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I think the essential thing about this era is a gradual cultural rediscovery of ownership. We've just been through a very lengthy race to the bottom for all sorts of information - pretty much anything ephemeral and disposable is free or extremely cheap, and then heavily locked down to protect property rights. And it's built a kind of event horizon to culture where all the things pressed up closest to the digital universe just disappear into a little footnote on a wiki page saying "yes, this happened". Memes, blog posts, videos, games, etc.

There is a game product called "Fortnite", and it's just had a huge in-game event, so it's clearly here, alive and well, but you'll never again be able to experience Fortnite as it was 24 hours ago - ever.

And yet future culture is, as Alan Kay puts it, "the past and the present". It's our reaction to that hole, where nothing really builds on anything else, that, in turn, is motivating interest in products with longer time horizons, longer stories and histories to them.

An obvious metaphor for this is video games vs pinball:

* Fundamentally digital vs fundamentally analog

* Mostly design & marketing vs mostly manufacturing

* Trivially cloned vs scarce, unique

* Black-box artifact vs maintainable assembly

* Perpetually caught in the breathless hype cycle of tech, vs increasingly existing outside of that cycle

Pinball's days as part of the traditional amusement business ended with the 1990's, but it's found a resurgence of interest in the home market as a kind of collectable furniture - something to put in a rec room or a basement arcade, that retains decent trade value if maintained. A whole array of small manufacturers have appeared this decade to serve that market. It's much easier to understand a collector's market for it being sustained 30 years out, versus video game collecting, in which any product with a modicum of popularity will have had its primary content either already preserved through piracy(if emulated), or else impossible to reproduce(if a service). It's a much stronger version of interest in vinyl records or dead-tree books taking precedent over streaming music and e-books.

Because digital media has so little physical value, it is beholden to be entirely marketing driven, front-to-back, and to treat you as either a product marketer or as the product, and sometimes both. The true form of the medium remains always hidden behind the UI. Even your personal work, done on systems you wholly control, just disappears into a collection of files, where it is easily forgotten.

And in that sense I think we are not really asking, "Where is Flash? Where is Hypercard? Where is BASIC?" - because in different eras each of those tools did the kinds of things we wanted and expected from a beginner's tool - so much as we are asking, "Where is the actual medium? Where can I do work and preserve the original source material? Where can I send a kid to learn to play with software and not have it all break six months later, rendering the learning useless? How can I curate software when nobody can make any promises?" Tech continues its warfare for a platform monopoly, and so on this front we keep starting from zero, over and over. It's not hugely different from the space we've arrived at in professional software development, where dependency hell and code rot is an ever-increasing concern for all codebases.




> you'll never again be able to experience Fortnite as it was 24 hours ago - ever.

Isn't that true of all one-time events, not just digital ones? I'll never be able to attend a Beatles concert or see "The Empire Strikes Back" on opening night or be celebrating on the streets of New York City on V-E Day.


It’s more that only a few years ago, the same experience could have been revisited - the technology and the means exist - but business reasons say otherwise.

In this case, it’s the Fortnite world.

If Fortnite were a game in the 1990s-2000s, the data (map, world, characters) would be on a CD or DVD and the multiplayer server would also be included on the CD: the community runs its own servers. If the developers release a huge new update - including over digital distribution - users still have the original discs and server software, thus if they want to relive “Fortnite 1997, v1.0’ they can - just reinstall it from the original media.

With the iOS App Store we used to be able to make versioned backups of the IPA files and restore them using desktop iTunes so if an over-the-air update for... say, Angry Birds, added an obnoxious amount of pay-to-win functionality then we had the choice to downgrade before things went to shit.

Now, we can’t do that. This is why I don’t buy mobile games anymore: I have no guarantees about my ability to keep what I paid for.


Angry birds was such a disappointment... I bought it, thought it was a neat game, and well worth the $2.

A few years later I wanted to show it to my kids, and the game I bought had turned into an abomination of ads, in-app-purchases, and dark patterns, and there was no way to get back the charming little game that I originally bought...


I had the same experience showing my daughter Cut the Rope.


Wow, yeah so many dark patterns in kids games, lots of games that look cool and then you install them and have to watch a half minute ad for another video game every time you die. I remember renting NES games over the weekends and so I had to choose between a limited number of choices. The seemingly infinite number of games that exist now via the android play store is crazy but most of them are completely bad and would never get approved from any curatorial perspective yet they make money for the platform and the developer (evidently).


The Longest Journey (the game) on iOS :(


The entire map of Fortnite was removed, literally sucked into a virtual black hole. The game world is being rebooted/remade.


The same could have been said about World of Warcraft, but here we are with WoW Classic.

Digital experiences can be recreated, especially if motivated by profit. What won't be created are some of those moments that were unforeseen consequences (e.g. the Seed of Corruption exploit in WoW)


Also, all of these gaming events are recorded for later viewing. I can experience Fortnite EXACTLY as it was when the event took place.


You can experience a recording of it (and even those may be taken down) but you cannot experience the game itself.


I fully agree with you, but anyway an online game cannot be repeated once the community has moved on. For example my son says that fifa, a soccer game that gets a new version every year is not the same after one year: the whole community has moved on the next version and thus you'll be playing alone to the preceding version.


> Where can I send a kid to learn to play with software and not have it all break six months later, rendering the learning useless?

If you had a Pentium 1 PC, would you not still be able to run DOS and BASIC on it? Software "breaking" only happens if you let it - you can still use Windows 95, or XP, and run all those old programs that no longer work. If you have a copy of Flash 4 you can still run that on supported hardware, make media using it, and probably still have people with modern Flash installations be able to play it back?

The difference between the pinball machine and video game is not so wide a chasm. The vogue of pinball came and went, and now it is a small community hobby. Hobbies come and go - just look at the resurgence in Dungeons and Dragons the last 10 years adjacent to a huge decline in "AAA" PC game RPGs.

In the same light, while the Fortnite gamer might never be able to re-experience the event that just passed, there are thousands playing Doom maps written in the mid 90s today on engines refined through decades of hobbyist volunteer work to provide features not even often seen in modern titles. And simultaneously there are new Doom maps being made all the time, entire games (look up the Adventures of Square) made with its engine, etc. That technology is now over 25 years "obsolete" but lives on through its community.

You touch on it - but it really does matter if you own it. All these transient experiences being offered as a moment of engagement by corporations all of which are held under lock and key and never see a bidirectional creative process between maker and consumer are all vapid and empty. The digital experiences that endure are those that go both ways, and that everyone involved can lay claim to and participate in.

Modern video games are themeparks, but the tooling available through projects like GZDoom, OpenMW, Godot, etc are sandboxes for creativity that no corporation can take away. This is why the free software movement even began, and why it has only gained relevance as technology has permeated society and culture.

But that concept extends beyond just video games - Blender makes its open movies, there are repositories and communities around free music, art, etc. Communities built around shared worlds all licensed permissively to encourage participation and collaboration in opposition to the common proprietary reality of creative products being weaponized against their own fans through copyright to reject participation. You just have to look for them - they don't have the billions in advertising to permeate your every waking second of consumptive behavior.


You brought up Doom, I'm still mapping for Quake. Quake and Doom are awesome because they are indeed sandboxes with open source code that you can play with at will. Also, these older games are quite a bit less complicated to make content for than some of the newer engines like UE4.


> Software "breaking" only happens if you let it

I don't think this is realistically true in the age of cloud services and forced, automatic updates.

Maybe it is if you painstakingly stick to decades-old software or FOSS - but this will mean you're missing out on a lot of progress made in modern software.

(edit:)

> ...and probably still have people with modern Flash installations be able to play it back?

Even if you got Flash running on your old PC, this is where things would break. Browsers deliberately increase the friction and technical expertise needed to enable Flash content, with the openly stated goal to drop Flash support completely in the mid-to-near future.

Learning Flash might still be a fun experience if you can keep it on the PC it's produced - but if you want your kid to pass their movies on to anyone else, Flash is nowadays a dead-end.

I agree though with the Doom thing. My suspicion is that in 20 years, many of today's games will be forgotten but people will likely still play FFIV on emulator - not because some artistic quality were better but simply because you can.


> My suspicion is that in 20 years, many of today's games will be forgotten but people will likely still play FFIV on emulator - not because some artistic quality were better but simply because you can.

Inn 20 years, emulators will probably progress enough that the (non-server-based) games people still care about will be playable -- anything where there's no server, or the server is just a DRM check and all the gameplay happens clientside. Some of the servers will probably be replicable locally for single-player or small-group play, too; I think there's already reverse-engineered server emulation for some online-multiplayer DS games, some of it even having been made before the official servers went offline.


Godot, Doom, and Blender are all great but none have the level of approachability that Hypercard and Flash had for the amateur. They allow determined creators to soar, but they aren't enabling people who would not otherwise be creative to make interactive media in the same way. The 2d/3d gulf is a huge one to cross, and that may be the main issue. There was also something very wyswyg about both flash and hypercard-though Godot definitely approaches that. It's just hitting it's stride popularity-wise, so I guess where people take it remains to be seen.


What a lovely, lyrical comment that inspires engagement. Let me start with a question, what do you mean by "things pressed up closest":

>culture where all the things pressed up closest to the digital universe just disappear into a little footnote on a wiki page saying "yes, this happened". Memes, blog posts, videos, games, etc.

Is this just a fancy way of saying "digital things that are very cheap/free to distribute"? If that's true, then I'd argue that digital things have an outsized impact in people's lives, even more than physical things sometimes. After all, whats more important to you, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or the car you're currently driving?

And since that's the case, what's wrong with charging money for data that was expensive to make, even if it's super cheap to distribute? I feel like that's far more honest than giving away free entertainment data that's been marred by an ad stream.

I think the thing that's pressed up closest is a briefly filled container of code (the browser), that briefly redirects a server thread in front of your eyes. You have a chance to affect it's future course. But there is no ownership at all, not even of the blob that corresponds to the runtime image.

I think its funny that open-source software has created a world where software is even more proprietary than ever - not even the binaries every reach your machine! In that world, distributing binaries only doesn't really seam so bad!


Not bad work for a closed-source platform, enabling all that ownership.


Um, it's possible to play simulated pinball games that work just like the real ones except the "table" is a huge-ass monitor. Recreations of classic tables, like Addams Family are available as well as entirely new tables like Portal that do things no physical pinball table can do.

Sure, it's not like playing the real thing. Neither, in most cases, are emulated video games.




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