Y’know I think another possible analogy here might be the difference between a videogame and a tabletop game. Especially if we compare RPGs specifically.

It’s one thing to play a computer RPG. It’s another thing to play with a human GM who can reshape the story as needed and who can interact with the player in an open-ended manner.

It’s master bait for people interested in the content!

Ahh, the actually-pornographic version of begging senpai to notice oneself.

Thank goodness. Have those copies resurfaced and gone into the possession of proper archivists and/or research collections?

It says we can link to top-level domains, just not specific titles. So you’re probably fine anyway. (But I am not a mod.)

Yeah, I read. I don’t have much sympathy for him. He sounds like a jerk.

IMO preserving the content is more important than honoring him (or, for that matter, humiliating him).

Ooh, I hadn’t considered checking archive.org. Seems useful, albeit very random.

I had poked all over the megathread, but didn’t know about the github repo. Thanks.

But yeah, you’re right about it being a matter of luck sometimes.

Heh, more of this shit.

Remember, the only reason we can still watch the highly influential 1922 vampire movie Nosferatu today is because some people didn’t destroy all their copies despite a court saying they had to.

DISOBEY DESTRUCTION ORDERS.

COPY ALL THE THINGS.

Any such verification depends on some other party to verify it. If the game requires online services, then the verification is dependent on the online services; the verification can’t stand alone. But we already have existing systems for that without the need for NFTs.

On the other hand, if the game is a standalone game that doesn’t require connecting to online services, then if the game can be made to run on one computer it can be made to run on another computer. No matter how you choose to assign ownership, you can’t get around this. Videogames are fundamentally data, and data can be copied.

Besides…inventing a new NFT-based DRM? No matter how you do it, it’s not going to be as convenient as simply not having DRM. A DRM-free game is one that anyone can just pick up and it’ll work, too. You’re proposing a “solution” that doesn’t offer anything new, while opening up other cans of worms along the way.

Also, we already have peer to peer game trades/sales anyway, and we’ve had these, long before NFTs were a thing.

And what exactly is that NFT, as distinct from the media it’s linked to, useful for? Aside from simply saying that it is unique and one can have ownership of it.

Back when Mastodon was more in the news I told various friend groups to jump on it. I wrote up guides for them too. They largely didn’t, and some of them even got annoyed at me.

Nowadays I see they’re still somewhat mostly using Twitter though some of them have started to slowly warm up to Bluesky. Sigh.

But anything that exists as digital data can be copied. The same applies to NFTs. Make an NFT image or game or whatever, and it can be copied by whoever has access to it. The only way to prevent such copying is to not release it at all.

The only stipulation is that copies made without authorization of whoever holds the rights to it would not be “official” instances of the thing, and there are potential copyright restrictions on the use of such copies…but that’s using NFTs to justify copyright law, and aside from “lol copyright”, legal of ownership of an NFT is even more of a mess than traditional legal ownership of an IP.

Sidenote: I wish I could do more to encourage friends on the internet to use Mastodon and Lemmy…

Do you happen to know how well this works for old Windows games? We’re talking about random indie things that run in little windows and are native to like Win98. A good lotta old doujin games are like this.

Fundamentally I don’t really know how it’d be viable to truly “own” a specific copy of something, when it’s always possible to make infinitely many copies of it. Any such “ownership” is at best essentially just conceptual, aside from perhaps the legal right to annoy other people about the copies they are in possession of.

So instead my personal take is that I’d rather everything just be offered DRM-free. I don’t necessarily need transferable ownership as much as I just need proper and guaranteed access under my own control after I purchase the product.

The Steam client (which, as we recall, is not optional, unlike e.g. GOG Galaxy) is gradually becoming bloatier in terms of technical concerns (due to moving to a browser-based engine), less accessible (due to that move breaking keyboard usability to do things like navigate through the game selection and launch them), and also bloatier in terms of features (a great example is the What’s New shelf, but more generally, the interface prioritizes looking pretty than being responsive or data-dense with metadata about one’s games).

On top of that, in recent years Steam basically shut off a way to access older versions of games (using a depot downloader). This is on top of Steam generally making avoiding game updates to be a pain anyway. (Yes, updates are often good things, but sometimes it’s useful to have an older version, for a variety of reasons.)

As icing on the cake, if you try to suggest any of these features on the forum, be prepared for forum regulars to endlessly argue your thread into the ground, telling you why your idea is oh so wrong for Steam and how you should not have the right to play games you bought unless you do so in and only in the ways expressly authorized by the publishers who control all rights forever and always with zero recourse to you if anything goes wrong such as an errant update that breaks functionality.

Yeah, piracy is better than that shit.

Ironically, Steam being shit is a major reason I’ve come back to seeing the value in piracy.

I know to keep the Task Manager handy when I do my testing!

If you have to crack the DRM, it’s not DRM-free anymore.

The ones that are copy-and-paste-the-files-and-run-them, sure. But just because DRM is easy to crack doesn’t mean it’s not DRM.

(The one exceptions might be those super old forms of DRM which basically just need the manual and that’s it. Sometimes, those were actually done in creative ways that made narrative sense in the game, too. So those are like, obsolete DRM that’s auto-circumvented.)