[johnnyjeans]

It is. I have very little respect for artists with sentimentality over such trivial bullshit. Speaking as someone who makes games. The jewel case doesn't matter.

It detracts from the thing-itself, like a showroom car that travels everywhere in a hermetically sealed container. That's not a car anymore, it's waste. Just because it gets driven 5 miles a year doesn't change shit. If someones spending money to preserve my games, I'd rather it'd just be a tarball in a well maintained magnetic tape vault available on-line than some aristocratic funko pop collection for a tiny amount of people to pog at in person.

[DocTomoe]

You may not have experienced gaming in the 1980s and 1990s. Games back then were more than just a stream of bits. They had physical maps (sometimes on cloth, not paper). They had actual manuals (and many of them were art in itself). Disks were in strange, unusual colors, later CDs had shapes, or hidden audio tracks. I vividly remember a copy-protection scheme of black, slightly shiny ink on black paper to prevent photocopying (to read one of the 400 random codes, you had to tilt the page just right.

That needs to be preserved. Just making a digital copy isn't enough.

[johnnyjeans]

You correctly intuit that I am young, but I do have a lot of experience with that era of games. They could be reliably played on any shitbox I could commandeer in high school (early 2010s.)

Thus I've cut through a laundry list of silver and golden age cRPGs (and other genres, of course) with cute copy protection and complex manuals. Often times the relevant information was included as a text file (maybe not in the same format it came in), sometimes the copy protection was patched right out of the game (the Scene in the 20th century was just that crazy.) I never particularly cared. I was there for the game, not the auxiliary accoutrements. To some degree I understand the sentimentality and attachment if you grew up with the tactile materials accompanying the game. That being said, I don't feel like my experience of Ultima 3 was lessened because I lacked the cloth map any more than I feel like my experience of Wasteland was ruined because I could ctrl+f the copy protection challenges.

[EA-3167]

The issue here is that a picture of a book is not a book, a copy of a game is the same game. Barring people with excellent and well-adjusted monitors looking at uncompressed images, the pics we see are (potentially excellent, but still) approximations of the original.

With software the notion of an original is meaningless though.

[duskwuff]

> The issue here is that a picture of a book is not a book, a copy of a game is the same game.

That... depends. A lot of older games shipped with physical artifacts which were an important part of the game: manuals, code wheels, custom controllers, "feelies" in Infocom games, etc. You can't easily make a copy of those. (And preserving them isn't just a matter of throwing a copy on a hard disk.)

[EA-3167]

This is a good point that I overlooked, thanks for the correction.

[johnnyjeans]

A picture of every page of a book combined in a collection is a copy of that book, and for all intents and purposes is the same book. This is because the overwhelming majority of books, the text is what matters. Gravity's Rainbow is still Gravity's Rainbow whether it's in a PDF or the very first printed copy. To extend that to games, it doesn't matter if you're playing the MS-DOS version of X-COM or OpenXcom.

And for that matter, if you're concerned about minute granular details of visual media being an integral component of the meaning and essence of that media, you should be far more concerned with whether or not the cultural context is one that's even accessible to you in a meaningful capacity, because most are not. The whimsy of the Mona Lisa in person isn't actually all that deep.

[DocTomoe]

> To extend that to games, it doesn't matter if you're playing the MS-DOS version of X-COM or OpenXcom.

Oh boy, are you mistaken. The 1990s version of XCOM was a mess. If it wasn't enough that it was hard as a nail, it also was buggy beyond belief. To many of us, X-COM (and to a lesser extend the reskin 'Terror from the deep') was what started the 'compulsively save the game after every move' trend. OpenXcom in comparison is a lot more forgiving.

> The whimsy of the Mona Lisa in person isn't actually all that deep.

That is in large parts because you never get to experience the original as you are the copies. You always have a thousand tourists around you, all loud, all pushing to get a glimpse of the real painting once in their lives. They do not understand art needs time to work, impressions do not come between a hotdog and a trip to a café - that is why in most galleries, you see little benches that invite you to sit down and immerse yourself in a picture.

Similarly ... just giving the games to anyone without context will lead to people pushing and prodding, getting bored or frustrated easily, and eventually losing interest. For those people, it doesn't matter if you give them a masterpiece like Ultima III or junk. They consume, they move on. Abandonware sites exist for them. A scholarly archive of gaming history, not generally available to the public, still is useful.

[EA-3167]

For many books that's true, for the book in this example (The Book of Kells) it isn't. Having seen it in pictures and then in person, the difference is notable, partly because of the difference between a camera and a human eye, and partly because what you get in person isn't a 2D map of a 3D object.