DIGITISER
  • MAIN PAGE
  • Features
  • Videos
  • Game Reviews
  • FAQ

it's time to build our own global games vault

28/3/2019

17 Comments

 
Picture
On the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, around 800 miles from the North Pole - where Father Christmas lives FFS!!!!!! - is a vault, extending deep into a sandstone mountain, encased in a layer of permafrost. Inside that vault is a Noah's Ark of seeds - a failsafe in the event of a global crisis that might threaten the world's genetic diversity, and the very survival of the human race. 

Millions of seeds, from every country in the world, are stored at a temperature of -18 degrees centigrade, representing 13,000 years of agricultural history. Primarily funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and various governments, the seed vault has already been used to replenish genebanks that have been devastated by war and catastrophe. 

Svalbard - specifically the town of Longyearbyen, where the seed bank is located - was chosen due to the area's lack of tectonic activity, and its permafrost. Were the vault's refrigeration units to fail, the area's low annual temperature would keep the seeds below freezing for at least 200 years, with some grains potentially viable for thousands of years. 

Except... the vault is now under threat, courtesy of global warming.

In 2016, it experienced an unusual amount of water leaking inside, due to higher than average temperatures, and today the story has broken that Longyearbyen - the northern-most town in the world - is warming faster than any other settlement on earth; 3.7-degrees centigrade since it was founded in 1900, roughly three times the global average. 

Ironically, one of the threats the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was designed to protect the seeds from is climate change.

"What does any of this have to do with video games?", I hear you sob. 

This: if gaming, as many of us are predicting, is skulking towards more of an on-demand, cloud-based, future... then we're going to need our own global games vault.

Preferably one with an entrance as cool as the one at Svalbard and with, like, holograms and shit. 
Picture
GENERATION NOTHING
Contrary to all appearances, I'm not an idiot. I know that preserving video games for future generations isn't quite as important as saving the seeds (though the way some people bleat on about it, you'd think making sure they have physical copies of all future Assassin's Creed sequels is more vital to them than ensuring that our species endures).

Global warming may be a whole different level of threat to, y'know... making sure that the people of the space year 2149AD can still play Horace And The Spiders, but something that has been quite apparent over the past week is that if Google and their ilk get their way, games aren't going to exist as they have done until now.

Part of the reason that retro gaming has become so established is because gaming, to date, has existed in a physical way; the consoles, the games... they were all tangible things that can be rubbed against your belly.

The inexorable transition to a cloud-based future makes all of that ephemeral; the only thing you're going to need is a screen, which can literally be any screen, and a controller. No more consoles. No more physical media. Collecting, in the traditional sense, will be a thing of the past. And no collecting means that in 20-30 years time... retro gaming is going to look very different.

The kids who are today enjoying Fortnite won't be able to visit a retro gaming fair and pick up a mint copy of it the way we can walk into a big hall full of old people and their kids, and a couple of teenagers dressed like Harley Quinn, and buy a boxed copy of Ocarina of Time.

Collectors won't be able to fill their shelves with copies of the games they grew up playing... because the shelves will be virtual, and the stuff on them will be virtual... and the only thing allowing us to play games for years will be how long delivery services like Stadia, or Apple Arcade, or Microsoft, choose to keep the games on their servers.

So, I get why that would be a concern. Not least if video games are all you've got going on in your life.

Zzzzzing!
Picture
ARCHIVE AND ONION
There's a fear expressed by some academics that, when future archeologists and historians attempt to understand where they came from, there's going to be a huge gap in the recorded history of our species, which will begin round the time the Internet was switched on.

That's only going to get worse, as we transition into more of a cloud-based, streaming, future.

Imagine some global catastrophe where electricity fails... when hard drives and servers are wiped. Imagine how much will be lost - from film, to books, to TV, to (yes) video games. You only have to have attempted retrieving data from a corrupted hard drive to know how difficult it can be. That would be the task of future historians - there'll be no digging around in the dirt to understand the art that their ancestors enjoyed.

They'll be sifting through server farms, piecing together fragments of a digital past... and wondering why we all feared a vengeful spirit called Momo. There are online preservation projects - such as the Internet Archive, ROM sites, GOG.com, and the like - but it's a digital form of preservation that only lasts as long as the Internet does.

​Even then, you might be able to somehow store the data behind, say, Facebook or Twitter... but without the context for how we actually use social media. 

How our ancestors lived their lives is pieced together from the physical artefacts they left behind. No artefacts = no way to understand this age of social media and The Cloud. 

It's already becoming more difficult to preserve video games - which typically require some sort of proprietary hardware, and (too often) online connectivity to external serves, in order to work. That's only going to become harder still, with games existing only on external servers. 
Picture
CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF EXTINCTION
I don't have a solution as to how we preserve the games that are going to be released in the coming years, not least because I, for one, welcome our new cloud-based overlords.

Yet, at the same time, while I wouldn't regard myself as a collector - unless you include a collection of empty crisp packets on the floor next to my chair - I totally understand why people would be concerned, and feel it's something to be anxious about. 

Nevertheless, I hope that somebody, somewhere, will already be considering this, and figuring out a way it can be done. It's rare that I revisit the games I played, say, 10 years ago, but I do dip back on occasion into the games I played in my formative years. They matter to me, because they make up part of the tapestry of who I am.

Much as we might mock Fortnite and Minecraft, I want that for future generations too, and some sort of concerted preservation effort - somehow archiving this stuff as it appears - is the only way to ensure they have it. 

I mean, I'd do it, but I can't really be arsed. 
17 Comments
RichardM
28/3/2019 09:47:47 am

Ach, 99.9% of videogames are just ephemera. In the same way we don’t need every episode of Neighbours squirreled away in a vault for the future, I don’t think we need just about any videogame ever preserved for posterity. I wouldn’t mind at all if Jet Set Willy was gone forever, because I’ve never played it for more than 5 minutes. I agree it is a fine example of early British videogame development: I don’t think actually playing it would educate or edify anyone in 2000 years (they’ll be too busy having sexxus in the Holodeck). If you’d asked teenage me if I thought GoldenEye 007 should be preserved forever I’d have agreed, but on playing again lately it’s kinda guff. I’ve heard of Spacewar but have no desire to actually play it, especially not on original hardware. Genuinely can’t think of any game that is worth being preserved forever: for me, they are special flowers to be enjoyed in the moment and allowed to die.

It’s just my opinion, guy.

Reply
Mr Biffo
28/3/2019 09:59:57 am

Like I say, I'm not really arsed either way.

Reply
lilock3
28/3/2019 10:02:56 am

This has the potential to be a massive problem. Even if copies of the cloud based games themselves can be clawed out of the hands of the service providers and then archived, the actual infrastructure needs to be preserved/recreated in order for people to run the games in the future. This is made even more complicated by the fact that online services are typically continually evolving platforms rather than having a static definition.

Maybe someone will be able to create a Stadia emulator or virtual machine at some point so that games can still be experienced. My hope is that there will, for the foreseeable future at least, still be a market for running all the major games locally on PCs, even if home consoles are going to die out. Also, there's potentially the need for an offline, portable device - such as the Switch - unless perfect global coverage for internet connectivity happens...

Reply
Spiney O'Sullivan
28/3/2019 12:21:12 pm

It was already a problem years ago where MMOs were concerned. WoW might still be kicking around, but who remembers Toontown Online, Uru: Live and The Matrix Online? Even if you could get the games working again on a server (I believe that Toontown has been reactivated by fans), the last two involved actual people "acting" in real time as key characters during live events, and those people will likely really object to being cryogenically frozen and woken up to perform as Morpheus or a D,ni tour guide for the rest of their unnaturally-extended lives.

Reply
Jim Leighton (Future World Darts Champion) x
28/3/2019 10:45:55 am

Final Fantasy VII and VIII to go in, I demand, oh as well as XII, XIII, XIII-2, and XV, and maybe Crystal Chronicles too if there is room.

Hang on, Square have lost the source material for VIII, sod the PC version, leave that then

Reply
Nick
28/3/2019 11:52:04 am

I might start printing this website.

Paper or vellum?

Reply
lilock3
28/3/2019 12:11:34 pm

Neither. Carve it into stone stelae.

Reply
Nick
28/3/2019 12:27:23 pm

The Block of Biffo it is.

Floop
28/3/2019 01:18:09 pm

it needs to be preserved on some kind of poo based media

Reply
Nick
28/3/2019 01:32:48 pm

We must meet in the middle.

How about carving onto coprolite?

Reply
Jim
28/3/2019 02:14:32 pm

There are some Universities in America which have videogame archives, I've met them before at industry events. However I am not sure how complete the collections are. See here for one: https://www.lib.umich.edu/computer-video-game-archive

Reply
Jim
28/3/2019 02:16:43 pm

You can search the archive here: https://search.lib.umich.edu/catalog?query=mrbiffo_bumstank&filter.collection=Video+Games+-+Basement&filter.location=Art+Architecture+%26+Engineering&library=U-M+Ann+Arbor+Libraries

Reply
Indiana Jones
28/3/2019 03:24:07 pm

That videogame belongs in a museum!

Reply
Marro
28/3/2019 09:08:52 pm

Yes you could have a 700 year old Dave Perry guarding the crypt. To enter you have to beat him at Cool Mountain on Mario 64.

"Only the flatulent man shall pass..."

Reply
Adam Villarreal
28/3/2019 08:35:12 pm

"This is a concern. You should fix it. I would but no." - Mr. Biffo 2019.

You'd be a stellar American politician.

Reply
Robobob
28/3/2019 09:21:37 pm

To be honest I'd be happy just to be able to play my collection of late 90's/early 00's PC games on Windows 8 or 10. I'm sure it's dead easy, I just...don't know how.

Reply
RichardM
28/3/2019 11:26:39 pm

DOSBox often does the trick, up til the late 90s. Got Warcraft 2 running a treat for my dad on his Mac with some CPU throttling!

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    This section will not be visible in live published website. Below are your current settings:


    Current Number Of Columns are = 2

    Expand Posts Area =

    Gap/Space Between Posts = 12px

    Blog Post Style = card

    Use of custom card colors instead of default colors = 1

    Blog Post Card Background Color = current color

    Blog Post Card Shadow Color = current color

    Blog Post Card Border Color = current color

    Publish the website and visit your blog page to see the results

    Picture
    Support Me on Ko-fi
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    RSS Feed Widget
    Picture

    Picture
    Tweets by @mrbiffo
    Picture
    Follow us on The Facebook

    Picture

    Archives

    December 2022
    May 2022
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    November 2020
    September 2020
    July 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014


    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • MAIN PAGE
  • Features
  • Videos
  • Game Reviews
  • FAQ