librarypunk - 092 - Preserving Worlds II: Preservinger

Episode Date: May 26, 2023

We’re talking about the latest season of Preserving Worlds! Video game preservation, indie media, archiving, animation, DIY, the Internet as a bad place! We close talking about the end: our deaths, our multiple digital deaths, and how they won’t coincide with each other. https://means.tv/programs/preservingworlds  https://twitter.com/DerekLMurphy  https://twitter.com/MitchellZemil  Media Mentioned https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrzKT-dFUjE - Lemon Demon video Shawn worked on https://rpgmaker.fandom.com/wiki/Yume_Nikki - Yume Nikki https://rpgmaker.net/games/2430/ - Space Funeral https://rpgmaker.net/games/6697/ - OFF https://rpgmaker.fandom.com/wiki/Ib - Ib https://www.youtube.com/@ToddintheShadows  https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/19/1073367/digital-life-isnt-permanent-google-twitter-inactive-accounts/

I'm Justin. I'm a Scholar Communications Library, and my pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library, and my pronouns are they them. I'm Jay. I'm a music library director, and my pronouns are he, him. And we have guests. Would you like to introduce yourselves? Sure, I'm Derek Murphy. I also work IT in a public library. Oh, and my pronouns are he, him. I'm Mitchell Zemmel. I'm an adjunct professor slash animator slash filmmaker, and my pronouns are he him. Welcome. I didn't know you worked a library IT. Oh, yeah. I, yeah, I'm a public librarian.

Used to be at a research library as a systems library, and now I'm in the public library doing IT. Yeah, basically administering an ILS and a lot of print software, my least favorite part of the job. Oh, yeah. Oh, God, I can, you and I could probably go on for a few hours, I'm sure. Yeah. I imagine Sadie, like Kubrick's staring right now. Like, that'll be everyone's favorite episode, right? The two hours of moaning about print software.

No, they'll love it. Yeah. But I think this will be a close second, which is we've brought you back to talk about the new season of preserving worlds. Preserving Worlds to Preserving Her. That's not the official title, but I pitched it. They were very generous in the rejection of my title, but I was told the brass that means TV decide all these things. So I wasn't, I was too late to give my idea in. It was like the Fincher Social Network like scene with like the just season two, keep it clean.

Yeah, yeah, that's what Derek told me. But no, so this is a show on Means TV. We had Mitchell on for season one. We are all big fans because it's a show about preserving these living. It's sort of like a living archival project. The things we talked about last time was, you know, you can preserve software, but what about the communities that keep these things going and you've preserved that by doing these documentary and interviews with them. And so I think it's a really valuable project and I'm really glad that it got another season. I hope, well,

I wonder, are there plans to keep it going? Is this it? What's what's going on there? Well, thank you for having us and for the kind words about the show. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, like, with season one, we were like, yeah, we're pretty much done. But then, you know, we got a lot of good ideas for season two, a lot of inspiration. We thought of some different, you know, thematics we could cover, different angles we could take. And so it ended up being very much worthwhile to return to the well. But

we might be done. I don't know. I mean, that's what I said last time, right? So maybe we'll do a season three at some point, but I feel like season two feels like a complete statement that closes with a good conclusion to the series, which is not out yet, but it should be interesting. Yeah, I'm looking forward to all the episodes. I've seen the

few, and we'll talk about the individual episodes, but I have been kind of interested in, you know, what it's been for you working with Means TV. Was there anything different about making the show this time around as opposed to the first time? Like, how is working with Ben Ben? I mean, I would say in general, they have a really great ethos of letting artists, creators, filmmakers do their thing, essentially, do what they do best. Even more so than season one, they were already kind of like, you know, do your thing and they had a couple maybe suggestions here or there of stuff they wanted to see. But with season two, especially, they were like, yeah, you know, you guys know what you're doing, keep it up, which is, you know, it just makes it that much easier to work with them.

Yeah, there's a level of trust there that is much appreciated and also just full creative freedom and control, which you really don't get all the time with documentary or with any film work, really. And I found that you were. especially don't get that when you're getting funded to make your thing. So, you know, this is a very rare situation we find ourselves in. And it's much appreciated. Absolutely. And I guess the tradeoff in terms of what we brought to the table this season was, yeah, like Derek said, just trying to up the production, up the ambition levels, trying to do new things, expand on season one, rather than keep doing the same. Oh, look at this stuff. Isn't it neat? You know, actually.

I would say looking forward to season two, we do a little bit more editorializing and going in-depth on kind of more niche, I guess, themes and ideas rather with season one. A lot of stuff was sort of implicitly there that we're now more explicitly kind of examining with these communities. I think it would have been very easy to just do the exact same formula and just be like, okay, because we could do this forever. Every episode is just, hey, here's a different virtual world. Let's talk to someone from that virtual world and just get a little travelogue in it.

I really like that as a format and a concept for a show, but we could just do that for the rest of our lives and never run out. And it would get old eventually. So we did try to tweak the format this time around, do some new stuff. You know, so far only episodes one and two are out. And those, I would say, are actually the most similar to what we did in season one. Those are the most like straightforwardly, this is a preserving world's episode type of episodes. But when episode four comes out, you're going to see some interesting stuff where you see human beings for the first time in the show.

There's like some archival footage. And we do a lot of like interesting historical looks back at like the genesis of the early internet and like the scene around the creation of the first virtual worlds, which is kind of an interesting thing. You know, we didn't really take that like historical archival angle. in season one for anything, I think. Yeah, you'll see some other stuff. You'll see episodes that are not just about one game,

that are about multiple or are on a theme. And you'll see group interviews and, you know, segments that cover whole like guilds in games rather than one person. We really just tried to expand and do different stuff this time. Yeah, like the thing I've appreciated about preserving worlds is that it doesn't just feel like a documentary about this game or this world or something like it feels like the style that you're doing it in feels like it's also part of the game. And so I feel like I'm in that world and not just watching something about it.

So it's like the way that you all like sort of like incorporate your own commentaries and these interviews and whatnot into what the game or the world itself actually looks like. I think is really well done. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. I think that Mitchell and I both as filmmakers are very interested in spaces, just like a sense of play. a sense of space as like a kind of the ambient qualities of it and also the like way that places are socially constructed too. So with preserving worlds as with our feature Sarasota Halfen Dream that we worked on together before this, yeah, just a we really want to put you in a place and give you a real

sense of that place and like what all goes into that place, I guess. You mentioned you're bringing in more commentary. I did see you did give us a sneak peek at the third. episode that's about to come out. And I did notice a little bit of a commentary on like copyright as a barrier to preservation snuck its way in there. So is that the kind of commentary or are we getting even more like meta with the concept? I think that that is definitely something that we wanted in there. I mean, you know, most of the time with these episodes, you know, the majority of what's in the episodes is coming from the interviewee. Of course, we're making a lot of editorial decisions in the way that we edit the interview because usually these interviews,

are like an hour or two, at least sometimes three or four hours of material that we're cutting down, or more even in a couple of cases, that we're cutting down into, you know, 30 minutes. I think our longest one this season is, what, like 55 minutes? Around there. Yeah. So, you know, there are editorial decisions made in that, and one of those was indeed in the third episode, Hunda Parkin, we talked a lot about, yeah, copyright barriers to preservation of games. I think in terms of other themes that we're covering that are a little different from season one,

I think there's really a focus on how the internet could be a better place about the ways that designs of virtual worlds can influence the social dynamics within them and how that could lead to a better internet if things went well. If people went and made their own virtual worlds or if people took the right lessons, I don't know. I would say that's one of those things that was present maybe under the surface a little bit in season one. that, yeah, we're trying to highlight a little bit more this time around. And I think it was part of having gone through the production of season one, we realized, like, looking at these places like, oh, like the old internet, like part of the reason people are nostalgic for it is because the experience of going online nowadays in 2023 is largely a bad one.

And so we were trying to kind of make a link between, like, the way that these older virtual spaces were designed, possibly gleaning some lessons from that in terms of how we could reconstruct the internet or the online experience in a way that is more positive, is less painful, etc. So trying to pull some of those lessons. Yeah, the last episode is, I guess I can spoil what the premise is, but it's not about one game. It's about the concept of DIY virtual worlds. So, you know, I mean, like, I'll say that in this show, you know, we cover virtual worlds. We don't really cover websites or message boards or whatever for the most part.

And one of the reasons for that is simply that virtual worlds are more charismatic to film, right? I mean, no one's going to want to watch a documentary that's all just pictures of a message board. But also, they are interesting places. As I said, we're very into spaces and these are like digital spaces that we can like walk around in and look at. Anyway, yeah, that's the main subject matter of the show. And we're looking at in the last episode like do it yourself examples of that. like ways that people can leverage technology that exists now to put together little online spaces that you can hang out in with your friends that you can develop on your own, you can implement

on your own and keep running on your own without really requiring very much money or even some like web dev skills but not like intense. I mean like you don't need like a software company. You can be one guy and put one of these things together. Yeah, that's the last episode. And I think that that is sort of us trying to put a finger on, you know, know, like, hey, here is one way that the internet could go a little better. Here are, like, some ways that people are trying to do that in a way where, like, one person can put together, you know, something for their friends that is a lot better for spending time together than some corporate-run platform.

Yeah, that's something we've talked a little bit about in some previous episodes around the concept of digital gardening, which I'm really interested in, where it's this sort of nostalgic return back to the pre-blogue internet and, like, way of interacting with information and whatnot. And I'm, as much as I love the concept, I'm also quite critical of that sort of nostalgia of like, you know, pre-fall. It's like almost like return to the Garden of Eden kind of idea. And so I'm always sort of critical of these like sort of hyper-nistolic internet bad now, not bad then. Yeah.

And so I'm interested to see how maybe that sort of idea is, is tackled as not a like return to form pre-whatever, but like what are we doing now? Yeah. Absolutely. It's definitely like more complicated than like just saying, oh, the old internet was better and we need to go back to what that was because like there were a lot of ways the old internet was not better, you know, I mean a lot of, if you ever go back and like read stuff from like the internet in 2009 or whatever like go go back and like look at like homestuck or something

you're going to be like we don't need to bring up homesstack you're going to be like oh yeah the 2009 internet oh no the 2009 internet had aque too i think that might be the first time that homestuck has been referenced on this podcast and i only got through the first five acts hopefully last right through more of it yeah i've not gotten that far myself it's the infinite The Jest of the 21st century, then I'm completely dead serious about that as someone who loves Infinite Jest. Yeah, I like Infinite Jest better, but Homestock is interesting, at least, as an object of study. It sure is. It's season three premiere.

Oh, no. It's just Homestock. I used to live with someone who did the Homestock prom in New York, so we have to be in. I've asked people, because Mitchell and I were talking about this, I don't know anything about Homestuck. I've totally missed it. And I've asked people like, should I bother trying to understand it? And they're like, if you weren't there for it,

you're not going to have the same experience because it was like a social phenomenon of reading it and getting feedback with the author. I'm like, okay, well, I guess that's an experience that's just gone. But I hear tell of it. But I also think... Reading the first couple of acts, I think, is worth it because there's just a bunch of kids in their respective homes

playing a game that brings about the apocalypse, basically. And that's really fun. And it's like hypertext and you're interacting with the text-based kind of. And that's cool. And then the trolls come in and it gets weird. That's about as far as I got too. Yeah. Once the trolls come in, I'm like, all right, I'm done now.

I was like just like, here's eight more characters to memorize. Honestly, I would only go back just to read more to like the Midnight Crew, like interludes or like the popular stuff. We're just turned into a film noir. Yeah. Love it. Yeah, that shit rocked. I think the best. reason to go back to it today and have a look at it or even just for the first time because I didn't get

into Homestuck at the time that it came out either. I was curious like what is this thing that I've heard so much about and I looked into it like a year ago and it is the most of its time thing ever. Like it is pure condensed 2009 in a way that is like it doesn't feel like that was that long ago but when you look at it it's like oh that was a completely different world like already. Yeah, I've dated not one but two people who were very, very, very, very into homeschucks. I don't know what this says about me. It says roughly what we already knew about you. Yeah. I'm not going to take that as an insult or a compliment.

This podcast exists because we all know each other from Tumblr, like never leaving. It's like, come on, I don't have a whole lot of room to talk. Although when you said, I don't know if anyone's going to watch a show about a forum, have you considered something awful the animated series? You could animate like at hospital lost thing at. That'd be perfect because that's how I started learning animation was like an old bootleg copy of like Macromedia Flash 8. We did cover a text-based game in this season, which should be interesting.

That episode is not even done yet, so I don't even know what it's going to look like. Checking along. It's getting there. But yeah, that was something that we kind of wanted to do in season one was cover a text-based game because like if you're talking about the history of virtual worlds like all of the first virtual worlds were all completely text based they were called muds or multi-user dungeons and it was just like yeah early internet you get on like a client and like you just role play and text together that's very difficult to portray visually in the medium of cinema so we really were racking our minds on

how to do that and didn't end up coming up with a good way to do it for season one but we do have a way to do it for season two, that does indeed have a lot of animation in it, a lot of illustration and animation. Mitchell's cooking. Yes. I'm literally cooking my PC. It is, I mean, talking about, like, defuncts and dying technology, my poor computer is going to be no more by the time we're done with you.

I think your computer's from 2009, too. I wish I could say that. I think it's more like 2019. Yeah, this is, this is my. long way around pitch for getting library punk the animated series on Means TV. Let's talk. Yeah, just see if I can con Mitchell into doing animation for us. We're all bunnies. Start practicing now.

I'm the goth one. I was just so jealous that seriously wrong, Heather Poppin, Boy Sketch turned into a show and I'm like, oh, that's the coolest thing in the world. Well, it helps that half of them were the animator behind the ultimate showdown of Ultimate Destiny Lemon Demon Music Video. It just sent me like back like a couple decades. Because I was going to say I was jealous that I didn't get to work on the Papa and Boy thing. But I digress.

Here we are. It's pretty cool though. I'm glad they got to do that. Yeah. They didn't want to bring in my skill set. Sound boarding. Yeah. You left that on the table.

Let's see. Although you did say, you know, you didn't want to keep. doing the same formulaic thing again and again. What do you think, because I like this archival idea of archiving like a live digital space, how feasible, since you've done two seasons of this, how feasible do you think it would be for like students to do this kind of work? Obviously, you had some funding to do it, but, you know, if they were scaling it down to do the interviews and student documentaries, like, is it something you think other people could do if they had, you know, what kind of basic skill set would they need? Yeah, I think so. I mean, this is a pretty low-budget

series, really, I mean, in terms of like it's all filmed on a computer. You don't even need a camera, right? You just need like screen recording software and maybe a nice microphone, but maybe not even that. So, I mean, it's essentially a lot like doing an oral history, which like a student could definitely do, you know, just get on a Zoom call or whatever with someone and just talk to them for two hours. And I mean, that's how we start recording our episodes, basically. So that part is very easy. I think the part is just all of the visual pizzazz that we add on top. And also, of course, editing, video editing is skill in itself that can be kind of difficult. Yeah, just recording the interview itself is like definitely something students could do. And if a student was motivated to do

audio editing, they could put out a podcast of it. Or if they were motivated to do video editing, they could do a video, yeah. Yeah. I would say, yeah, so for the video recording, we use OBS, which is a totally free software, you kind of have to finagle the settings to get the bit rate however you want it, which is, again, more important if you're trying to do like the high-end production thing that we are. And then I would just say for any students who are, you know, interested in doing something like this, I would just say, especially with 3D games, just be careful about how much you move the camera, try to keep it to a minimum because it's easy to make people motion sick. So we do a lot of kind of sticking down.

trying to keep the camera not moving. But that's, you know, again, it's not really a cost prohibitive thing. It's just about, yeah, essentially the oral history kind of skills and conducting the interview while gaming. Yeah, I'd say almost all of our budget just goes into, yeah, visual effects and licensing music. I mean, the actual, like, production itself is essentially free. Yeah, I think video editing is always kind of that barrier where if you haven't had a reason to

sit down to do it before, it's really like staring at. at a very difficult hill to climb. Oh, yeah. It's not easy. Yeah. All those J cuts. Exactly. All the J cuts.

Nothing but J cuts. Mitchell and I both studied film in undergrad, so we both got the training there. Yeah. And again, to call back to our feature Sarasota Half and Dream, that's absolutely where I picked up all of my, like, cinematography skills,

all my editing skills. And it's just directly lifting that and applying it to this series in more or less the exact same way, except sometimes the camera tools that I have are a little different. Yeah. Because this could be like really cool for like library school students to get into this kind of like oral history plus archiving plus preserving. Plus you're learning a valuable skill for on the job stuff. But you're also like creating like an art thing like you get to create like and use your vision and stuff.

Yeah. Because I feel like so many people view preserving as just preserving the thing. And there's so much more to it. Like, that's one reason I really like, so back when Justin visited me, we went to the Cryptozoology Museum up in Portland, Maine. Nice. Which is goofy of shit. But it's, I love it because it's so much more focus around the culture around cryptids and cryptozoology than it is like, this thing is real. Like there's like whole things where it's just like cases full of toys.

Oh, that's neat. Right. And so it's not just like, here's a museum about X. Y Z weird cryptid here. But like, here's all the cool toys and movies and cultural things and stuff. Like the culture and the society around this thing that is equally as important as the thing itself. Yeah.

That's pretty neat. I would have assumed a museum like that would be like, here's a jackaloupe horn on a pedestal or something. They do have a jackalope. But they're like, jackalops aren't real. They fully admit when things aren't real in there. well, when they think they aren't real. Yeah, treating it as like just the whole

cultural phenomenon and just like giving you the whole meta layer about it. That's pretty neat. Yeah, so like I feel like that could be a, I mean, I am not an archivist, nor have I learned like preservation or anything. So they probably teach this and I'm just like shit talking my own profession. But like I feel like

that sort of attitude around preservation and even like archiving is something that I think should be more embraced in widespread. It's not, just about the object. It's about everything else around the object and there are different ways of preserving that culture. I think when I was in library school, I didn't take a class that had this assignment, but I think I had classmates that did have archival assignments that were around like doing oral histories. So nothing quite as specific as like what we do and not about video games

or anything, but just like talk to someone like a talk to an older relative about like a historical experience they had or, you know, some of a historical event intersected with their lives. I do think that library school students are doing that kind of thing, and it's definitely very instructive. That's good. I know the library I work at is, like, they have someone who does oral histories, like, in the community, which I think is really cool. Oh, that's great.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, it was just something that got me thinking because when we talk about, like, video game preservation, it's mostly like emulation, you know, or are we going to be able to run this the future, how well can we store the media? But there's this whole cultural element, which is like how the game is played. Like the second game you mentioned is just like pure PVP because they hadn't really invented like scenarios. So everyone just kind of jumped into servers and started attacking each other nonstop. And they just never stopped doing that. And that's,

you know, it's hard to like to preserve. But I'm thinking a lot about like digital projects right now because it's something we want to support students at my university doing by like having a librarian whose main job would be like supporting those kinds of projects. So I will report back if we can talk some someone into doing like their senior thesis project in the art school to doing a preserving worlds episode or something. That would be pretty neat. That would be really cool for me. Yeah, I would love it if I could help bring that around.

Yeah, I'd get a kick out of that. So I do want to talk about the first couple episodes. So I'm, I'm curious, did you all have an RPG maker experience as a kid? Because I know I did. And seeing those graphics in that game through. me back in time, like immediately, as many of these episodes do. I was not a cool child, so. I had RPG maker for a hot second. I actually bounced around a couple different game-making engines as a middle school or high schooler. I think, funny enough, an RPG maker episode,

our guest, Stephen Gilmurphy talks about how it came with all of these like pre-made assets to create your own kind of Final Fantasy-esque JRP. and for him, you know, it was like this, this bonus or this, this boon to the system. But I think for me personally, it was like almost too overwhelming to like, wait, I have to, like, I have all these like anime guys and girls and stuff. Like, I want to make my own stuff. I wanted like the blank slate. So I moved to Game Maker version 5.3A and some other stuff.

But I definitely, I must have had Don Miguel's like bootlegged, uh, pirated coffee. of it because I did not pay for it. I remember. Yeah, that was the copy everyone had. It must have been. Yeah, I didn't, I didn't ever, like, make anything with RPG Maker back in the day, but I did play a few RPG maker games. Primarily, I really loved the game, You May Nikki, which is a horror, like, surreal horror game that sort of went beyond the RPG maker community into just, like, a cult classic, like, experimental indie video game type territory. And I played space funeral. as well, which was the most well-known RPG-Maker game by our guest from the episode, Stephen Gilmurphy, who also goes by the name, the catamites when he's doing game development. Yeah, and I thought Space Funeral was great, too. So there are actually a decent number of, like, indie horror games that were made in RPG maker that got surprisingly popular. I know off is one. A friend of mine loves that game. I've been meaning to play it. Ibb is one. Yeah, a lot of interesting stuff coming out of that community. I wish I had a RPG maker experience when I was younger.

I'm a huge fan of the Final Fantasy series, especially the like four and six, which, you know, the eight bits. So watching that, it was like nostalgic for me in a way that like was really great. And I was like, oh man, if I'd have had this, like, yeah, if it's, if either of you still have a copy of it kicking around, I would absolutely love to mess around with it. So I would say good news. the internet archive has Don Miguel's original ripped copy of RPG Maker 2000 on there. I don't know if anyone's going to notice at some point. Probably not. But yeah, it's literally called like Don Miguel's RPG maker.

And they make new versions too commercially that like you can buy and everything if you want a more modern experience. But it might be fun to mess around with the old one. Talking about like the, you know, stolen assets, how he talked about how like he, you would just, you would download like a game and you would then play a little bit of it and then root through the files and stuff. I've been on and off a Sims 4 player and it reminded me a lot of the custom content sort of world for Sims 4 because I like the gameplay experience of it. Well, my wife likes the building experience of it.

So they will go in and just find like the weirdest, wildest stuff that you can import into Sims 4. and just thinking about how like people create for these virtual worlds no matter what as long as they can get around it. So I just think it's a very cool kind of legacy. Totally. It's funny. A friend of mine, I showed that episode too also mentioned The Sims as like that it reminded her of the Sims. Yeah. I mean, I think there probably could be a preserving worlds episode about the Sims if we ever wanted to.

There seems to be enough like community and like player creation around it. It's probably some interesting stories there. That'll be the season three premiere as a joint episode Homestuck slash. Somebody out there has done Homestuck Sims 4, trust me. Oh, I have no doubts. Oh, my God. I'm sure. About it and I can't.

It's funny you mention Final Fantasy because we actually have a Final Fantasy episode this season. I've been playing Final Fantasy 14 for a couple of months now. And it's the first MMO I've ever played. So like, all I know about Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy is that I relate to Sephiroth because I, too, have been driven crazy by libraries and wear slutty chess harnesses for no reason. So that's like all I know about that game. And then there's Nenecki and Nenecki's cool. And that's like it. So we do cover Final Fantasy 14 in an episode. And believe it or not, that was the first like MMRP I ever got into. You know, even though Mitchell and I are making a show about these games, I never really played them ever until working on this series.

I started playing Final Fantasy 14 because I had to in order to make the episode. And I ended up getting really into it and putting so many hours in. And now I'm like in the final, like most recent expansion and I'm halfway through it. And anyone who's played enough of that game knows that the number of hours you have to put in to get to that point are unspeakable. But yeah, it's a great game. Oh, I'm really looking forward to that episode then. That's the longest one too. That's the one that's half about a text game, half about,

Final Fantasy 14. Nice. Maybe 60, 40, 70, 30. Favorite Final Fantasy. Just to give us more visuals. Back to the stolen asset stuff, though. It was interesting because that makes preservation a lot harder because almost all these games were not made to make a profit.

A lot of people who are making games now, you point out, are trying to do it so that they can sell the game, so they need all original assets. And so you get these really cool indie games. And once in a while, one's actually worth. playing, but I'm sure there's tons in Steam that are just like, no, whatever. But it also means people can't stream them, which I thought was pretty interesting that, like, there would be copyright concerns about streaming a game with stolen assets, because, like, streaming in itself is, like, technically infringing.

I mean, it's insane that it's like allowed to happen, but, you know, the game industry has just decided, no, we're not going to all that infringement. We'll call that fair use. But, I mean, if they wanted to, they could have made a big stink about it. But, yeah, I hadn't even considered that, like, there would be worried. about the sexual content too. Again, that's getting back to the sort of sexual panic we're having right now about everything. But it's kind of been a running theme in our podcasts.

Not on purpose. It just keeps coming up. You know, libraries are in the culture wars now. I mean, always kind of have been. But it's, we've been starting a lot of episodes with like, hey, here's a new story. Shit sucks. Yeah. Yeah, it's been rough lately.

But yeah, it's true. I mean, it's not even something that I thought of on my own. like until like Stephen brought it up in the episode, I hadn't considered it. But yeah, the ways a lot of people find out about new games these days is from streamers. Like that can be the make or break thing between a game getting like any eyeballs on it or like anyone playing it or it just languishing obscurity forever. And all this streaming is occurring on these big corporate platforms that have like terms of service that discourage certain types of material from being shown. So it's like, yeah, you can't show anything like explicitly sex. on Twitch. You can't show like stuff that violates copyright too hard. And so the streamers have sort of like this mentality where there's like a cop in their head like, you know, can't show anything sexual because I'll get my stream taken down, you know, can't show anything illegal or, you know, copyrighted, can't have copyrighted music, you know, like the games that have like streamer mode that you can turn on. So any copyrighted music that's in the game is switched out with something else.

Yeah, because that's the other thing is that there's a lot of like, automated enforcement on these platforms where it's like, there's not like a person checking, like, is this like reasonable like fair use of this song? It's like an automatic detection system that's like, you know, oh, this song's copyrighted, take down the stream, you know, like strike against this person. And so I mean, I would worry about that for, for Mitchell and I even. It's like, you know, we've licensed music for our show, but like would Twitch know that, you know, if someone were to stream our show on Twitch, would they know that we license the music or would they take it down because it's copyrighted music. I don't know. Yeah, exactly. This is something I did

like a presentation on years ago about content ID and about there's the law about what you can do. And then there's these platform rules, which have nothing to do with the law. And I was trying to explain to librarians, it does not matter if it's a fair use. It is a robot. It's stupid. It doesn't know if you've licensed it. It doesn't know if it's fair use. I've seen so many copyright talks that have gotten taken down and then put back up because they played 30 seconds of like a jazz song or something that was like recently in a court case or something. And this is like copyright centers at like Stanford, whatever. It's like the YouTube channel for the Copyright Center keeps getting their videos taken down because yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't know. It's frustrating. Yeah, it's sort of

a weirdly, robotically enforced like blandness, you know, it's like, because even game developers now, a lot of them have internalized, you know, like the rules of Twitch basically, because it's like if you make something that's going to get a Twitch streamer in trouble for streaming it, then you're not going to get very much attention on your game, right? And like on YouTube, I know if you get a certain number of like takedowns or something, and it depends on the severity of it, but like basically if you get like a certain amount, they'll just delete your account. These are not, and these are like could be completely fair use. If you get a certain number of them, then you're just screwed. And it's not the ones where it's like someone actually

physically sending in like a DMCA take down. It's these automated bot ones often. Because I, um, I like taught in the shadows. He's like a pop music critic on, on YouTube. And he talks about this a lot of how like, even though he's completely doing legal fair use because he's literally a music critic, the algorithm bots don't know that. And it's like literally, literally, a risk to his channel and therefore his livelihood, even though what he's doing is completely legal. Yeah, it's really not good for pop culture. It's not, no. It's a sort of like, yeah, very enforced, like, restriction on what can be expressed in the

public sphere. Like, I mean, you can, like, put out a game that will, like, cause streamers to get their stuff taken down. But, like, yeah, the avenue to get sites on it is so much smaller. Like, legally, you can put out your stuff. but like no one's going to see it, right? So I think Stephen made a really good point that it's like very interesting to,

and refreshing to look at these like hobbyist spaces where game development's happening. And you can see stuff that like, especially stuff from back then before like streaming, was just willing to do whatever, right? Because people were just making whatever they felt like. They didn't really have any angel or devil on their shoulder being like, you know, you can't do this particular thing.

They just would do whatever came to. them. And so you get a wider range of expression. You get like the potential for surprises that you sometimes don't get to encounter on major platforms. Plus a lot of Pokemon games. Yeah, yeah, plus a game where you have a machine gun and you shoot Pokemon, of course, who can deny the appeal. Yeah, that one was a sequel too. So there were at least two Pokemon, the evil inside RPG maker games. Incredible. For some reason it was funny when you said they were RPG maker, I was like, yeah, I've seen flash games. Yeah.

Same cultural impulse. Yeah, there's so many old flash games that are just gone forever and I think about them a lot. I think about like all the Cartoon Network website flash games that were just like thrown together like Dragon Ball Z beam battle or whatever. Like it's gone. I don't know. Yeah, it's a real shame.

I think about it a lot. Yeah, Flash dying was a real, real bad news in our Hunda Parkin episode, the third episode that you guys have previewed. we had two guests on that and one of them is a video game archivist at the Danish Royal Library. Oh, cool. Yeah, he talked about, like, I think what he said was that the death of Flash was the single biggest erasure of digital culture in history, which I believe. I mean, Flash was a very, very easy platform to make games and videos in. Like, a 13-year-old could make something in Flash that would become famous.

Like, Sean from Seriously Wrong did that, right? And there was this huge treasure trove of both mediocre, like, bullshit, and also very interesting artwork. And now you have to, like, emulate it. And it's like there's a lot of barriers to get to the point that you can run these flash games. It takes a lot of manual work for any given flash game to get it working. It's a shame. Yeah. And for Hyundai Parking, they actually rebuilt the whole game once Flash went away.

Yeah, they had to, you know, because, I mean, you can. can emulate a single player flash game, but you can't really emulate a multiplayer flash game very easily, I think. I wouldn't even begin to know how you would do that. So yeah, in order to keep the game going, they had to, like you said, completely re-architect it, like outside of Flash, just like figure out a way to get it running in a browser. And yeah, I mean, I'm pretty sure they coded it from scratch. Like, it was just a completely new thing they had to build. Not everyone can do that. Aside from the, just the preservation, one thing that was really interesting, especially on the Meridian episode, it was like the change of assets over time. And this game, you know, was owned by a group of people and then, you know, like, handed off

another person. This community was kind of keeping it alive. And I believe they sold it back to some original creators who wanted it to become open source. And that was kind of really interesting to me because there's like this battle between making money. Like, are you going to create something with the goal of making money so that it will sustain itself, or is everyone going to have a day job and do this thing for free? And will that keep it going? And it's interesting to me when they switch between those models. And I think something similar

with that happened with Hunda Parkin, right? But the source code accidentally became open source because someone stole it, which is a very funny story. But I'll let people watch the episode to learn all about that. Yeah, I think there's a lot to think about there. With Hunda Parkin, it's interesting. it was totally non-profit from the start, no way to make money via the game whatsoever, intentionally because it was run by a public broadcasting company, DR, the Danish Denmark's radio, the Danish public broadcasting company.

So yeah, they're like, this is a thing for children run by a public broadcasting company, we're not going to monetize it. And so when DR eventually discontinued it, they ended up, I believe they sold it to a couple of moderators of the game who then ran it, and continued running it totally non-profit, not making any money.

Just out of passion, right? It became a passion project, and it still is. There's still no one's making any money off of it. Yeah, I don't know. With Meridian 59, I believe there is an official, like, server, even though the game was officially open-sourced by the people who owned it, they continued running an official server of it. And I think you can buy the game on Steam.

They might be making a little money off it, but I'm sure it's a labor of love. I mean, most of these old games don't make like any money. So, yeah, I don't know. It's like, I definitely approve when a company like releases the source code for an old online game because that's very, very good for preservation. It allows anybody to run their own server for it, which can sometimes be the only way the game stays around, you know, like, I mean, these things cost some money to run.

And if the company stops wanting to dedicate that money because they're not making any money, then the game can just completely go away. A lot of game companies that run online games that stop making money will just shut down the game and will not open source the game. And then if fans put together illegal like fan servers of the game, then the company will sue them or put out a cease and desist, right? And make them take it down. That happened with City of Heroes a few years ago. The game got shut down. Some players went and ran their own fan server and they got cease and desisted.

They had to take it down. So that's no good, right? I mean, because these games, like, you can't play them offline. Like, they, you know, if there's no running server for them, then the game might as well not exist anymore. So, yeah, I don't know. I'm all for releasing the source code for these things. Plus, I'm sure it makes it a lot easier for archivists to maintain just the files and such to be able to revive it in a museum someday. For example, in season one, we covered Neo Habitat, which was a project to revive Lucas Films' is MMO Habitat,

which was the first graphical massively multiplayer online game. The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment a few years ago basically acquired the source code from the original creators and from Fujitsu, the company that still held the rights and sought an exception from the DMCA in order to get the thing back up and running and also put it online so that anyone could log into it again. So that was an example of a cultural heritage institution, completely reviving a game that hadn't been online since the 80s,

and that was legendary, right? It had an important place in history as the first graphical MMO. And people would talk about it, you know, make videos about it, like think about it, write papers about it. But you couldn't play it. You couldn't actually, like, see what it was like for yourself. You had to rely on old promotional videos and such of the game. So, yeah, I don't know.

I'm kind of rambling. But really, I think, like, getting the source code out there is very good, both for institutions like The Maid that want to revive a game, and also just for allowing play. that care deeply about the game to keep the game running. The reason I'm thinking about this kind of like nonprofit versus for-profit thing is that's a, it's a really big hot topic like this week in the Skalkom world talking about what is a journal. And a journal is basically like a community of people, right, who either for free will create an academic journal or they do it through like a for-profit publisher or they get some funding to do it. And how long did the journal stay alive, that sort of thing?

But there seem to be some people who don't really understand that and think you could do all this through just making a big platform, but everyone throws their papers into it. And there's no real community. And it seems like preserving worlds kind of shows that the thing that's really keeping these things going is their fan communities. I mean, when Meridian went from like a company to a open source server, the only reason it did that was because of the fans. So it didn't really matter which mode it was using the nonprofit or the for-profit. was just someone cared about keeping it going. And so that's how I kind of feel about journals. I'm very happy to be in the public library sector right about now because Scarly Communications is something I'm so deeply not into. I don't know. I got a paper published once and I felt

completely exploited because it's like, hold on, you're telling me that the way this works is that I give you the article for free and you get to publish it and make money off of it. And then I'm not allowed to share it with people. Like, oh, okay. Oh, that's how all publishing works in this sector. Oh, great. Okay. Yeah. I don't know. Not into it. I kind of wanted to run into this theme, because I think this is something I want to pursue with the show, is how do we plan for like the end of things? Like, when we're in a community, do we plan for it to end eventually? Or when you have like a digital life and you're planning for the end of your life, are we doing a really good job of like, You know, because there was this, the news article about Google closing down in active accounts, Twitter closing down in active accounts.

Our digital deaths are going to happen. We're going to have multiple digital deaths over our lives. And then also your actual physical death, which might not coincide with your digital death. And then someone's got to take over those accounts. So how do you see people planning in these interviews that you've done, where they're planning for the end or they're not planning? Well, I would say just on the subject of our people in general, like doing enough to prepare for their digital deaths. I think the short answer is no,

just because I'm thinking about I've had some semi-recent deaths in my family and just like the IRL stuff like is already, like people are not prepared for, you know. It's a whole process, you know, I'm seeing like my parents, my aunts and uncles, like coming in and having to go through all of the physical belongings, like my late grandfathers. and just the amount of like work and labor that that is.

And I would say it only becomes more complicated and more difficult on the whole when it comes to digital stuff. Luckily, you know, they weren't particularly online people because they were in their 80s, but people sort of of our age, younger generations, the amount of like just the volume of stuff that you can own is not limited by the size of your house. You know, I could have like, I have a little 8 terabyte drive. that's about this big that I could have like a million and a half pictures on. And I know that some people are better about sorting their digital stuff as they go, you know, keeping their files tidy. I know that personally I'm not even that great at it.

And there's people who are even worse about that stuff than I am. And so I think part of it is just that it's such an active process and like a deliberate process to keep your stuff in a way that when you do pass, there is a relatively seamless, or at least there's some visible avenue for how somebody could inherit your digital life. And yeah, that's such an active process that we generally, I don't think we do because we prioritize, like, other things in our life. Like we feel compelled to keep going and keep living. And yeah, it's just like a lot of time that a lot of people don't feel like they have the time to do. And having family members who have worked in social work on the end of life.

like aging and stuff. I think that's kind of a theme in general that has just extended into digital life. A lot of people just really aren't prepared administratively, you know. And like the thing that I found interesting about that technology article is how Google says a lot of the reason that they're doing this is a security risk because all of these old accounts are like easier to hack or use worse passwords. don't use MFA and stuff. And like, I agree that people, they don't keep track of their own digital footprint.

So you can have an account that you don't even remember having from, you know, 10, 15 years ago. How many of us still know our MySpace login, right? Like, how many of us still have those emails? I have a fanfic.net account that I can't get into for the life of me, right? Because that email is long gone. So, like, thinking about how then to pass those on and what the legal ramifications are, that is something that we are going to have to contend with eventually. And it's just not happening.

Yeah, I know my password manager has like a family plan option because it's like a subscription service, which I normally wouldn't even have if it wasn't a requirement on my work computer, the one I was using that was free. They didn't allow. So then I have this subscription one. But I, you know, I still haven't set it up with like getting like the rest of my family on this same password manager. and then they can access it if I can't.

So I think in that way, it's probably no worse than any kind of estate planning. But I was also thinking about these like community deaths. I remember when the Twitter ownership was changing, a lot of people were like, how do I archive my Twitter and what happens to that data? And how do you get into an archive anyway? How do you get your papers at an archive? What happens? And then they start having these like real crisis about like,

how will anyone remember me when I'm dead? And the answer is like, be rich because that's how most stuff gets into an archive is like it's your stuff was donated because you donate a lot of money. It's the John D. Fuxmith Center for getting your dick wet. Sorry if you two are nodded on that joke, but it's just a general...

Yeah. Yeah, that's what you name the archive. You name the archive the John D. Fuxmith, whatever, Institute for getting it in. And that's how you get there is you donate money or whatever. But, you know, I have like my old Facebook, account archived just because there's so many conversations in there. I don't know where the data was,

but I've got it somewhere in like a long-term storage with multiple redundancies because like, you know, that's years of correspondence. I have like three physical correspondence folders for like three years, like because no one sends me letters, right? But my digital correspondence is massive. Yeah, like my about five years ago. Yeah, five years ago, my, my mother died. of cancer. And a couple months beforehand, it wasn't like a terminal diagnosis, but she also had kidney disease. So chemo just, but just in case, she was like, hey, can we set up like legacy contact stuff on like Facebook? And I was like, yes, mom, I will do that. But now that means I can't get rid of Facebook because I also am like the arbiter of my like ghost mom on like Facebook, which like people like, her photos

are still there and like people still like go on her wall and wish her like a happy birthday every year and like say they miss her and stuff and it's like I'm not gonna touch that even though I like rarely use Facebook anymore and it's like there's still like photos of there on there that like I I you know or like me as like a child and stuff and it's like you know that like I'm now trapped by a ghost like I can't leave Facebook now because I had to take care of my dead mom's Facebook right like That that's also like a thing. It's like we become like stewards of these like dead accounts as well. So it's like not just like what do you do with it,

but what does that then do to you? Like it's this whole ecosystem that I don't think people are thinking about. Yeah, if you have your legacy contact on someone's like Facebook or social media and then that kicks in, you're trapped now by the way, FYI listeners. And that kind of reminds me of like studying cemeteries. Like if you've ever like, because you would think, oh, well, I just want Facebook to maintain that account. Well, I don't know if you do, because if you've ever seen, like, the history of any cemetery,

like, there's usually been some period of time where it was horribly mismanaged, and, like, people got buried over or something like that, and records got lost or, you know, kinds of stuff. And one other thing about the second episode that really caught me was when he's talking about how they had a, like, longtime member of, you know, Meridian 59 who then passed away and how they had a massive, like, 150-person funeral online for him. And then he immediately starts talking about how they didn't really know anything personal about each other and how that maintained the community, which I think is kind of an interesting way to think about it. I like, that just really struck me as, like, we don't know anything personally about each other. Therefore, we can continue to

keep up this community in this game. And then when you pass on, you know, there's that separation. Like, did that person's, like, family even know that there was this whole other funeral going on for their loved one? Would they have wanted to be there or to, like, you know, record it or something? Like, so that separation of digital life and meet space is really interesting to try to think about how we do our communities and then how we mourn those communities and the people. in them. Yeah, it's true. We have seen a lot of instances as we made the show of, you know, communities where a prominent member of the community passed away and seen the ways that the game community responds to that. And in Meridian 59, that was definitely a poignant one.

One that sticks with me was in our ZZT episode, our guest talked about a ZZT game creator named Flimsy Parkins who had made a extreme. interesting and well put together and visually striking puzzle game that didn't really get a lot of attention when it came out. But later on, Flimsy passed away, and people really treasured that game and really held it up as one of the landmark ZZT games, like, made by that community. Yeah, I mean, you know, people have online identities that can be very different from their IRL or like, yeah, meet space identities that, yeah, they can just kind of leave their own tombstones or leave their own creations in a way where maybe in their regular life, people don't even know

about it, yeah. A lot of MMO communities will memorialize, like, prominent players within the game. In the Fercadia episode, which hasn't come out yet, I believe there was a, so in Fercadia, you can make dreams. You can make, like, areas people can visit. Those dreams normally kind of automatically get deleted after a certain amount of time if there's a certain amount of inactivity. There was one prominent elderly woman who played the game that was very well liked, and she had created this dream that was very popular. And when she passed away, the people who run the game actually memorialized the dream as like a permanent part of the game so that it would never, you know, automatically get

deleted, which I thought was very sweet. And we've seen plenty of examples of spaces made in game as like, I guess guest books, where people can kind of like leave their condolences and thoughts. So we see the the Meridian 59 space where Psycho Child, there's like a guest book full of like memorializing, you know, comments left by people. And there was a similar thing in the missed episode that I recall. But yeah, it's, I would agree, Sadie,

that it is fascinating, like thinking about the separation of the meat space life and the digital life. And yeah, I'm thinking now about how you, resolve that with somebody's passing. You try to, you know, in theory, let everyone who was touched by this life, you know, have a part in that memorial service. But then again, there's some people for whom, like, there's an important distinction between their physical life and their digital life. And depending on the person's preference, sometimes, you get the impression that they would almost rather, like, this thing be its own thing. You know, my username here is, you know, separate from

the physical person that I am, IRL. I can only imagine in those instances as well with like trans people who maybe aren't out or like can't be out or live the life that they want to live like IRL but like online can. Like I can only imagine how that would complicate things as well because it's not just like, oh, I want my gaming avatar life thing to be separate from like being a boring businessman. But then there's this whole other layer on top of it. Yeah. And that's where I was I was thinking with these whole. digital deaths, like, say that you had a community that was kind of only online and you didn't know the other people, and then it abruptly ends that whole chapter of your life, like all those

messages, all that correspondence, all that time, like, that can just be gone and you didn't plan for it and you didn't get to save anything. And now you only have, like, your memories, but, like, this whole community is just dead. And so I was thinking, you know, that's kind of like a digital death. We might have several of throughout our lifetimes. And some of them might be a lot more devastating than others. And I imagine if you were really young, too, and it was your only outlet, that that would be like a particularly bad time. Like I imagine this probably was a really bad time when, I don't know, some early social media stuff, you know, that probably was like some teen's only outlet. And the MySpace age, like, things were just dying left and right. And,

you know, it must have been rough. If I, you would put all your eggs in one basket and you were just like, oh, no, it's gone. Yeah, for sure. I had a MySpace blog in high school. And that no longer exists and I have no idea how I would try and get a hold of it. And it would be kind of nice to go back and read that stuff. Like, I don't remember what I wrote at all. I'm sure it would bring back a lot of memories. It's definitely a shame that it's gone. I think that's happened to like most people who have grown up online at least once. Yeah. So that was the other theme I wanted to bring out was just this preparing for how do people keep projects going and how do they or prepare for the end or not. But yeah, that was everything I wanted to bring up.

Keep doing what you guys are doing. I love it. Thank you. Thank you. I'm looking forward to the rest of the episodes. Yeah, I'm like a film nerd. So, again, I love the technical aspects and stuff of it. I think that's, like, really cool what y'all are doing. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. And thanks for having us on. Yeah. Is there anything else you wanted to plug besides the show, personal Twitter's, other projects, anything like that?

Not just the show. Just go watch the show. It's on Means TV, means. Means.TV. The first episode, well, okay, the first season is all free on Means TV. You don't need an account or anything like that. So you can go watch the entire first season. The second season is the first episode is free, but the rest of the episodes will require a subscription. So subscriptions are $10 a month,

but if you cannot afford $10 a month, that's fair enough. Means TV does offer a sliding scale subscription. So you can pay kind of what you can afford. And that goes down. all the way to zero if needed. So I think anyone listening, if you're interested in the show, definitely check it out.

Absolutely. Also on Means TV is, again, the film that Derek and I first made together, Sarasota Halfen Dream, about our Sleepy's Floridian hometown. Sinking into the sea. Yeah. And I guess if you do want to follow us on Twitter,

I'm Twitter.com slash Mitchell Zemel, Z-E-M-I-L. I'm at Derek L. Murphy. Very creative, I know. Yep, and I'll have all the links in the show notes. So, thanks so much. And I don't have a good exit. Good night.