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** "The Ethics of Digital Necromancy: Should We Revive Dead Games?


EugenTum

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** "If a game like Skylords Reborn had not been revived by its community, would it be ethically wrong to do so without the original creators' involvement? Does the act of resurrecting dead games preserve cultural heritage or disrespect the developers' decisions to let it go?
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Maybe a controversial take, but should we burn all books, and paintings, destroy all statues, and so on for all other forms of art, that was sold, and the author did not explicitly stated that his art is intended to survive him?

And even better question, why you think it have anything to do with intention of developers? Did you asked them? To stick to the book analogy, it is like private collector buying all the book rights and putting a lock on each copy, so people that "own" a copy of the book can no longer read it, because it is locked, they can look at the cover, but they are not skilled enough to remove the lock.

Can I ask you for your definition of words "buy" and "own"?

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I think a better analogy would be to take paintings, which a painter threw in the trash and hang them up as art in your house, eventhough the artist clearly wanted them to be gone. In this case it is actually illegal to take them from their trash (at least in Germany) and it is morally questionable.

But in the case of this game, it was less of an act of actively trying to destroy the game and more of a "it doesn't make enough money, I don't care", so more like paintings being shelved in the back of the painters attic. The statements given by EA, which essentailly state "you can run the game, but don't make money from it" also seem to fit in that direction, i.e. the artist just not caring about their paintings and being fine with people hanging them in their living room as long as they don't sell them under their own name.

In general, I would say it is fine to resurrect games, if they were just abandonned, but if the developers actively want to get rid of it, its a different question. But that could also cause the Streisand effect to happen.

armatores likes this
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@Metagross31 I think you missed my point about "the artists" and "right owners". In case of art like painting it starts as same person, and then it is sold, but in case of game, or a book, you have multiple parties, and the terminology gets messy quickly. In case of bigger games artist/developers/designers/... was never the same people as the right owners.

So people that made the game might want to see the game thrive, but are forbidden to provide any help by the contract they had with the right owners.

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3 minutes ago, Kubik said:

@Metagross31 I think you missed my point about "the artists" and "right owners". In case of art like painting it starts as same person, and then it is sold, but in case of game, or a book, you have multiple parties, and the terminology gets messy quickly. In case of bigger games artist/developers/designers/... was never the same people as the right owners.

So people that made the game might want to see the game thrive, but are forbidden to provide any help by the contract they had with the right owners.

That's a good point. In the case of the painter, the legal copyright belongs to the same person that made the paintings, while for large digital projects, the copyright belongs to an abstract legal person, which is not a single human being but some corporation or organization, so in that case the will of the creators and the copyright holders are not necessarily the same.

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