I work in public policy and have written amendments to local ordinance in the past so I am slightly biased but the "vague is good" assertion is so cartoonishly wrong as to be insulting to people's intelligence. Vague is insanely wildly bad! Vague is a vessel for clueless regulators - people who themselves often do not have any real appreciation for the things they are regulating - to just slap down some comical rule that causes everything to explode. I don't necessarily hate the vague idea about SKG, but the way the campaign has progressed feels insulting to my entire being.
It's funny, having been largely out of the games for a few years, what strikes me is how little the tone of these discussions have changed. Way way back I was involved in a big EU project about games preservation and the issues are still just as complex - depreciation of hard and middleware, international copyright etc, etc, before you get to the question of who pays for it all, because it sure ain't cheap. Really fascinating, thanks
More than anything, I worry it fails to grasp the complexity of the ecosystem required for a game to function. Unless you control the engine your game/s is built on, the middleware, the platform, the hardware components etc etc then it's really a bit naïve to argue that a dev (or even publisher) can hope to manage the inevitable process of obsolescence.
There's also an inherent degree of "functional window" that tacitly applies to all products, particularly when they exist by their very nature within a specific, evolving context. You can't get cross with a boat builder if there's no water to float the boat on (I'm trying to find a proper analogy, but that will have to do.... :)
Any approach to this issue that is grounded in a foundation of consumer rights is hopelessly doomed. To whom are we making these requests? Corporations? Platforms? They are ephemeral. A good game should outlast them all. I spent a big chunk of my game design career making games in flash. Who should I yell at? The world? It is up to players to decide what games survive. https://superessence.itch.io/nightfall
I work in public policy and have written amendments to local ordinance in the past so I am slightly biased but the "vague is good" assertion is so cartoonishly wrong as to be insulting to people's intelligence. Vague is insanely wildly bad! Vague is a vessel for clueless regulators - people who themselves often do not have any real appreciation for the things they are regulating - to just slap down some comical rule that causes everything to explode. I don't necessarily hate the vague idea about SKG, but the way the campaign has progressed feels insulting to my entire being.
It's funny, having been largely out of the games for a few years, what strikes me is how little the tone of these discussions have changed. Way way back I was involved in a big EU project about games preservation and the issues are still just as complex - depreciation of hard and middleware, international copyright etc, etc, before you get to the question of who pays for it all, because it sure ain't cheap. Really fascinating, thanks
Thanks Dan! Yeah these conversations have been happening for a long time and SKG feels like taking a sledgehammer to them in a lot of ways
More than anything, I worry it fails to grasp the complexity of the ecosystem required for a game to function. Unless you control the engine your game/s is built on, the middleware, the platform, the hardware components etc etc then it's really a bit naïve to argue that a dev (or even publisher) can hope to manage the inevitable process of obsolescence.
There's also an inherent degree of "functional window" that tacitly applies to all products, particularly when they exist by their very nature within a specific, evolving context. You can't get cross with a boat builder if there's no water to float the boat on (I'm trying to find a proper analogy, but that will have to do.... :)
Any approach to this issue that is grounded in a foundation of consumer rights is hopelessly doomed. To whom are we making these requests? Corporations? Platforms? They are ephemeral. A good game should outlast them all. I spent a big chunk of my game design career making games in flash. Who should I yell at? The world? It is up to players to decide what games survive. https://superessence.itch.io/nightfall
THANK YOU