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YouTube “Let's Play”s are preserving video game history

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Re: YouTube “Let's Play”s are preserving video game history

#81

Post by jplayer01 »

surye wrote: post #71
jordigh wrote: post #12

Call me old-fashioned, but I often prefer screenshot-based LPs. LParchive is a great resource for those. I did enjoy Void Burger's video LP of Silent Hill but I liked that she used subtitles for commentary instead of her voice (I think the only time she spoke was to grumble after a particularly frustrating game over).

This makes me think, YouTube could really use multiple audio tracks that can be selected by the end user for commentary in general, not just LPs.

I don't understand why this isn't already a thing. The audio is already separate from the video on their end.

Re: YouTube “Let's Play”s are preserving video game history

#82

Post by degenerate »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #77
cabaalis wrote: post #63

Non-techies that are my age don't get the value of let's plays. When I was a kid, it was NES and then Sega. You'd go over to your friend's house and would take turns playing Mario, Ninja Gaiden, Contra, etc. When you weren't playing, you were watching your friend play. Sure, some games were multi-player, but not all of them. Let's plays capture that same feeling of watching your friend play the game.

If your statement was accurate there would be no thriving game streaming services like Twitch, UStream, etc. Watching people play is like watching sports: it's enjoyable the better the player is; it's boring if they're just fooling around with the controls. Also, like sports, the enjoyment improves the more you know about the game being played.

I second your opinion. Watching my friend play NES was sometimes frustrating because he played so poorly. I wanted to nab the controller and help him so many times.

Twitch wouldn't be fun to watch if everyone sucked. If I am watching someone on twitch who I think is the best at the game, and I found out some other gamer X is better, I will watch that better player if all other factors are equal.

Re: YouTube “Let's Play”s are preserving video game history

#83

Post by akhilcacharya »

cobookman wrote: post #45
cosarara wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A 10TiB HDD is only 150$ retail. Where is that? I can't find anything so cheap.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-easystore-10tb-external-usb-...

The bizarre thing is I can't find bare drives cheaper than that on Amazon - how are they making a profit on these?

Re: YouTube “Let's Play”s are preserving video game history

#85

Post by tzakrajs »

nullandvoid wrote: post #26
SkyBelow wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this true of any entity? Even a Museum will eventually have to pay bills and have to decide to downsize or make changes. Even government funded preservation can have voters decide it isn't worth the costs and preservation can be dropped. I do think private companies will be the ones most fastest to drop preservation and the ones least likely to look for external entity to swap preservation with, thus making You…

I don't think this is a fair comparison as a museum is normally opened with the sole desire of preserving history ( Profit is often desired but not the incentive for opening ) Do you think google bought YouTube originally to preserve history or to create a new line of profit and enhance its brand?

Considering their mission statement about making the worlds information universally accessible and contemporary goals around literary archival it’s not a stretch to believe they had history on their mind.

Re: YouTube “Let's Play”s are preserving video game history

#86

Post by ma2rten »

duiker101 wrote: post #17
cobookman wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You overestimate the cost of storage at this scale. It's totally worth them storing the data given the marginal cost. A 10TiB HDD is only 150$ retail. These videos can likely be stored in less than 200MiB on average. Storage has gotten cheaper YoY

Just a few days ago there was a discussion about how Google is now indexing less contented from a years ago[1]. If Google can't keep indexes which are relatively inexpensive why should they keep videos that are more expensive and possibly no one will watch? Especially as the length and number of videos is increasing faster than ever? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19762907

Google might have thrown out some old pages, but the internet keeps growing exponentially. I highly doubt that Google is indexing less pages than a couple years ago.

Re: YouTube “Let's Play”s are preserving video game history

#87

Post by airstrike »

nullandvoid wrote: post #26
SkyBelow wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this true of any entity? Even a Museum will eventually have to pay bills and have to decide to downsize or make changes. Even government funded preservation can have voters decide it isn't worth the costs and preservation can be dropped. I do think private companies will be the ones most fastest to drop preservation and the ones least likely to look for external entity to swap preservation with, thus making You…

I don't think this is a fair comparison as a museum is normally opened with the sole desire of preserving history ( Profit is often desired but not the incentive for opening ) Do you think google bought YouTube originally to preserve history or to create a new line of profit and enhance its brand?

Furthermore, museums curate what they hold whereas YouTube probably has far more i can haz cheezburger videos than humanity will ever need

Re: YouTube “Let's Play”s are preserving video game history

#88

Post by tasty_freeze »

Noos wrote: post #34

I don't know if they are. Emulating games is not really preserving them in a sense, because it can't reproduce the hardware or experience as it actually was very well. Like you can play Ridge Racer type 4 in emulation, but part of that game's history was the special controller it was bundled with, which let you twist the middle of it to enable analog steering wheel control. Like you can't emulate Boktai without the s…

As someone who has spent thousands of hours archiving documents related to certain old computers and writing a few emulators, I have to admit your comment is irritating to me.

Of course, emulation is going to lose something compared to the original experience; nobody knows better than the person writing the emulator. But nobody is stepping up to build the exact reproduction that you are holding out for. Even if someone came along and built reproduction controllers and cabinets, would you be willing to spend the money for them?

It is far better to capture the ROMs and 90% of the experience than to let it all slip away because of purity issues.

Besides, part of the TRS-80 experience was unreliable behavior. I'm quite glad that emulators don't attempt to reproduce it.

Re: YouTube “Let's Play”s are preserving video game history

#89

Post by Qwertystop »

minimaxir wrote: post #60

It's worth noting that video game LPs as a format in general have been on a downtown lately, likely because streaming (a la Twitch) has been on the rise, is more profitable, and requires substantially less post-production work. The implosion of the Something Awful forums which incentivized the creation of high production-value LPs didn't help.

What happened to SA?

Re: YouTube “Let's Play”s are preserving video game history

#90

Post by Kiro »

Noos wrote: post #34

I don't know if they are. Emulating games is not really preserving them in a sense, because it can't reproduce the hardware or experience as it actually was very well. Like you can play Ridge Racer type 4 in emulation, but part of that game's history was the special controller it was bundled with, which let you twist the middle of it to enable analog steering wheel control. Like you can't emulate Boktai without the s…

I've been a gamer for 30 years and I don't remember a single game where the controller or hardware matter so much that a "Let's Play" wouldn't do it justice.
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