[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.