Video Game Industry Is Becoming Like Hollywood

Via Cheat Code Central:

When you think of the game industry, you probably don't draw an immediate parallel to the movie industry. Sure, both deal in entertainment, but movies and games are so fundamentally different that trying to draw parallels between them is sort of like comparing apples to oranges. However, the game industry has slowly evolved into something strikingly similar to the current Hollywood "system," and that's not necessarily a good thing. There are several ways that the game industry is like Hollywood, and taken together, these new trends could be potentially damaging to the industry as a whole.

#4 It's All About Sequels and Remakes

I can't say that the game industry has ever been one to shy away from piling on the sequels—countless Mario and Sonic games on classic consoles are evidence of this—but this is a trend that's gotten way out of hand. Games that don't have at least moderate sequel potential are barely released anymore, and it seems every developer want to be on the cusp of the next big franchise. While I can admit that I love sequels as much as the next person, they have the tendency to stifle creativity and stall the industry. Hollywood's trend toward remakes and sequels hasn't exactly generated much excitement over the years (with a few very notable exceptions); as Hollywood churns out more and more of the same, consumers get bored. The game industry would be wise to take notice of this trend, and start looking less toward automatic sequels and more toward new IPs.

#3 "Star" Developers Are Touted instead of Substance

This is one area where the game industry is taking cues from Hollywood in a slightly different direction. Often, new movies are marketed by their stars, and it's common for moviegoers to want to see "the new Tom Hanks movie" or the "new Steven Spielberg movie." In much the same way, players are eager to try the new game from Rockstar, BioWare, or Epic Games. Putting the name behind the game first, before what is actually in the game, sells the content short, which can work in a game's favor in the short term. But if the game fails to live up to expectations, this can backfire. Many an actor has promoted a horrible movie which has stalled (or even ended, in extreme cases) their career. Movies and games should be promoted based on their content, not who is making them.

#2 Development Cycles Are Fueled by Early Sales

In the movie industry, decisions about movies in a series are generally made after first-week box office receipts are tallied. If the movie does well enough, that money is immediately funneled into a sequel, spinoff, or related project involving the same director or actor. Capital is almost never reserved for independent projects that are not directly related to something already out there, and any money gained is directed right back into a circular system that thrives off putting out the same old garbage. Unfortunately, games are the same way. Decisions about making and financing sequels rely on first-week sales, and money is hardly ever directed toward new projects that aren't at least in some way related to what's already out there.

Fortunately, the game industry does have a leg up on Hollywood in this area: digital distribution. Independent developers have flourished on services like the PlayStation Network, WiiWare, and Xbox LIVE, and developers like Mojang, Team Meat, Thatgamecompany, and Twisted Pixel Games have found enough success in this realm to get noticed and become able to fund more unique products. But as bigger companies also take advantage of the downloadable sphere, I wouldn't be surprised if it gets harder for smaller developers like these ones to get noticed.

#1 Marketing Is Bigger Than Ever

Back when the gaming industry was relatively small, marketing efforts were very concentrated. Ads for new games were published in trade magazines, and would find their way onto television every once in a while. Marketing was focused, inoffensive, and probably pretty effective. However, in recent years the game industry has adopted a scorched-Earth policy towards marketing their games. Trailers played before first-run movies, city buses wrapped in logos, moving billboards, and even publicity stunts are often employed in support of new games, which can make consumers feel a bit overwhelmed. The marketing campaign for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is a good example of marketing gone extreme, and unnecessarily so. People were already excited for the game, and I don't think blanketing whole cityscapes in MW3 logos convinced too many additional people to buy the game, especially when that money could have gone back into the development pool for another game.

Hollywood is also guilty of this type of over-the-top marketing, and has also proven that it doesn't always work. Movies like Sucker Punch and Mars Needs Moms had serious marketing campaigns behind them, and both flopped incredibly at the box office. Consumers are smarter than companies give them credit for, and while some marketing is always necessary, going over the top is not going to convince many more people. It just takes money away from projects that could put it to better use.

Unfortunately, the gaming industry is taking a lot of cues from the movie industry when developing its marketing and financial strategies. However, this isn't a good thing, and the gaming industry could be more productive if it would just buck the trend and forge its own path. By going back to the basic strategies used in the 80s and 90s, I think the gaming industry could get a lot more quality games produced, and avoid the "dip" in quality and revenue that the movie industry is currently experiencing.

By Amanda L. Kondolojy Senior Contributing Writer Date: February 2, 2012

*The views expressed within this article are solely the opinion of the author and do not express the views held by Cheat Code Central.*

Final Fantasy XIII-2: The End of Square, or a New Beginning?

Via 1Up OP-ED:

While some see the latest chapter of the long-running RPG franchise as a failure, perhaps it's actually the start of a better future.

By Jeremy Parish, 02/02/2012

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Earlier this week, Gamasutra published a scathing criticism of Final Fantasy XIII-2 penned by our colleague (and occasional Retronauts podcast guest) Christian Nutt. Though contextualized through an extended comparison to Red Letter Media's popular video critiques of the Star Wars prequel films, his commentary touched upon many of the same points and concerns I addressed in my own review of the game. Where our opinions differ, I think, is in our ultimate conclusion of XIII-2's merits (or lack thereof); I found the game flawed but a welcome step in correcting the series' course after two widely lambasted entries, while Christian feels it represents a deep, systemic rot at Square Enix's internal development studio.

I'm not too surprised by this turn of events. Christian and I rarely see eye-to-eye on most matters. So while I agree with his assessment of the underlying issues affecting FFXIII and XIII-2, my outlook on the company's future isn't nearly as dire as his. (I also disagree with many of Christian's assertions about FFXIII, such as the claim that lead protagonist Lightning lacked a demonstrable character arc, but that's neither here nor there.) From having spoken to FFXIII-2 director Motomu Toriyama and producer Yoshinori Kitase several times over the past couple of years, I get the impression that they're sincerely concerned about the series' direction and want to keep Final Fantasy relevant. From what I know of Square Enix's corporate culture, I also suspect that they're hobbled by the conservative nature of Japanese business, which can be slow to change when processes and standards that worked for years suddenly become ineffectual.

Rather than simply rebut Gamasutra's editorial, I'd rather examine a few thoughts that Toriyama and scenario director Daisuke Watanabe provided in an email interview conducted after I completed the game. I was left with my own complaints about XIII-2, most of which were explicated in my review, and hoped that I could find a little more clarity through an interview. Their responses offer interesting insight into the game, both through what the creators said and what they didn't say.

FFXIII-2's biggest shortcoming is, without question, its narrative. Not just in terms of story, but the manner in which the entire tale is presented. FFXIII featured a fairly strong cast of protagonists that fit together well enough to drive the plot. From the start, the game made clear the fact that Lightning, Sazh, and Snow were propelled by a common drive to rescue their loved ones from a living death, and their mission became bound to that of the other party members by virtue of a curse placed upon them by their world's "gods." The bizarre cosmology of that world was presented clearly, and the tension between the dual realms of Pulse and Cocoon along with their amoral, suicidal gods provided an acceptable background for the story. Though the tale often stumbled, especially in its ham-handed presentation, it worked well enough.

XIII-2's story doesn't work. While time-travel provides the primary hook for the narrative, the wherefores of its rules for jumping through the timeline and how events in different eras affect one another never make much sense. In fact, when I specifically asked Watanabe what the rules for the game's time-travel mechanics were, the totality of his response was, "This is more like a characteristic rather than a 'rule,' but, 'If you change the future, you change the past.'" To me, this suggests that the lack of clarity of in the game itself comes from a poorly considered story -- one in which the complexities of time-travel were never properly thought through. Even seemingly obvious details, like the way Hope and his assistant Alyssa pop up across the centuries at various stages in their careers but always appear to be 21 years old, undermine the bedrock of the game's premise.

Toriyama even concedes the shadow other time-travel works cast over XIII-2's development. "The subject matter of time travel has a treasure vault of masterpieces not limited to RPGs," he writes. "We were bracing ourselves to be compared to every possible piece of work. When we were building a comfortable time travel system for a high-end console -- for example contemplating what method would be the most appropriate to express moving through time with fancy visuals -- we continuously kept Chrono Trigger in the back of our mind and aimed to better the quality of the game."

You'd be hard-pressed to claim that FFXIII-2 offers any real improvements on Chrono Trigger, though. In that game, the party's ability to leap through time was well-defined, and the rules of causality played heavily into the story. Most of Chrono Trigger's side quests revolved around setting future wrongs right by journeying into the past; you could always be certain that by teaching someone the value of kindness or sowing forests in years gone by, the world of the future would become a better place. The results of your actions in FFXIII-2, on the other hand, feel haphazard. Sometimes your actions change the timeline (even in reverse, a phenomenon whose nature is never properly explained), but more often than not they simply create a better alternate reality to which major characters are shunted while minor NPCs continue to wander around beneath a cloud of doom and unhappiness. It seems the only way to enjoy a happy future in XIII-2 is to have been lucky enough to have been born with a unique character model.

The flaws of FFXIII-2's time-travel rules become even more obvious when the game directly mimics Chrono Trigger. The gameplay constraints of the older game were explained in an arbitrary but acceptable fashion by the omniscient narrator in the End of Time (a place outside of the normal flow of time), and they made sense in that context. When the party's time-travel adventures went awry, the reason for those errors was always self-evident. Not so in FFXIII-2; although it obeys similar rules to Chrono Trigger (up to and including the existence of an isolated fragment of reality in which time-travelers gone astray wash up), those laws are explained as needed by the party members themselves rather than an outside observer -- yet how mundane protagonists Serah and Noel (whose journey through time we see in its entirety from the moment it's foisted upon them) suddenly know the intricacies of temporal mechanics is never touched upon. Perhaps this is a small detail, but it demonstrates a lack of the essential consideration required to elevate the best time-travel tales to classic status. The nebulous rules by which the story operates diminish any tension that could have been instilled by its cliché-spouting villain; without definite stakes, the plot lacks a clear sense of urgency.

At least the time-travel game mechanics are presented well; one area in which Final Fantasy continues to excel is interface and world design. Toriyama notes, "We looked to YouTube and used that interface as our reference point and brushed up the system to enable easy browsing so that it would be a simple menu for both core gamers and people who like a more casual gameplay." The final result is actually more akin to Apple's iTunes Coverflow than YouTube, but it works well -- though it also has the downside of rendering the confusing interrelations between eras and alternate realities in high relief.

The second weak link in FFXIII-2's narrative exists in its protagonists, Serah and Noel. While I applaud the developers for attempting something new here -- no "core" Final Fantasy has ever featured a party of fewer than three characters, and clearing the deck of secondary party members reduced a great deal of the extraneous narrative clutter that's bogged down the latter hours of previous games -- the characters themselves suffer from the same lack of focus as the time-travel elements of the tale. Surprisingly, Watanabe suggests that writing for the duo actually posed a greater difficulty than juggling a larger cast.

"[FFXIII] was a drama in which the desires of six people, each with different circumstances, undergo conflict and struggles, finally becoming one group pursuing a common goal," he writes. "We had an ensemble cast in the previous installment, and we wanted to change the flavor for this game [and] create new characters that have different personalities from the previous six. [...] In a large group, when everyone is an important character, we have trouble with balancing dialogue. If we just let them have conversations, the characters are perceived as either 'talking a lot, and asserting their opinions,' or 'always listening without contributing to the group'; the latter becomes something like a supporting role.

"In a large group, there are many different kinds of people: Brave people, calm people, people who think on their feet, people who are knowledgeable, that belong in the group; so there is an advantage in that it's easier to control the flow of the dialogue. On the other hand, when there are only two people, and let's say they were a combo of a 'calm person' and a 'cautious person,' then [...] a line like 'the probability of us surviving is only 10%, but let's take our chances and jump into that flame!' would need some tweaking to make it realistic. We don't want the conversation to repeat the same pattern of 'one is always being calm, and the other always shrinks back in fear' each time, so we control the conversation based on the emotions in each scene."

Gamasutra's editorial blasts FFXIII-2 for a lack of authorial vision. Not to play apologist for what has proven to be an uneven RPG, but I'm not sure that take is entirely fair. True, FFXIII-2 does feel at times like a story adrift, but looking at the bigger picture and the creators' musings on their creative obstacles, I think the real problem here is that classic conundrum involving the teaching of new tricks to old dogs. XIII-2's key personnel have been with the series since at least Final Fantasy VII, meaning they were involved in the development of its most popular and successful entries.

The rules and standards that worked in the PlayStation era are well past their sell-by date, but the entire Final Fantasy production cycle -- and, on many levels, Square Enix as a whole -- has been built around the techniques and processes that worked two hardware generation ago, when gamers held different expectations and the cost of making games was far more modest. Perhaps I'm reading too much into them, but my impression is that Watanabe's comments on the challenges of writing for a smaller cast than in previous entries speaks to the entire team's consternation at the resistance that Final Fantasy XIII faced in the marketplace and online. According to their process, they did everything "right," only to find that the end result was out of step with contemporary expectations. And now they have to figure out how to relearn the entire production process while struggling to figure out how to express the idea of "Final Fantasy" in a format that remains relevant to its target audience's current tastes.

Unfortunately, they're still struggling to get it, as seen in the way the game caters so desperately to the developers' perception of Western tastes in terms of mechanics yet still features incredibly Japanese dialogue and characters whose designs are sublime in their preposterousness. Perhaps the problem is an underlying cultural schism. When I asked about why Noel, the last man left alive on the planet in his apocalyptic future, seems to spend so much time on his appearance, Watanabe's response spoke of symbolism and stylization.

"Noel's appearance was in the vein of what happened with Fang from the previous title," he writes, "conceived from the image of 'a life in the wild, different from the civilized metropolis of Cocoon.' Caius was living in a similar manner, but since we wanted to emphasize the eeriness of the 'immortal man who has lived for centuries,' he ended up with a symbolic design like that. Not just in the outer appearance of the characters, but from the art direction to the slightest details in the worldview, we always ask ourselves, 'Where should we place more importance; In the middle of portraying reality and impressionism, or in the threshold of realism and symbolism?' It's not that we take being realistic and 'believable' for granted, but our purpose isn't the 'recreation' of a real world but the 'expression' of an exciting story."

I have trouble imagining a Western developer offering that answer -- or if they did, for the final expression of that desire for stylized visuals to express itself in the form of Noel and Caius. The visual design of the game's characters is very much Japanese -- though I don't pretend to know if the way that country's character designs gravitate toward the exotic and impractical is rooted in culture, in teen trends, or even in some off-kilter focus-tested misperception of what gamers want. Whatever the case, I have to wonder if the stewards of Final Fantasy (and many other series) realize how off-putting their creations can be to the foreign markets they're trying to eagerly to cater to. Not that they should adopt the aggressively bland American character design standard of an angry white guy with cropped brunette hair and a hoodie by any means... but surely, somehow, there's a way to achieve a happy medium.

Nevertheless, I see a silver lining in FFXIII-2 despite its issues, because its messy narrative is bound together by excellent gameplay. The battle system is elegant yet frenetic, and the skill trees and monster-capturing components offer genuine choice without feeling overly complex or fussy. The game's mechanical successes, I suspect, explain the different conclusions Christian and I have drawn from our experiences with the game: He's a highly story-oriented RPG fan, while I care mostly about mechanics and consider a good video game plot an unexpected bonus. FFXIII-2's story is not good, and its Halo 2-level unresolved ending is a slap to the face of anyone who makes the mistake of caring about it. But it plays incredibly well, and to me that speaks of a fundamental competence -- a promising base for building a future, for correcting its course.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 stands as a flawed but encouraging step in the right direction. Having been a fan of the series since it debuted in the U.S. more than 20 years ago, I'm not ready to write it off just yet; right now, it's suffering the growing pains that seem endemic to all its 1980s contemporaries. Consider the state of the Castlevania series, rebooted into something almost unrecognizable. OrMega Man, a stump of a brand cauterized by its own creators and rendered a laughingstock. OrZelda, still solid but increasingly bogged down by its desire to be everything to everyone. Phantasy Star barely exists. Sonic the Hedgehog is in such a dire state that fans are willing to cling to the merest glimmer of competence as a sign of hope. The next Metal Gear had to be outsourced to Platinum after its creators couldn't figure out what to do with it. Even reliable Dragon Quest has pissed off its most loyal fans by going massively multiplayer for its tenth installment. Of the industry's handful of long-running franchises, only Mario -- ever malleable, ever pure -- remains on-track these days.

Simply put, time isn't kind to video game legacies. The Final Fantasy brand is suffering from the same malaise of age that plagues all its NES-era contemporaries. XIII-2 is definitely not the game to save the series, but the radical changes and uneven design of the thing are the result of a desire to right a listing ship, not of apathetic captains. The creators need to rein it in a bit and cut back on the superficial nonsense -- the puzzles, the quick-time events -- but the fact that they're exploring solutions rather than simply digging an ever-deeper rut of irrelevance for themselves gives me hope that Final Fantasy will reinvent itself and survive another 20 years where so many of its contemporaries have fallen. And if not, at least it'll go down swinging.

Why History Needs Software Piracy

Via PCWorld:

How copy protection and app stores could deny future generations their cultural legacy.

By Benj Edwards, Technologizer Jan 23, 2012 8:45 pm

Amid the debate surrounding controversial anti-piracy legislation such as SOPA and PIPA, our public discourse on piracy tends to focus on the present or the near future. When jobs and revenues are potentially at stake, we become understandably concerned about who is (or isn’t) harmed by piracy today.

I’m here to offer a different perspective, at least when it comes to software piracy. While the unauthorized duplication of software no doubt causes some financial losses in the short term, the picture looks a bit different if you take a step back. When viewed in a historical context, the benefits of software piracy far outweigh its short-term costs. If you care about the history of technology, in fact, you should be thankful that people copy software without permission.

It may seem counterintuitive, but piracy has actually saved more software than it has destroyed. Already, pirates have spared tens of thousands of programs from extinction, proving themselves the unintentional stewards of our digital culture.

Software pirates promote data survival through ubiquity and media independence. Like an ant that works as part of a larger system it doesn’t understand, the selfish action of each digital pirate, when taken in aggregate, has created a vast web of redundant data that ensures many digital works will live on.

Piracy’s preserving effect, while little known, is actually nothing new. Through the centuries, the tablets, scrolls, and books that people copied most often and distributed most widely survived to the present. Libraries everywhere would be devoid of Homer, Beowulf, and even The Bible without unauthorized duplication.

The main difference between then and now is that software decays in a matter of years rather than a matter of centuries, turning preservation through duplication into an illegal act. And that’s a serious problem: thousands of pieces of culturally important digital works are vanishing into thin air as we speak.

The Case of the Disappearing Software

The crux of the disappearing software problem, at present, lies with the stubborn impermanence of magnetic media. Floppy disks, which were once used as the medium du jour for personal computers, have a decidedly finite lifespan: estimates for the data retention abilities of a floppy range anywhere from one year to 30 years under optimal conditions.

A floppy stores data in the form of magnetic charges on a specially treated plastic disc. Over time, the charges representing data weaken to the point that floppy drives can’t read them anymore. At that point, the contents of the disk are effectively lost.

This becomes particularly troubling when we consider that publishers began releasing software on floppy disk over 30 years ago. Most of those disks are now unreadable, and the software stored on them has become garbled beyond repair. If you’ve been meaning to back up those old floppies in your attic, I have bad news: it’s probably too late.

To make matters worse, software publishers spent countless man-hours in the 1980s preventing us from archiving their work. To discourage piracy, they devised schemes to forever lock their software onto a single, authorized diskette. One popular copy protection method involved placing an intentionally corrupt block of data on a disk to choke up error-checking copy routines. It worked so well that it also prevented honest attempts to back-up legally purchased software.

If these copy protection schemes had been foolproof, as intended, and copyright law had been obeyed, most of the programs published on those fading disks would now be gone forever. Manycultural touchstones of a generation would have become extinct due to greed over media control.

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It’s not just floppy disks that are under threat. Thousands of games published on ROM cartridges and as enormous arcade cabinets are now hard to find and can only run on electronic hardware that will not last forever. Publishers have re-released a handful of the most prominent games among them on newer platforms, but the large majority of legacy video games don’t get this treatment. Pirates liberate the data from these ROM chips and allow them to be played, through software emulation, on newer consoles and PCs.

Pirating also makes foreign game libraries easily available for historians to study. Some games only appeared on writable cartridges in Japan via download methods like the Nintendo Power flash cart system and the BS-X Satellaview. Those would be entirely out of the reach of Western historians today without previous efforts to back them up illegally.

For a sample slice of what’s at stake when it comes to vanishing software, let’s take a look at the video game industry. The Web’s largest computer and video game database, MobyGames, holds records of about 60,000 games at present. Roughly 23,000 of those titles were originally released on computer systems that used floppy disks or cassette tapes as their primary storage or distribution medium.

23,000 games! If game publishers and copyright law had their way, almost all of those games would be wiped from the face of the earth by media decay over the next 10 years. Many would already be lost.

For the past decade, collectors and archivists have been compiling vast collections of out-of-print software for vintage machines (think Apple II, Commodore 64, and the like) and trading them through file sharing services and on “abandonware” websites. Through this process, they’ve created an underground software library that, despite its relative newness, feels like the lost archives of an ancient digital civilization.

As a journalist and historian, I rely on these collections of pirated software to do my job. I’d rather it not be that way, but there is no legal alternative (more on that in a moment).

The compilation of this underground library–a necessary resource for future historians–is a brave act of civil disobedience that needs to continue if we are to protect our digital heritage. As we’ll see, the greatest threats to software history lie not behind us, but directly ahead of us.

Why Preserve Software?

Before we go any further, let’s take a step back and consider why we should preserve software in the first place. Software often seems inconsequential because of its ephemeral nature. It’s a dynamic expression of electrons on a computer screen, and that doesn’t mean much, instinctively, to brains that evolved to recognize value in physical objects.

But software is also a powerful tool whose mastery says something profound about our civilization. If we look back through a museum, we can get a good idea about a certain society’s potential by examining its tools. If a civilization could build threshing machines, for example, we know that they could harvest and process wheat much faster than people 100 years earlier. That, in turn, might explain a known population boom.

Likewise, we can measure mankind’s recent potential by looking at his software tools. Future historians may ponder how people achieved a surreal vocal effect in music or created the CGI animated films of today. They may wonder at what point a certain tool allowed fantastic, photorealistic image manipulations that now dominate advertising. Without knowledge of and experimental access to various versions of Auto-Tune, Pixar RenderMan, and Adobe Photoshop, they’ll have a difficult time finding accurate answers to those questions.

Software is also entertainment. It is culture. Like books, music, and films before it, the art form expressed in software entertainment programs–usually games–has both reflected and influenced the cultural behavior of multiple generations around the globe.

Is there an American alive between the ages of 15 and 35 that doesn’t know who Mario is? (I’m sure you can find someone who has not heard of Mario, but he was locked in a basement from 1980 to 1999.)

Thanks to the work of preservationists that flout the law, future historians will be able to more fully consider Mario’s cultural impact and answer deeper, ancillary questions like “Why did people wear T-shirts with pixelated mushroom people on them?” and “What games, exactly, did Mario appear in and why?”

It’s possible that Nintendo will be around 200 years from now, but it is unlikely to provide all the answers. The company will only convey the history that is in their best commercial interest to show you (i.e. Super Mario Bros. 3, over and over). Historians will show you everything without restraint — even Hotel Mario, Mario Roulette, and I Am A Teacher: Super Mario Sweater. None of those games will survive 200 years without piracy, because Nintendo would rather see those embarrassingly low-quality titles rot away in a tomb sealed by copyright law.

We Have Everything To Lose

It would be nice if the problem of disappearing software was limited to the past, but there’s a disturbing parallel at work in the current software marketplace. App stores and other digital distribution methods–which often inextricably link purchased software to a unique licensee, sometimes on a unique machine–threaten to deprive us of even more software in the very near future.

Thanks to widespread adoption of aggressive digital rights management (DRM) and a single-source model of distribution, most digitally distributed software will vanish from the historical record when those stores shut down. And believe me, they will shut down some day. If this doesn’t scare you, then you need an allegorical history lesson. Here it is:

Imagine if a publisher of 500,000 different printed book titles suddenly ceased operation and magically rendered all sold copies of its books unreadable. Poof. The information contained in them simply vanished. It would represent an cultural catastrophe on the order of the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria in 48 B.C. In that fire, a majority of the Western world’s cultural history up to that point turned to ash.

Now take a look at the iTunes App Store, a 500,000 app repository of digital culture. It’s controlled by a single company, and when it closes some day (or it stops supporting older apps, like Apple already did with the classic iPod), legal access to those apps will vanish. Purchased apps locked on iDevices will meet their doom when those gadgets stop working, as they are prone to do. Even before then, older apps will fade away as developers decline to pay the $100 a year required to keep their wares listed in the store.

From a historical perspective, we can only hope that hackers and pirates have been quietly making archives of as much as they can grab from download services like the iTunes App Store, the PlayStation Store, the Wii Shop Channel, Xbox Live Arcade, and other online app stores.

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And what about cloud software? If all of our software tools become centralized and run over the Internet, it will be hard to pirate them, which also means they won’t get preserved. That’s bad for history.

When paleoanthropologists wonder if a 13,000 year-old Clovis pointcan take down a Bison, they tie one to a spear and let it fly. If spear points had been automatically cloud updated over the course of their development, however, we would only know of the most recent iteration in the design process. Clovis points wouldn’t exist today, and we’d be wondering how ancient Native Americans managed to hunt game with uranium-tipped bullets.

With that in mind, think about this: What did Gmail’s interface look like just one year ago? How did Google Maps work before it added Street View? Lacking experimental access to older versions of cloud-based software tools, future historians will have to depend on screenshots and personal testimony to work out exactly what the tools were capable of at any time, if they still exist.

But if future historians retain access to old versions of non-cloud software, they will be able use the tools, as they would with a Clovis point, to experimentally duplicate the activities of people in the past. For example, they could run the AtariWriter word processing program on an Atari 800 emulator to reproduce a document from the 1980s in a way that would explain its format.

A complete reliance on cloud gaming (think OnLive) is also a very bad idea. Looking to OnLive to preserve game software would be like expecting your local movie theater to preserve film history. It’ll only show what is commercially viable to show at the time, and they discard the rest. That is how cloud gaming will work as well.

The new Great Library is already burning, and we are only just beginning to smell the smoke.

When Corporations Own History, They Change It

The DRM found in digital app stores today poses a significant threat to our future understanding of history. Sure, the companies that create this software own the rights to these products now, but once a work becomes consumed and embedded into mass culture, it belongs to the ages. It assumes a role larger than that of a mere commercial product, and copies of the work should be protected and preserved as cultural treasures.

It’s hard to protect and preserve that which is liable to change or disappear at any time. If VHS tapes worked like app stores, George Lucas could force all of us to upgrade our purchased Star Wars films to the Special Edition versions (to maintain compatibility with LucasOS, of course), overwriting the old ones in the process. Heck, one day he could decide he doesn’t like the movies at all and replace them with copies of Willow. It would be within his legal rights, but it would also be cultural robbery.

It bugs me that iOS software today updates at a galloping pace that deletes previous versions unless you’ve taken pains to archive them. It is convenient and wonderful functionality in many ways, but the practice also rewrites history with every download. What if Photoshop had been updated that way throughout the 1990s? Would anyone have a copy of the first version that could work with layers? Such a historically important piece of software would be lost. Similarly, if we move to a completely controlled, single-source, automatic update scheme for all PC applications–it’s almost here withWindows 8, by the way–we will be destroying digital artifacts with a fervor heretofore unseen.

By accepting restrictive DRM into our lives, we are giving not only software publishers, but all media publishers the power to erase, control, or manipulate digital cultural history if they choose. That is why DRM feels fundamentally wrong from a humanistic standpoint: it conspires, in conjunction with time, to deprive humanity of its rightfully earned cultural artifacts.

To be sure, every creator of software should be rewarded appropriately with exclusive rights of reproduction for a certain period of time, as they are now, but only in a soft legal sense, not with a virtual lock and key that stymies the preservation of history.

Let’s not repeat what happened 2000 years ago in Alexandria. The only scrolls that survived the burning of the Great Library were those that had been copied and distributed, likely without the permission of their authors. (Unfortunately, library officials strictly limited library access to prevent this, so very few texts escaped destruction.) If we don’t open the doors to the legal preservation of all software, civilizations thousands of years from now will only possess copies of programs that pirates illegally duplicated and distributed while the works were still officially available.

The cultural impact of software easily equals that of any other creative work. It is time to legitimately preserve this digital art form in libraries alongside books and films. Setting up such a library, however, is a very difficult proposition.

The Plight of the Digital Librarian

If you wanted to study the history of our culture up to the present, you’d probably turn to a library. There you can find comprehensive collections of analog data to study for free. If you want to study software in the same way, you’re out of luck: operating a practical, comprehensive software library is currently illegal in the United States.

Don’t get me wrong: it is possible to create a legal software library, but its implementation would make it nearly useless. The best a library can hope to do, within its legal limits, is to stock physical copies of officially duplicated software media on physical shelves. That means that all the problems with decaying and obsolete media come along with it. There’d be plenty of bulk and very little guarantee that you’d be able to access what is sitting in the stacks.

A more practical approach for a software library would be to liberate the data from fixed media and store it in arrays of redundant hard disks. Librarians could upgrade the arrays over time to avoid obsolescence, and the software could be painlessly transferred over a network to be run on emulators (which would simulate the original software platforms) for historical study.

Unfortunately, the practical approach doesn’t work because it’s currently illegal under US copyright law to copy software — a necessary part of freeing it from its original media — and then share it with the public without the publisher’s permission. (The law provides for legal backup copies, but you can’t share them with other people.) Moreover, it’s illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act(DMCA) to circumvent copy protection schemes to actually make those copies in the first place.

Right now, there exist libraries that store floppy disks on their shelves as if they were books. These organizations make the mistake of assuming that, like books, the data on computer disks will last indefinitely if carefully shielded from the elements. But there is nothing they can do to ultimately stop the loss of data. The data needs to be copied onto a new medium. At some point, the law needs to be broken — or changed.

Copyright’s Obsolete Legal Assumption

Current U.S. copyright laws have good intentions, but they ultimately jeopardize the survival of digital property because they do not take into account the rapid pace of digital media decay and obsolescence.

Our body of copyright law makes a 19th-century-style legal assumption that the works in question will stay fixed in a medium safely until the works become public domain, when they can then be copied freely. Think of paper books, for example, which can retain data for thousands of years under optimal conditions.

In the case of digital data, many programs will vanish from the face of the earth decades before the requisite protection period expires (the life of the author plus 70 years in the U.S.). Media decay and obsolescence will claim that software long before any libraries can make legal, useful backups.

A potential solution would be to limit copyright terms on software to a more reasonable period of time — say, 20 years maximum. Then archivists would have a far greater chance of properly retrieving and storing the old software before it deteriorated into oblivion.

It should also be permanently legal for librarians to circumvent copy protection schemes to archive software. Currently, limited exemptions to the DMCA provide temporary DRM-breaking provisions under very narrow circumstances, but that is not enough.

As an alternative, a new law could require publishers that seek copyright protection to deposit DRM-free versions of software to the U.S. Library of Congress for media-independent archival. The software could later be digitally “checked out” on a limited basis by patrons doing research. If necessary, these digital library materials could become available only after a period of time, say five years, to further protect commercial interests

Don’t Let Software Disappear

We live in a civilization dominated by commerce and those who benefit from it, so we instinctively want to protect those who fairly engage in business. There are those among us who, in pursuit of that goal, would like to assault piracy with heavy-handed legislation. But piracy, which is endemic to and inseparable from digital distribution, can never be fully controlled without depriving freedom. Legislation that attempts to do so will only drive the practice further underground while punishing those who don’t even engage in it by crippling the technology that allows software to exist in the first place.

At the moment, you can obtain just about any entertainment work or software program for free if you try hard enough. Despite that, millions of people still pay real money to obtain legal copies of software, films, and music, in the process making those industries bigger and more profitable than ever.

The fact that people still buy access to digital media in large numbers means that piracy is simply not the problem they think it is. In fact, piracy is itself the solution to another problem: the problem of over-protected intellectual property. It would be wonderful if those companies utilizing strict DRM and pushing for aggressive anti-piracy legislation saw the need to be a little less profiteering for the greater historical good, but since that is rarely the objective of the free market, don’t hold your breath.

It is up to us, as a generation, to preserve our cultural history. We must also push for reforms in copyright law that allow software to take its rightful place in historical archives without the need to rely upon the work of pirates.

If you love software, buy it, use it, and reward the people who make it. I do it all the time, and I support the industry’s right to make money from its products. But don’t be afraid to stand up for your cultural rights. If you see strict DRM and copy protection that threatens the preservation of history, fight it: copy the work, keep it safe, and eventually share it so it never disappears.

Some people may think ill of your archival efforts now, but they’re on the wrong side of history: no one living 500 years from now will judge your infringing deeds harshly when they can load up an ancient program and see it for themselves.

The Four Forces of Software Decay

There are four main techno-cultural forces pushing software toward extinction.

Force 1: Physical Decay

No form of digital media holds data forever. Every computer data storage medium physically deteriorates over time, losing data in the process.

Force 2: Medium Obsolescence

As technical innovations continue, every storage format will become obsolete and rarely used at some point, making retrieving the data in the future difficult.

Force 3: Copy Deterrence

For economic reasons, software publishers have historically tried to deter users from copying the publisher’s software without permission. These methods prevent the legitimate archival of software.

Force 4: Economic Obsolescence

Every software product has a limited market lifespan, which is the result of rapid technological progress. This means that software will only be duplicated and distributed commercially for a short period of time.

Benj Edwards is a historian and freelance journalist who specializes in video game and computer history. He is also editor of Vintage Computing and Gaming, a blog devoted to those subjects.