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Zkuq on 29 August 2017
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VGPolyglot said:
Zkuq said:

What use is preservation if you can't experience the preserved experience? Games are meant to be experienced, and small inaccuracies don't take away from the experience. Horrible performance however does. As far as I'm concerned, physical storage media isn't important either in preservation because games are essentially just software. I'm not saying physical things shouldn't be preserved too, but that's extremely unpractical for many so preserving them is probably best left to museums and such. One point of preservation, to me, is to let people experience old stuff themselves, and considering how easy preserving software is compared to preserving hardware, I'd say the current situation is pretty much fine.

I'd say that the physical aspects should be preserved digitally to, for example I think that there should be scans of the cover, the back, the disc and even the manual in order to fully preserve the game, because those are part of the history as well.

I agree, that's an excellent way to preserve stuff. In this case, it's not nearly as good as preserving the originals, I think, but it's a lot better than preserving nothing.

Miguel_Zorro said:
I find the "preservation" argument interesting. It forces me to imagine a scenario where 80 years from now, Breath of the Wild is lost to the world, and some former VGChartz user comes riding to the rescue, having saved the emulated version for all those years.

The games that are most at risk of being lost are the unpopular games that people aren't playing. If it's about preservation, where are the threads about emulating those games?

It's a valid argument, just not one most people probably think of when talking about emulation. Most people are probably simply interested in playing the games. Thus, if those people preserve anything, it'll be the games they're interested in and not some obscure titles no one ever liked. I think that also explains why there aren't any threads about emulating those obscure games (along with the fact that no one would reply in those threads). Additionally, preservation is probably a long-term goal that doesn't have much relevancy to most people right now.

As to why people are so keen to mention preservation in threads about emulation, I'm not entirely sure. I suspect it's mainly a combination of hypocrisy (i.e. wanting to defend emulation and finding preservation to be a suitable tool for that) and long-term thinking (i.e. thinking preservation is a valuable thing itself in the long term, even though it's not exactly relevant right now).