A [relatively] old subject, good piece though.
on
The Abandonware Question
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· Score: 5, Interesting
It's one of the few good objective pieces that seems to look at the issue of abandonware/emulation from a few different angles... and it comes right on the heels of that Control and Creativity piece ran on slashdot recently.
My personal feelings on abandonware are that there's really nothing wrong with it. I think it's healthy for the market and wonderful for players.
When I was about 9 years old, my father bought me Starflight... a game we saw on the shelves of Radio Shack and thought looked cool. We enjoyed it but never got very far because the game has a high probability of corrupting itself (otherwise it's a terrific game... a true classic). Years later I realized that surely someone must have preserved a copy of the game that I could download... and thanks to abandonware, I was right. I tracked down a copy for download and fiddled around with my system until I could get it to work... and it was just great... it was a minor obsession of mine for several weeks and I finally beat it, getting my father's money's worth out of the purchase. Lot's of nostalgia, lot's of fun. Who gets hurt here?
I dismiss most of the arguments of the game publishers, and especially the stance of the IDSA. The bulk of their argument is that legality equals morality, which any freethinking individual probably realizes isn't true... or else laws would never be repealed or changed.
I also don't understand how Abandonware sites hurt their intellectual property rights as many of them seem to claim. They still own the copyrights, they still own the trademarks. Nobody is going to tell Nintendo that they don't own the rights to produce Mario games because they fail to rabidly attack an abandonware site with a Mario Bros romdump from a 20 year old arcade board. Nobody is arguing that Mario Bros is "public domain" from a legal perspective. The one fellow put it succintly "It's piracy, but so what?" The pirates aren't challenging the rights of the publisher's... they only hurt the publishers by denying them revenue, and in the case of the vast majority of abandonware, they're not even doing that.
Another argument a few of them made was "Well, we might want to release a classics pack one day." This is a semi-legitimate argument, but in reality we know that the only "classics packs" that are truly successful commericially are those that package together a few familiar arcade classics... not more obscure PC titles. Most people only buy "arcade classics collections" because they are familiar with playing those games in arcades.
What is the market for a classics pack of old PC games, on the other hand? There aren't going to be very many people who are going to plunk down $20 for a bunch of old games with EGA graphics that they're not familiar with. If people ARE familiar with the games, on the other hand... it's probably because they legitimately owned the games at one point in time.
And the truth that we all know is that very few people are actually trying to sell 10+ year old games... at least not without heavily retooling the game (like Frogger 3D).
So Abandonware really is quite harmless. I'd like to think that there are a few current and future game designers out there getting exposure to these "Golden Oldies" like Starflight for inspiration on how to do more with less and that thanks to Abandonware, we will (and have been) enjoying better games. I really think the IDSA is doing the gaming community and the companies they represent a disservice by going after abandonware sites so diligently, but I guess they have to take a hardline stance on all forms of piracy to convince their members that they're doing their job.
Precisely the point. In that case, I would have made the mines sufficiently small or narrow or rounded that they would have been a precarious ledge at best.
The problem, of course, is that it's impossible in a flexible game environment to forsee the potential impact of each and every item put in the game... which is normally a good thing! You can produce patches which resolve these sorts of issues, but then the game developer has to expend energy and resources continually tweaking what is essentially a "finished" product. And in products which are never "finished" (like MMORPGs), these sorts of "fixes" tend to be frowned upon by players as "nerfs." The developer is accused of forcing players to conform to a narrow vision of gameplay... which they may or may not be doing.
The challenge lies in creating a flexible environment in which the player can do a lot of stuff, things the developer never thought of, while maintaining the "integrity" of the game. It only takes one unbeatable uber-tactic that the developer didn't foresee to ruin the game.
I don't know if they'll ever succeed, but I hope they keep trying.
To some extent, some of the problems you have with games like everquest comes when you have people running around looting stuff from other people, without an easy place of safety at hand.
I wonder what would happen if social stations were handed out more at random instead of having to come up just through the levels. The equivalent of "You are 13 years old, and have reached Manhood. You are a member of the Royal House of Saud, one of 5,000 plus people running the Kingdom." In this case, you are rich, but you have political responsibilities as well. Don't mess up!
It sounds like you're sort of describing Shadowbane, a game which will attempt to combine the traditional MMORPG with a heavy dose of various strategic and social elements. Players create "guilds", cities, kingdoms and empires and are responsible for the governance of those entities. If you insult an influential guild member, he may tell his NPC guards (and his PC guildmates too, of course) he doesn't like you, and your plans of opening up an inn or forge in that town will be shot to hell, and you may not even be able to "adventure" any more in that geographical region, because you don't have access to the shops or trainers you need to sustain your activities. Your options are to go someplace beyond that guild's influence, or perhaps join a rival guild with the ultimate goal of supplanting them.
At least, that's the idea. In many ways, Shadowbane strives to achieve environmental flexibility akin to that described in the keynote, but with social/political dynamics, instead of using gameplay hooks and physics engines. While leaving the system of checks and balances in the hands of the playerbase may be the most fun and potentially interesting way of doing it, it could result in the social equivalent of "mine stepping" that will unbalance and ruin large portions of the system.
I personally am happy to see this trend towards more flexible game models. While some games do a fair job of keeping me amused, the best games often simply provide fertile ground on which I can amuse myself. Most games have uninspiring plots, and static gameplay that involves predetermined goals that can be achieved in only a predetetermined number of ways (ways predetermined by the game developer) and get old pretty fast. Some games can get a lot of mileage out of intergrating a multiplayer aspect, but combining a flexible game engine with a multiplayer element would be like the Holy Grail of gaming, at least in my mind.
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My personal feelings on abandonware are that there's really nothing wrong with it. I think it's healthy for the market and wonderful for players.
When I was about 9 years old, my father bought me Starflight... a game we saw on the shelves of Radio Shack and thought looked cool. We enjoyed it but never got very far because the game has a high probability of corrupting itself (otherwise it's a terrific game... a true classic). Years later I realized that surely someone must have preserved a copy of the game that I could download... and thanks to abandonware, I was right. I tracked down a copy for download and fiddled around with my system until I could get it to work... and it was just great... it was a minor obsession of mine for several weeks and I finally beat it, getting my father's money's worth out of the purchase. Lot's of nostalgia, lot's of fun. Who gets hurt here?
I dismiss most of the arguments of the game publishers, and especially the stance of the IDSA. The bulk of their argument is that legality equals morality, which any freethinking individual probably realizes isn't true... or else laws would never be repealed or changed.
I also don't understand how Abandonware sites hurt their intellectual property rights as many of them seem to claim. They still own the copyrights, they still own the trademarks. Nobody is going to tell Nintendo that they don't own the rights to produce Mario games because they fail to rabidly attack an abandonware site with a Mario Bros romdump from a 20 year old arcade board. Nobody is arguing that Mario Bros is "public domain" from a legal perspective. The one fellow put it succintly "It's piracy, but so what?" The pirates aren't challenging the rights of the publisher's... they only hurt the publishers by denying them revenue, and in the case of the vast majority of abandonware, they're not even doing that.
Another argument a few of them made was "Well, we might want to release a classics pack one day." This is a semi-legitimate argument, but in reality we know that the only "classics packs" that are truly successful commericially are those that package together a few familiar arcade classics... not more obscure PC titles. Most people only buy "arcade classics collections" because they are familiar with playing those games in arcades.
What is the market for a classics pack of old PC games, on the other hand? There aren't going to be very many people who are going to plunk down $20 for a bunch of old games with EGA graphics that they're not familiar with. If people ARE familiar with the games, on the other hand... it's probably because they legitimately owned the games at one point in time.
And the truth that we all know is that very few people are actually trying to sell 10+ year old games... at least not without heavily retooling the game (like Frogger 3D).
So Abandonware really is quite harmless. I'd like to think that there are a few current and future game designers out there getting exposure to these "Golden Oldies" like Starflight for inspiration on how to do more with less and that thanks to Abandonware, we will (and have been) enjoying better games. I really think the IDSA is doing the gaming community and the companies they represent a disservice by going after abandonware sites so diligently, but I guess they have to take a hardline stance on all forms of piracy to convince their members that they're doing their job.
The problem, of course, is that it's impossible in a flexible game environment to forsee the potential impact of each and every item put in the game... which is normally a good thing! You can produce patches which resolve these sorts of issues, but then the game developer has to expend energy and resources continually tweaking what is essentially a "finished" product. And in products which are never "finished" (like MMORPGs), these sorts of "fixes" tend to be frowned upon by players as "nerfs." The developer is accused of forcing players to conform to a narrow vision of gameplay... which they may or may not be doing.
The challenge lies in creating a flexible environment in which the player can do a lot of stuff, things the developer never thought of, while maintaining the "integrity" of the game. It only takes one unbeatable uber-tactic that the developer didn't foresee to ruin the game.
I don't know if they'll ever succeed, but I hope they keep trying.
To some extent, some of the problems you have with games like everquest comes when you have people running around looting stuff from other people, without an easy place of safety at hand.
I wonder what would happen if social stations were handed out more at random instead of having to come up just through the levels. The equivalent of "You are 13 years old, and have reached Manhood. You are a member of the Royal House of Saud, one of 5,000 plus people running the Kingdom." In this case, you are rich, but you have political responsibilities as well. Don't mess up!
It sounds like you're sort of describing Shadowbane, a game which will attempt to combine the traditional MMORPG with a heavy dose of various strategic and social elements. Players create "guilds", cities, kingdoms and empires and are responsible for the governance of those entities. If you insult an influential guild member, he may tell his NPC guards (and his PC guildmates too, of course) he doesn't like you, and your plans of opening up an inn or forge in that town will be shot to hell, and you may not even be able to "adventure" any more in that geographical region, because you don't have access to the shops or trainers you need to sustain your activities. Your options are to go someplace beyond that guild's influence, or perhaps join a rival guild with the ultimate goal of supplanting them.
At least, that's the idea. In many ways, Shadowbane strives to achieve environmental flexibility akin to that described in the keynote, but with social/political dynamics, instead of using gameplay hooks and physics engines. While leaving the system of checks and balances in the hands of the playerbase may be the most fun and potentially interesting way of doing it, it could result in the social equivalent of "mine stepping" that will unbalance and ruin large portions of the system.
I personally am happy to see this trend towards more flexible game models. While some games do a fair job of keeping me amused, the best games often simply provide fertile ground on which I can amuse myself. Most games have uninspiring plots, and static gameplay that involves predetermined goals that can be achieved in only a predetetermined number of ways (ways predetermined by the game developer) and get old pretty fast. Some games can get a lot of mileage out of intergrating a multiplayer aspect, but combining a flexible game engine with a multiplayer element would be like the Holy Grail of gaming, at least in my mind.