ok so this is not gonna be a really long thesis or anything, but this is something that I've been thinking about a lot lately

people often compare video games to movies or describe them as "cinematic", the most recent example of this is Heavy Rain, but it's been going on for years

but obviously no matter what video games will always be different than movies obviously, but one difference between gaming and movies and as a matter of fact gaming and all other forms of entertainment and art is time, or specifically the passage of it

recently EA announced that they're going to shut down servers for various online games http://www.destructoid.com/say-goodbye-to-online-functionality-in-these-ea-games-164055.phtml#commentbox and this got me thinking how video games are a pretty finite thing, trapped in the era in which they were released (or more generally the console generation they were released in), we might say we don't care about these games being shut down because no one plays them, but what about your favorite online games today? will they be shut down a few years from now? Microsoft announced that they're shutting down Xbox Live for the Xbox 1 entirely meaning the experience of playing all those games online is now a thing of the past (including Halo 2), you also have to wonder about the 360 and the RROD, when Microsoft stops producing 360s and stops replacing them when they break, will we one day live in a world where there are literally no functioning 360s left? I can easily imagine a world where with no Xbox Live support for the 360 and all the consoles eventually breaking over time only people who modify or repair their consoles will be able to play anything on them

basically what I'm trying to say is that I can watch a movie from the 1980's as easily as I could watch a movie made today, I just buy it on dvd or movie companies even spend money to release it on a modern format such as a blu ray, but when it comes to gaming video games companies seem to not care about a game if it's old, "who plays that anymore?" they may ask themselves "why would we bother making that available to people?" it would be as if movie companies never invented home video and assumed no one would want to watch a movie again after it stops playing in theaters, this used to be the reality, before home video the only way to watch a movie was to see in theaters or see it on television, did you miss a movie or want to see one again? you were SOL

to expand the metaphor I can a novel from centuries of years ago as I easily as I could anything new, there are these amazing things called libraries that have been around for a while, video games though are like books that no one bothers to maintain or reprint and the pages wither over time

so I can watch a movie or read a book from the 80's easy as pie, but if I was to play a video game from the 80's and the actual cartridge on the actual console as opposed to roms or whatnot that would require me hitting up Ebay or trying to find a used copy and hooking it up to an older tv, or even if I was to play a game like Ocarina of Time on the N64 it would require the same effort

but what about PC games? with those older games have compatibility issues with modern OSs that require a lot of work to get running

so bottom line if gaming is going to ever be on the same level of an art form as movies or books it needs to think about the future and the preservation of games, we need a way to play any older game just as easily as we could play a modern one, game companies need to value their back catalogs instead of letting them be lost to the sands of time, there needs to be a way that future generations of gamers (I'm talking decades from now) can play the classics of the past