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Comment by venomsnake | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget about gaming history that could be/is lost. We have emulators up to PS2 and almost everything on PC without always online is cracked.

But with current decisions that game companies own your play-trough (they were able to shutdown streams on copyright grounds - it is as if the person that supplies the paints has copyright of the painting) - and with emulator servers moving more and more into the illegal - we could enter a digital history dark age. A lot of the cultural phenomenon that was WoW is lost and unexperiancable for the future generations.

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I as well am perpetually concerned about video game preservation, but WoW is a poor example. Issues of copyright aside, MMOs in general just aren't the sort of games that can be capably experienced in a historical capacity. To use the obvious example, Nostalrius existed not out of historical curiosity, but out of nostalgic sentiment which is only going to continue waning. Even with access to the source, someone fifty years from now is going to have a hard time pulling together forty people (or eighty, if you want to do PVP) and convincing them to play a game together for months on end solely in order to experience a meagre facsimile of what WoW was like at its peak. (Though I'm amused at the prospect of a professional video game historian offering work-study jobs to history students that consist solely of playing a sixty year-old video game).

This sort of thing has implications for game design as well. If you care about your game being experienced half a century from now (which, to be fair, you probably don't), then you should attempt to provide an "offline mode"--even for games with online multiplayer--that makes a best-effort attempt to convey the spirit of the game. Dark Souls does an excellent job at this: even though much of the fun of the game is in playing online (seeing the hints that others have left on the ground, summoning allies for boss battles, fighting off invading players, seeing the ghosts of other players running around the level and the bloodstains they leave when they die), it also goes to great lengths to cater to offline players: there exists a spell that will cause developer-written messages to appear, there are summonable NPC allies and NPC invaders, all PVP reward items can technically (and laboriously) be farmed from enemy drops, etc.

An MMO server could be set up in 50 years with bots taking the place of most of the players to a mostly convincing degree, although I think the knowledge that those are just bots and not real players would be just as unsatisfying then as it is today. If AI advances well enough, the bot-players could provide the drama elements and story lines currently created by players, but then we're basically looking at a derivative work instead of preserving the original work.

> it is as if the person that supplies the paints has copyright of the painting

I think that video games are a different enough medium that normal intuition doesn't apply, and that this example is not applicable. I think most people would be unsurprised if a live-stream reading of a novel was found to infringe copyright, but how far would you have to change things to not? Would an interpretive dance adaptation of a novel infringe copyright? Almost certainly not. What about a real-time translation into Tolkien's Elvish? That probably wouldn't either, but translations are generally considered to fall under the same copyright, so maybe.

A sufficient portion of some video games is enough like a movie that I entirely understand the logic behind not allowing live streaming of play-throughs, while others (Minecraft) are clearly centered on user content enough that they would fall on the other side of that line.

I think it's unrealistic to try and describe the situation as clearly fair use or clearly infringement.

That said, I do feel that the extension of copyright length is doing damage to the growth of culture, not least in the area of video games that will be lost to time.

> it is as if the person that supplies the paints has copyright of the painting

This is a great characterization of the problem, though it's not entirely clear where the issue lies.

A production company gets together a ton of money to build a film or game. Because of that they own the profits on most of the produced work.

What's really tough to understand is that they can choose to stop making profit from it, and in so doing, stop others from using it altogether.

All of these cloud-centric services suffer the same fate -- as soon as the remote part of the product disappears, the entire thing becomes unusable. If that WoW license, for example, didn't come with a "right" to run the game against an independent server, does the production company have to leave itself open to lawsuits, for example, originating through players of the game and weird things happening on even a "vanilla" independent server?

I just don't think "I paid $40 so it's mine" can cut it any more when we're really not buying many of the core or important bits of the game itself.

> I just don't think "I paid $40 so it's mine" can cut it any more when we're really not buying many of the core or important bits of the game itself.

Yes. But I paid $40 USD and I am entitled to the profits of the art I create with it is sensible stuff. MS cannot prevent you from profiting from the word documents you create. But Bethesda can claim that video of my speed play trough of Doom II infringes their copyright (the case was with Nintendo and some of their games I think). Blizzard can claim that modifying a bits in my RAM memory infringes their copyright and so on.

> MS cannot prevent you from profiting from the word documents you create

Hypothetically, could Microsoft legally do that if it wanted to? I'm guessing something like that could be part of EULA.

The home/academic licenses for MS Office have not-for-profit terms, IIRC.

In different words, you recorded and broadcast your performance of the production company's game.

Which, for other forms (Music, stage plays/musicals, etc.) usually requires royalties paid to the creator of the thing being performed if you perform it for profit.

I think it wouldn't be difficult to argue that the different mediums -- character on a screen vs. character on a stage -- don't really change that aspect significantly. The legal evolution around the birth and maturation of machinima is kinda interesting to dig into.

Eh... I don't think it's that black and white.

As I see it, there's a very compelling argument for restricting streaming of narrative heavy/gameplay light games. Walking sims and the like. I have no trouble believing that views of lets plays impact sales (although, not as much as that one blog post by the creator of That Dragon, Cancer claimed -- that seems more due to subject matter than anything else).

And FWIW most game publishers allow streaming. The right exists to limit it but few take advantage of it other than nintendo.

For context: I'm an ex-game programmer (admittedly, I mostly worked on strategy games, so this never really effected me or my employers) who watches a more streams and lets plays than I'd like to admit.

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