Amid More Game Shutdowns Occurring, John Carmack Weighs In On Preservation (original) (raw)

from the preserve-culture! dept

The conversation about preservation in the video game industry is continuing at a nice pace. Honestly, the most encouraging part of all of this, as someone who has been writing about this topic for several years now, is seeing how much more mainstream the topic has become. It used to be that certain servers or services being shut down by publishers, thereby breaking the games that people had bought, mostly resulted in shrugs an utterances of, “Oh well, thems the shits.” But at present, far more people are acknowledging that these games, online or otherwise, are pieces of human culture worthy of preservation.

And if you’re looking for a true titan in the gaming industry weighing in on the topic, well, you just got it. Amid the shutdown of several games recently, John Carmack gave a comprehensive statement to UploadVR on the topic. Amid all kinds of discussion about the shutdown of Echo VR by Meta, he goes right into the preservation angle.

After noting up front that companies are far too quick to shut down games in general, purely over potentially misguided profit motives, he then launches into what really should be SOP for game makers moving forward.

Every game should make sure they still work at some level without central server support. Even when not looking at end of life concerns, being able to work when the internet is down is valuable. If you can support some level of LAN play for a multiplayer game, the door is at least open for people to write proxies in the future. Supporting user-run servers as an option can actually save on hosting costs, and also opens up various community creative avenues.

Be disciplined about your build processes and what you put in your source tree, so there is at least the possibility of making the project open source. Think twice before adding dependencies that you can’t redistribute, and consider testing with stubbed out versions of the things you do use. Don’t do things in your code that wouldn’t be acceptable for the whole world to see. Most of game development is a panicky rush to make things stop falling apart long enough to ship, so it can be hard to dedicated time to fundamental software engineering, but there is a satisfaction to it, and it can pay off with less problematic late stage development.

And at this point you really do have to keep in mind that Carmack very much knows what he’s talking about. After all, consider the early Doom games. Those games came out decades ago, yet they are still played regularly today. Why? Well, part of the reason is that they are great games! Other reasons are that there is a healthy modding community still making content for those games, and that nobody like Carmack or id Software has gotten in their way.

But what really allows that game to continue its popularity to today is the fact that there are no online or server requirements for it to work. The game is preserved digitally because, frankly, how could it not be? This is a stark difference from more modern games that either require online connectivity to servers that might disappear, or connectivity to online DRM servers, or, such as the NBA 2K series of games, suffer from what is essentially planned obsolescence.

And that’s what Carmack is really getting at. He’s advising that game makers code their games in such a way that the online check-ins and DRM checks either don’t exist at all or can be patched out once the publisher no longer wants to support the game. That way, if publishers themselves aren’t interested in preserving their own cultural output, museums, curators, and the general public could do it for them.

Filed Under: john carmack, ownership, video game preservation, video games