can’t understand them much of the time, by the time your brain has processed one thing they’re saying, they’ve covered two more.

And no matter how smart you are, unless you’re the actual statistical top dog, some people out there can do this to you.

I always feel a touch bad for those people that did really, really well in HS and then go to college. That’s where I learned this anyway, I had just been the biggest fish in what was actually a pathetically small pond. Universities and professional workforces are not so small though, and they finally get barriers to entry, where everyone isn’t supposed to start at a certain age and eventually succeed. Was certainly a shock. lol

The first is great for what it accomplished, but wait until you get to the ones with actually substantial and enjoyable narratives.

Well, if you live metroidvania you probably already know all the good ones already.

Yes, Your Grace was a fun little story-driven thing. Or go big and branch out, something like Fire Emblem could easily soak up numerous trans-continental flights. If you’ll get in-flight wifi, something like Mario Maker 2 could also fit, since you’ve got some platforming chops. It’s basically endless content.

What’s your taste?

Not really you. The difficulty was naturally higher, for a wide array of reasons, most of which get ignored. Inputs were poorer, the management of difficulty curves was basically lolrandom, people didn’t know how to really tutorialize yet, etc etc.

Tetris doesn’t really suffer from any of these. Either they got lucky or designed it very smartly. Prob both. It’s a masterpiece. Most retro games aren’t, even our favorites.

Tetris never really goes out of style tbf. There’s something too fundamental about it. Pong was the first truly timeless game imo, one of the very few of the arcade generation. People could still play a basic version of that and enjoy it 100 years from now, it’ll have some appeal. Tetris is the best example in that camp. It’s a masterpiece. It requires no nostalgia to appreciate, no real background or anything. Just a really simple, dopamine-escalating puzzle that is accessible to pretty much all. SMB3, Chrono Trigger or Ocarina of Time can’t say that, they all require you to be the sort of person that enjoys that sort of thing. Tetris really doesn’t, you could give it to someone that hates video games. Just mute the volume maybe.

It’ll outlive us all, in similar iterations to its current form. Most powerful thing to ever come out of Russia, hands down. Putting a man in orbit? Whatever. Fields full of tanks and a huge nuclear arsenal? Meh, fat lot of good its doing them. Atilla the Hun? Okay, could make a case there. Tetris, though… The west has never truly matched it. I think Candy Crush is the closest we’ve gotten.

Yeah. I think you’ve brought me around actually. Because that is an achievable goal worth fighting for, too. It would have benefits in other spaces of society. That was my original reason for disagreeing in the first place.

Corporations aren’t babies. Criticizing a corporation for behaving like a corporation feels to me like shaking a baby. The corporation is fundamentally innocent–pursuing only its basic programming. It can do nothing else. It’s not even legal for it to do otherwise, it has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders, violating that subjects it to lawsuits. It’s basically required to be evil and greedy by law.

What if we just dropped patent and copyright protections down to something like 10/20 years? That would kick pharma companies in the nuts too. I’m aware it would stifle innovation somewhat, but frankly I don’t care. At least it would be a longer-term solution, where we wouldn’t have to deal with whatever the next generation of this problem looks like in another couple decades.

Yes, now that you mention it, people should be able to copyright a meme. Not much point though, I don’t think. Mainly an enforcement problem, we’d need AI tools just to keep up with the content produced. And for what gain? Hard to monetize a meme, and value is what everything is about at the end of the day. Not identity or structure, just how much money its worth.

On a side note, AI tools are going to make piracy a lot harder soon, I’d imagine.

Yes, I’d like to move past the heavy emphasis on how corporations and their regulatory/legal capture are making it happen. That is fully understood and someone would have to be a little bit dense not to understand it, imo. They are entities that exist exclusively to create profit, they will pursue all legal means to do so, and attempt to influence the law to their own ends. This is simply the logical thing to do, in their situations. I can’t blame them for it, generate profit is what we create them to do. I’m about as anti-corporate as people get, I fully expect them to obstruct to preserve every penny of potential gain they could ever possibly have, with a preference towards being short sighted. This constant criticism of them feels like shaking a baby for crying. It’s just what babies do.

Unless you have some kind of plan? I understand your passion, but … it’d be cool if we could keep moving forward instead of constantly looping back.

You did get me wondering exactly where the line should be drawn. All art is clearly not equal, shouldn’t it be the ultimate responsibility of the property owner to preserve it? Whether the physical holder or the intellectual owner? Not legally speaking, again I give no fucks as I expect the law to become compromised by money, but practically speaking?

Regarding the online service games you mentioned, I hadn’t even considered those, but I do know what you mean. I’ve played a few that are long gone now, to my dismay.

The main problem I foresee is scaling. Right now the number of consoles that has ever existed is still fairly manageable. That’s slowly changing. Once the current generations of players have died away and everyone with a personal, nostalgic relationship with the oldest art is gone, it becomes more of an academic matter for future generations.

I’m sure they’ll keep some of it around, but over time I expect most of it to start to fade more rapidly at that point. It’s still a very young medium. I doubt many films were lost in their first 20 years of existence. But the 20 years after, and the next, etc etc causes accumulating attrition.

I’d certainly like to see the problem solved, if it was feasible. I think the closest we’ll get is long-term physical storage from pirated sources though. Which some future-dweller could then design an emulator for on whatever the current state of hardware is. I certainly don’t expect corporations to care, or for us to overpower them any time soon.

Of course there are volunteer devs. Do you think each project will always have some though? Particularly passion projects that have no profit? Just because things are a certain way now, does not mean they will be 10, 20, 40 years from now, when who knows what computing looks like.

This is the technological aspect, its swiftly changing nature making everything require maintenance. It’s a fundamental principle that seems like it will remain true for the foreseeable future. Perhaps I’ve gotten used to it simply due to the sheer quantity of projects I have seen fall by the wayside in the past decades, but it’s just a lot. The basic idea is this: At no point can you just stop and say “this thing will work for the next few decades”. Your software will go out of date, your hardware will break and replacement parts will go out of production. Etc etc. I feel like it’s just part of tech for now.

So sure, we’ve identified the problem and that’s great. But it has no good solutions. Which is why it bugs me as a debate. As I said earlier, the effort to fix this, the political will it would require, is just not worth the benefit of preserving art large-scale for the first time in human history. That’s just not good enough to fight for, in such a problematic world. Imo at least.

Btw, thanks for the engaging discussion. I’ve never debated this particular topic actually.

I genuinely think it’s inevitable, with our current technological, economic and legal frameworks. While that can change, I think the amount of effort it would require far outstrips the gain.

The entire issue bugs me a little bit, actually. It only gets so much attention because its games and the internet has a lot of gamers. There are far bigger challenges to tackle though.

Good point. And with continuous maintenance to keep the ever growing number of emulators maintained with the ever-shifting operating systems, that will remain true. The moment our maintenance of any one thing stops…

I would say it’s not new per se, just a new mechanism for an old phenomenon.

If that one problem were solved, it would improve the situation, but not perfectly remedy it. This just makes it more noticeable, it reeks pretty badly of planned obsolescence.

Most classic everything is no longer available. This is a function of time and the general human desire to make new stuff. Otherwise antiques wouldn’t really be special.

If we want our stuff more permanent, this will be a change from the past that we need to specifically enact. Otherwise it’s just people being subtly out-of-touch with how time will eventually destroy not just them, but their works too. Only the influences it left behind echo into the future, for as long as our art does anyway.