The games industry’s self-induced traumatic brain injury
I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller Enshittification: catch me next in London, Toronto and San Diego! Full schedule here.
Words have power. In 1991, I read "The Wonderful Power of Storytelling," the transcript of Bruce Sterling's keynote speech for that year's Game Developers Conference in San Jose, CA, and within a year, I'd dropped out of university to become a programmer:
Bruce's speech wasn't the only reason I dropped out, but it's certainly been the most durable, and I frequently return to it in my mind as I navigate the difficult and turbulent waters of art and technology. In particular, I've had much cause to ponder Sterling's ideas about the very weird way that game developers relate to their art-form's history:
My art, science fiction writing, is pretty new as literary arts go, but it labors under the curse of three thousand years of literacy. In some weird sense I’m in direct competition with Homer and Euripides. I mean, these guys aren’t in the SFWA, but their product is still taking up valuable rack-space. You guys on the other hand get to reinvent everything every time a new platform takes over the field. This is your advantage and your glory. This is also your curse. It’s a terrible kind of curse really…
…A lot of our art aspires to the condition of software, our art today wants to be digital… But our riches of information are in some deep and perverse sense a terrible burden to us. They’re like a cognitive load. As a digitized information-rich culture nowadays, we have to artificially invent ways to forget stuff. I think this is the real explanation for the triumph of compact disks…
…The real advantage of CDs is that they allow you to forget all your vinyl records. You think you love this record collection that you’ve amassed over the years. But really the sheer choice, the volume, the load of memory there is secretly weighing you down…
…By dumping the platform you dump everything attached to the platform and my god what a blessed secret relief. What a relief not to remember it, not to think about it, not to have it take up disk-space in your head…
…I’ve noticed though that computer game designers don’t look much to the past. All their idealized classics tend to be in reverse, they’re projected into the future. When you’re a game designer and you’re waxing very creative and arty, you tend to measure your work by stuff that doesn’t exist yet…
… I can see that it’s very seductive, but at the same time I can’t help but see that the ground is crumbling under your feet. Every time a platform vanishes it’s like a little cultural apocalypse…
…I can imagine a time when all the current platforms might vanish, and then what the hell becomes of your entire mode of expression?
Even by the high standards of a Bruce Sterling keynote, this is a very good one, and Sterling does that amazing thing where he's iterating different ways of making this point, examining it from every angle, and it makes it hard ro excerpt it for an article like this. I mean, you should just go and read the whole thing and then come back, honestly:
But the reason I quote those specific excerpts above is because of what they say about the strange terror and exhilaration of working without history, of inhabiting a world shorn of all object permanence. This was a very live question in those days. In 1993, Wired's Jargon Watch column ran a definition for "Pickling":
Archiving a working model of a computer to read data stored in that computer's format. Apple Computer has pickled a shrink-wrapped Apple II in a vault so that it can read Apple II software, perhaps in the not-too-distant future.
https://www.wired.com/1993/05/jargon-watch-12/
In 1996, Brewster Kahle founded the Internet Archive, with the mission to save every version of every web-page, ever, forever. Today, the Archive holds more than a trillion pages:
https://blog.archive.org/trillion/
Digital media are paradoxical: on the one hand, nothing is easier to copy than bits. That's all a computer does, after all: copy things. What's more mass storage gets cheaper and faster and smaller every year, on a curve that puts Moore's Law to shame.
After dropping out of university, I got a job programming multimedia CD ROMs for The Voyager Company, and they sent me my first 1GB drive, which was the size of a toaster, weighed 3lbs and cost $4,000.
30 years later, I've just upgraded my laptop's SDD from 2TB to 4TB: it cost less than $300, and is both the size and weight of a stick of gum. It's 4,000 times larger, at least 10,000 times faster, is 98% lighter, and cost 97% less.
We can store a hell of a lot of data for not very much money. And at that price, we can back it up to hell and back: I rotate two backup drives at home, keeping one off-site and swapping them weekly; I also have another drive I travel with and do a daily backup on. Parts of my data are also backed up online to various cloud systems that are, themselves, also backed up.
And while drives do fail, drives that are attached to computers that people use every day tend to fail gracefully in that their material defects typically make themselves felt over time, giving ample warning (at least for attentive users) that it's time to replace them.
Given the spectacular improvements in mass storage, there's also no problem migrating data from one system to the next. Back in the 1990s, I stored a ton of my data offline and near-line, on fragile media like floppies, Zip cartridges and DAT cassettes. I pretty much never conducted a full inventory of these disks, checking to see if they were working, much less transferring them to new media. That meant that at every turn, there was the possibility that the media would have rotted; and with every generation, there was the possibility that I wouldn't be able to source a working drive that was capable of reading the old media.
But somewhere in there, storage got too cheap to meter. I transferred all those floppies – including some Apple ][+ formatted 5.25" disks I'd had since the early 1980s – to a hard drive, which was subsequently transferred to a bigger hard drive (which, paradoxically, was much smaller!) and thence to another bigger (and smaller) drive and so on, up to the 4TB drive that's presently about 7mm beneath my fingers as I type these words.
This data may not be immortal, but it's certainly a lot more loss-resistant than any comparable tranche of data in human history.
Data isn't the whole story, of course. To use the data, you have to be able to open it in a program. There, too, the problems of yesteryear have all but vanished. First came the interoperable programs, which reverse-engineered these file formats so they could be read and written with increasing fidelity to the programs they were created in:
But then came the emulators and APIs that could simply run the old programs on new hardware. After all, computers are always getting much faster, which means that simulating a computer that's just a few years old on modern hardware is pretty trivial. Indeed, you can simulate multiple instances of the computer I wrote CD ROMs for Voyager on inside a browser window…on your phone:
https://infinitemac.org/1996/System%207.5.3
Which meant that, for quite some time, Bruce's prophecy of games living in an eternal ahistorical now, an art form whose earlier works are all but inaccessible, was dead wrong. Between emulators (MAME) and API reimplementations (WINE), a gigantic amount of gaming history has been brought back and preserved.
What's more, there's a market for this stuff. Companies like Good Old Games have gone into business licensing and reviving the games people love. But it keeps getting harder, because of a mix of "Digital Rights Management" (the "copy-protection" that games companies pursue with a virulence that borders on mania) and the difficulty of tracking down rightsholders:
And doing this stuff without permission is a fraught business, because the big games companies hate games preservation and wage vicious war on their own biggest fans to stamp it out:
Which means that the games preservation effort is coming full circle, back to Bruce Sterling's 1991 description of "the ground crumbling under your feet"; of an endless series of "little cultural apocalypses."
It doesn't have to be this way. The decades since Bruce's talk proved that games can and should be preserved, that artists and their audiences need to continue to access these works even if the companies that make them would rather "reinvent everything every time a new platform takes over the field" and not have to be "in direct competition with Homer and Euripides."
The "Stop Killing Games" consumer movement is trying to save the library that games publishers have been trying to burn down since the 1990s:
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
They're currently hoping to get games preservation built into the new EU "Digital Fairness" Act:
It's a good tactical goal. After all, it's manifestly "unfair" to charge you money for a game and then take the game away later, whether that's because you don't want to pay to keep the servers on (or let someone else run them), or because you don't want the old game to exist in order to coerce your customers into buying a new one.
Or both.
No matter the reason, there is nothing good about the games industry's decades-long project of erasing its own past. It's bad for gamers, it's bad for game developers, and it's bad for games. No art form can exist in a permanent, atemporal now, with its history erased as quickly as it's created.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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The mysterious Doctor/Dr. Smith from The Cabinet of Light and the Time Hunter series has always been delightfully associated with Richard E. Grant’s Shalka!Ninth Doctor. It’s mostly due to the bizarrely coincidental physical description, traits, and neuroticism, but it’s also a melding of Time Hunter’s assumed placement in the EDA/Faction Paradox Post-War Universe and the latter EDAs building towards Scream of the Shalka as their future.
Skimming through AHistory tonight (as I do), Lance Parkin actually suggests that the Doctor of Time Hunter is not actually the Doctor of the “proper” timeline, but an inhabitant of the alternate timeline/possible future from which the Sodality comes from. Which... is actually sort of a cool idea? Shalka’s Doctor and Time Hunter’s Doctor are the same incarnation, just from two different timelines. Which explains the fact that, ignoring the (scary) coincidences between the two’s physicality and mannerisms, they are in very different status quos (and it’s a more interesting/fun explaination than “younger vs older”).
2010
The word, “cruk” was introduced in the anime series, "Bones and Kay" and quickly caught on as a mild expletive.
2025
The word, “cruk” was very rude by 2025, (.V.N.A. 7 Love and War, .V.N.A. 50 Happy Ending).
26th century
A means of expressing their displeasure, (.B.F. Death an the Daleks).
Other
One of two Arviem 2 robots said, "cruk it" after Bernice Summerfield tricked them and blew off their arms, (.B.F. The Revolution).
Chris Cwej. (Cwej: A Bright White Crack, Ring Theory, .e.t.c.).
We have a chance to make a piece of Who Lore real, (at least amongst ourselves) and incorporate it into stories set in the present day of next year.
The lesson being: Always check the charity shops and be grateful that some of this stuff being obsure enough to be cheap.
Suprisingly the Almanac was the most expensive and light on any real detail.
Glad to finally get a physical copy of AHistory, (even if it isn't the lastest ed.) and Easy Dalekese.
I've only skim read them so far but many ideas have been generated.
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Doctor Who Christmas 2019 Gift Guide: Non-Fiction Books
DoctorWho #Christmas 2019 Gift Guide: Non-Fiction, Including Books from @BBCBooks, @Candy_Jar, and @obversebooks
Looking for a Christmas present for the Doctor Who fan in your life? There are loads of books on offer, but which non-fiction entries deserve a place on Whovians’ bookshelves? We’ve narrowed down a selection of reference books examining the many worlds of Doctor Who…
The best thing about my Great Courses Amazon Prime Channel is the plethora of fun and interesting courses. I have a few in progress and a few more lined up, but this one is my current favorite. Learning about where food came from, how it became popular, and how it traveled from one continent to another. It's about the culture of food, not just the food itself. It relates how historical events create the food culture as it evolves into what is familiar to us in the modern day. #thegreatcourses #amazonprime #food #ahistory #foodculture #foodhistory
