[the_af]

It comes from an essay by Paul Graham as far as I know: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

> "One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms."

I see nothing that would indicate this is an ad, covert or otherwise. It was posted by Jason Scott -- whose reputation should be familiar to readers of HN -- on the Internet Archive, and has a legitimate reason for being posted there. This is as good as it gets for "not for profit" and "not an adverticle".

[prvc]

>"not for profit" and "not an adverticle"

Neither of those cases excludes the possibility that the article was influenced by a PR campaign in some way (author's intentions are in fact irrelevant to this question), in this case for a recently-released, and apparently not particularly great documentary by Netflix.

[notafraudster]

The causal chain is obvious: the documentary surfaced interest in the game; this led to a call to try to locate the lost game; it was located and uploaded on archive.org (a library) for preservation's sake. You can consume the game with or without watching the documentary or subscribing to Netflix and no one was compensated.

Of course the documentary and the release of the game are connected, but in precisely the opposite way from what you propose.

[textfiles]

Actually, no. We had GayBlade up and emulated earlier this year, completely unaware of the documentary. Causal chain is actually: People working with Ryan Best to tell his story at something called RAINBOW ARCADE, the world’s first exhibition on LGBTQIA* video game history at Schwules Museum Berlin. This includes multiple groups of people and museums. That's early 2019.

During that point, the story of GayBlade and Ryan Best become known to the HIGH SCORE production team, and Best is interviewed for it and his story told.

Late 2019, Best discovers some original materials and they are used to recover the game.

Early 2020, Internet Archive hosts a copy of the game emulated, and LGTBQ Game Archive does an extensive writeup on the game.

Mid 2020, HIGH SCORE is presented to Netflix, and a card is inserted into the documentary to indicate it was found. (I'm finding not many people have seen the card.)

[the_af]

Well, this is a post by Jason Scott of the Internet Archive. I trust him. And he posted the source code and online playable game.

(In a submarine ad, the intentions pretty much matter. It refers to an article directly commissioned or written by a PR firm).

[textfiles]

Well, as you saw, someone brought up "Death of The Author" (i.e. I may not even know I'm posting an ad) so there's that.

But.

The blog post is 100% posted because of the Netflix documentary. It's causing literally hundreds of people to go 'Now I hope they found GayBlade! How do we find it!' and also a screenshot of my twitter account (which I had nothing to do with and became aware of after people starting pinging me) is in it.

The GayBlade stuff went up in January and was announced at that time, by the LGTBQ Game Archive (this was mostly their gig, the whole project to find and recover it).

Internally, our social media and outreach folk went "Hey, did you see we're getting mentioned a lot as people find GayBlade on the archive? We should do a blog entry about it." I was hesitant for the reasons people here seem to bringing up, i.e. cynicism that we must be doing it for money or something. But the fact is: we did it, we worked with Ryan Best and Strong Museum and LGBTQ Game Archive to make Gayblade playable (and also downloadable, when I realized nobody had taken that step). So why NOT talk about it, in case people missed it?

(It was also easier to point to the blog entry than endlessly tweet at people asking.)

There you go. Thanks for the trust.

[prvc]

Thanks for responding with that clarification. I'd like to clarify, in turn, that my original post was intended more as observation than accusation. No malicious intent imputed!

One thing I would like to add, that I think we would both agree on, is that regardless of everyone's exact motivations and the actual causal chain of events, the post is still, de facto, part of the miasma of publicity for the series. Anyway, I appreciate your work, and that of archive.org.

[textfiles]

I think there's been a discussed theory that if something gets public attention, and people respond to it, even if they're not intending to, that they're contributing to the promotion of that item. That goes back many decades.

I don't mind that discussion but I definitely don't want people thinking in any way we got money to write the entry; we simply put into a formal entry that we've had this for a while. A popular awareness of something we do helps a non-profit, so we'll clarify the context of it. I think we're both in agreement the more people know of our work, the better.

[prvc]

>I definitely don't want people thinking in any way we got money to write the entry

Certainly; archive.org has been singularly beyond reproach in that regard.

[the_af]

Thanks for the clarification! I definitely consider you and the Internet Archive part of the "good guys", and well deserving of my trust.