Games of Theseus

I have made something of an effort to say that video games, if not whatever mysterious quality 'art' would be, are at least something more than a dopamine generator. I won't say all games are like this, and that's what this post is going to be about.

Let me put it this way, the most coveted award in all of film, for example, is the Oscars Best Picture award. A prestigious event's most prestigious award. 2016's Best Picture was this little film called Spotlight. If you've never heard of it, I haven't either, but it's a film you could probably watch today the same way as it was in 2016.

The equivalent of such for video games is The Game Awards show's Game of the Year. Putting aside any criticisms I might have of the show itself, people do watch this show and do pay attention to what wins game of the year. Spotlight's videogaming equivalent in 2016 was Overwatch.

If you're familiar with Overwatch, you may have noticed the problem already. At the time, it was perhaps a deserving title for it, I can definetly tell you many games that took direct inspiration from Overwatch, but that's aside the point. The problem is, Overwatch isn't playable anymore. One of the sphere's supposedly most prestigious titles is, today, completely unplayable and completely missing.

You probably know the drama. Overwatch 1 released, but then Overwatch 2 came out and despite barely counting as a sequel they pushed it by making Overwatch 1 unplayable, despite having charged people money for it. I'd know, I'm one of the people who got scammed, poopoo on me for thinking that Blizzard would do something about my cash.

But even aside from that, Overwatch was far different from its GOTY form by the time 2 came out. It had balance patches stacked on top of balance patches, entire characters identities being changed, entire new heroes and entire new mechanics constantly being added... In spite of the title, I won't say this is completely different, but it's a hell of a lot for a game to get.

I constantly need to reach for other mediums to explain the absurdity of this, but let's try sticking to videogames for now. Imagine, if you will, that you simply could not play the original NES Mario. Over the years it was constantly updated to have its graphics switched around, and levels had been changed to be unrecognizable.

If this had all of the sudden just happened people would take notice, but with the way online games have tended to work people have gotten used to this concept and actually support it now, or even go as far as to treat it as a natural thing that will occur and we can't do anything about it.

This sounds a lot like the Stop Killing Games movement, maybe there's a part of that, but it goes even further. Even if Overwatch was still playable, 2016's Overwatch would not be. How many balance patches and new heroes and events or what not can you run and add before Overwatch simply stops being Overwatch?

The philosophical answer to this is that because it's called Overwatch, it's Overwatch regardless of what form it takes, but I mean if I paid money for the damn game in 2016 why can't I play the 2016 version that I paid money for in any capacity? You can't run your own servers for this game, so you can't even create hacky little mods that roughly try to undo balance changes assuming they wouldn't officially support it.

I say Overwatch so much, really this is a problem with a lot of things, even TF2, in fact that game has it much worse because its fundamental identity had been changed through updates. Particularly, the Meet Your Match update as well as the general direction of online gaming has convinced people that Valve will one day shut down TF2!

If you've played, and I mean actually played like I have through nearly the game's entire existence up to this point, you would know this is very silly. TF2 is unlike Overwatch, you can actually host your own servers. Valve have provided long term support for games like CS 1.6, so the minimum amount of effort of keeping the master server up to display servers is hardly a problem.

But even if it was, you can just join directly. Or utilize versions of TF2 that don't require you to use Steam at all. Problems here are still twofold.

Number one is obvious, this is dubiously legal. To watch a movie from 2007, you just buy it from somewhere and play it. To play this theoretically totally defunct TF2, you'd have to pirate it. You'd have to commit a criminal offense to have the privilege of enjoying this thing in any way, shape, or form.

Number two, how many people would actually realize that they could do this? The answer is "very few", and because it's so few then nobody would play and the game would just end up 'dying' anyways. People are simply too used to the idea that once support for a game ends, that game is effectively dead.

I suppose that's why people don't mind when their games die, to them the idea of game death is just a natural one, and the idea that you should have to be a criminal to continue playing them is just as natural. There's not that many games I know of genuinely dying, a lot of the old MMOs I used to play back when I still cared about that shit exist on old versions in some form or another today.

I'm digressing. This all being said, even the "extreme" side of "I want to continue playing my games, thanks" still doesn't really acknowledge how games change between versions, and how those versions can be entirely different games if those changes are fundamental enough.

What am I getting at with all of this? Well, why can't we live in a world where people are free to play all of these various different versions? TTRPGs for example, 5e is the most recent D&D but you're still free to go back and play all of the older editions if you please. WotC would absolutely try to burn down your house and all of the gaming shit in it if it meant they could make 5 more dollars, but they aren't allowed to.

Why can't I get some VPN that works, a couple of pals, and host a 2016 version of Overwatch? Why am I not free to choose between all of the different versions Overwatch has to play?

Let's take MMOs too. Why can't various people host their own Mabinogis? Legally, at least. People do, in fact, host their own Mabinogi servers, which proves this is theoretically a possibility. The only thing is that they're all doing it illegally, on versions of the game obtained dubiously, without Nexon's permission or any legal backing.

The only reason they get away with it is because they're more trouble than its worth. They cannot advertise their servers, they cannot grow too big. If they were any competitor for Nexon's official Mabinogi servers, they would be dealt with swiftly and painfully.

And that's a shame because these servers do show what you can do with this self-hosted approach. The ones that exist add new content onto the game taking it in a unique direction not thought of by Nexon themselves, and they can redefine and shape what this game is and will be in their own images. In other words, they can mod it and homebrew it.

So why don't we live in this universe where, say, Nexon can just sell one time purchase server licenses to people? This isn't selling the game persay, just the right to make a server and make some money off of that server to keep it up. You could maybe sell the game separetely and have people set up their own servers for it that are smaller in scope in case not everyone is interested in making big centralized hubs.

The reason they can't just allow this fun approach is because it doesn't seem to make as much money as the abusive FOMO approach where you basically need to be playing the game 24/7 or else you'll miss out on every small aspect of it. Miss a specific update in a specific time, a specific event? Too bad! Better hope they re-run it!

Nexon in particular leans heavily into this FOMO approach, every other time I glance at the game's official servers they're running another event that can be summed up to "log in, wait for 2 hours, recieve prize." Every single one of their games as well falls into the 2016 Overwatch dilemma, being that they're games that constantly get updated and therefore constantly get redefined.

These games aren't just something that can exist in a neat little bubble like anything else, they have to undergo unnecessary decay and rebirth and we can only look back at historical records to imagine what it was back then.

Let me give you an example of a game that does the opposite: Space Station 13. Some guy made it, nobody knows where he went, and then a bunch of people took that framework and designed like 50 different flavors of it that they all host. Ignoring the fact that I think Space Station 13 in general is a pile of shit, it's a very positive example of how this approach can preserve games.

If this were entirely a centralized affair it would've died a long time ago, but it can continue to live on and it can be made into many different forms. Goonstation-style and /tg/ style are two very different kinds of SS13, even if they share similarities. On top of this, there have been versions based around being entirely different from the typical SS13 affair such as Dorf Station, which is all about building, and a gamemode that expands upon aliens versus humans.

If none of that strikes your fancy, you can host all of the different older, public versions and hopefully separate yourself as much as possible from SS13's terrible community.

Fuck where was I going with this, now that I write it all out my thoughts are jumbled and confused.

I guess after all of this is what I'm saying is that I'd wish for online games to not have to be so FOMO-dependent, and that I'd wish every single version of a game could independently remain playable rather than the former versions of the game effectively being deleted.

If you do consider video games as some sort of art, would you so callously want things to be deleted like this? Imagine if we just burnt the Mona Lisa or some shit. Oops, past its expiration date everybody, it's time for it to go bye bye permanently!

People don't do that to such works because those works have a real value to them that isn't just a matter of dollar signs. Can you say the same about video games? Is there any big video game that, if given the chance, the developer would not try to stranglehold purely for economic gains?

If something like Mabinogi were art, then is it okay that the different variations of it are gone for good, and that you can only legally enjoy the modern version of it, despite how different it is from its past? Is TF2 the same? Is Overwatch the same?

People from the year 2024 can go far back in time to a century ago to see masterpieces made then. People in the year 2124 going back a century ago will find so many different titles that existed, at one point, and then have to piece together what those titles were like based on historical clues. Like trying to piece together how the Romans lived from what survives of their civilization.

Fuck, you know what? People from 2024 already have to do this with the games released in their era. I talk about this like it's a far gone problem none of us are going to experience, we're fucking LIVING IT RIGHT NOW! YOU ALREADY CAN'T PLAY THE 2016 VERSION OF OVERWATCH! THIS GAME THAT'S A SUPPOSED MASTERPIECE IN THE MEDIUM! The only way you could see 2016's Overwatch is if you looked up footage of it taken around the time, or written accounts of the game!

Maybe I'm the insane one. Games really are just disposable plastics. You buy games like you buy Coke bottles, you drink em up and then when you're done you're supposed to throw it away and never see it again. This isn't art, this is commercial diarreha.

I'll leave with this, the Star Wars Special Editions are controversial to say the least. Star Wars was revolutionary culturally and for films as a whole, and everyone knows this because you immediately understood what I meant when I said "Star Wars".

George Lucas and pals essentially took the entire film and changed it, adding in stuff pioneered far after the original's release. Random CGI shit, references to the prequel films, it's relatively minor in hindsight but to fans it's a massive slap in the face. The Library of Congress, despite wishing to preserve the originals, only ever got Lucas's Special Surprise in the mail.

These Star Wars Speical Editions are essentially video game updates. They're the Overwatch 2 to Star Wars's Overwatch 1. If the LoC were to, for some reason, want to archive these games as cultural landmarks, what the hell would they archive? There's only one kind of Special Edition per Star Wars film, but there's like a hundred different versions of Overwatch over the course of its ridiculous updating schedule.

Maybe I'm an old fogey, but games don't really need this. Games can simply exist. They don't need to be constantly renewed for their existences to be justified, barring the usual preservation efforts that old things tend to go through. But no, these are flashy products sold for money and the updates are to make them even flashier and flashier.

I'm a fool. I live in a paralell universe, or perhaps an insane asylum. I scream out from the bars "GAMES DON'T HAVE TO DIE AND BE DESTROYED!" and if anyone does hear it then they must think I've lost it a long time ago. Poor fellow, cracked under the pressure I see. Everyone knows it'll all just disappear one day. That's just how it is.