Manifestly they can be. It may be illegal, but that’s different. Jason Scott has been posting scads of old commercial games to Archive.org; if your goal is “for everyone to go in and experience” those games, he’s succeeded wildly.
Some authors do exactly that.
Hmmmm… I happen to agree that, in general, it’s best for someone to be able to remove something he’s no longer proud of… but that’s not the way anything works, is it? Once it’s released, it’s released. Once it’s done, it’s done. It’s that way in every artform, every production. Like it or not, once someone releases something… they release it. It’s done. It’s in the whole big wide world, it’s out there.
There are very few things in life one can go back and erase…
True… well, for my part, I have scores of them. They’re not part of my online collection, but should the day come, or should they be required, I have them. I’d be glad to give something back to the community (seeing as I definitely won’t be making games!)
When these discussions about preservation come up, I always feel obliged to mention how I feel like it’d be nice if the IF Archive (or a similar resource) kept earlier revisions of games, too, as these become more and more historically interesting as time goes on. I’m not familiar with all of its releases, but I can imagine people being curious about the differences between every version of Curses… and even small games can have interesting changes from version to version.
The thing is, even if the IF Archive had an option to store old versions when uploading new ones, I don’t know how many authors would use it so it’s obviously a complicated issue.
I would imagine, and suggest, that as far as the archive goes maybe just the most updated version is necessary, because that’s the one the author finally intended to be played, and an extensive changelog - complete with spoilers, and fair warning of it too - to illustrate all those differences.
More work for the author, though, I’m afraid, and it’s hard to tell, when you start revising your game, whether it’s going to be so important - so played - so fondly looked back on - that anyone is ever going to be interested in that extensive a changelog. Right now we find it fascinating to see how Curses evolved - back then Nelson was interested only in bettering and bettering his game.
(I am not aware whether the Curses example is a good one; Nelson seems the sort of author who would indeed document changes extensively. But it suffices for this conversation. We could look at The Mulldoon Legacy for another example, I suppose)
Isn’t this what was done with the Infocom games? I think there’s a site somewhere detailling all changes between versions. Or is it just some bug-fixes?
I’ve thought that too. It wouldn’t be a change to the uploading process; just a policy change to keep the old version somewhere. (The annoying part is figuring out where.)
But it’s one of those things that feels not really worthwhile if we didn’t start ten years ago.
Hm, well, with Dropbox, I certainly want to keep the revisions I have & that makes it easy to do personally–just provide an IFDB link. And while revision logs can’t show everything, if you have an original version of a game, a list of logs, and a latest version, then someone can imagine: oh, this is how THIS works, and so forth.
I’ve tried to keep pretty accurate revision logs as well as old walkthroughs, just so people see how things get more sensible and less buggy. It’s fun to look back on what I did. But I don’t know if anyone would have the patience to go through my game, or find it worthwhile!
So I think the historical interest is interesting, but perhaps it can only go so far, so yeah, it may not be worth the effort on ifarchive’s end. I’m not sure if there is IFComp original comp and November 15 versions on the archive, even. But it might be a good place to start, if anyone wanted to.
When a person pours a part of themselves into a work, especially an expressive work of literature or art, and somehow all copies of it are destroyed, it is a sort of tragedy. There’s a part of them there, a part of something they gave birth to, that is gone forever. Like a disappearing god who, when he is forgotten, fades away forever.
Agreed. Preservation is one of the reasons I think people should provide source code of their works under a license that allows for redistribution, modification, etc.
Whether a work is “commercial” in nature doesn’t actually matter to the question of “is it covered by copyright?” Thanks to things like the Berne Convention (which most countries of the world have signed on to), things are placed under copyright automatically just by virtue of having been made, regardless of what the author’s intention is.
By not otherwise declaring anything in particular about what people can or cannot do, works go under the default of “All Rights Reserved”, which disallows all of the things I mentioned (which is what most works seem to fall under, in my experience.)
Why the legal permission to do those things? Copying and redistribution because backups are important. Also so that an archive can be legally created (look at some of the legal challenges that the Internet Archive has experienced and you’ll see why.) With the our current so-called “permission culture” it’s far safer to be able to point to something and say that you have permission to be doing it. Finally, modification because you never know about the future - The game may need porting to a new or different development systems, etc. Such efforts are much easier when the source code is available along with with the permission to make derivative works, which a port to a newer or different development system would assuredly be.
Hopefully all of this helps to show that a policy of letting people legally modify and redistribute works helps to move toward good public policy.