Gamasutra - P.T., Gaming History and the Self-Serving Crusades

Felipe Pepe - editor of the upcoming CRPG book - has published a long rant at Gamasutra:

DISCLAIMER: This wasn't an easy article to write, and it's definitely not a pleasant article to read. But sometimes we must go through unpleasant things, to challenge our convictions, make us reflect upon our actions and hopefully emerge better. This is my sincere intent.

Some snippets:

We are losing content

A game is much more expressive than an interview, I agree. So here's a near-catastrophe that affected thousands of games but didn't get even 1/100th of the attention P.T. got in the past weeks.

Do you recall Neverwinter Nights? No, not the 1991 MMO – that one very few recall despite being such a historical landmark. I'm talking about the 2002 RPG by the same name, from BioWare, that came with the Aurora Toolset, allowing players to create their own adventures. It was extremely popular at the time, and where many developers and modders cut their teeth at game design.

The toolset was more acessible than that of Skyrim and other modern mod tools, so it had a huge, varied and friendly community gathered at the official community website, the IGN-hosted NWN Vault. There they hosted thousands of modules, art assets, pre-made characters, maps, comics, fan-fiction, contests and even interview with module creators.

People created some really high-quality adventures that rivaled with retail games. The Shadow Hearts campaign, for example, won multiple awards and is now being developed into a full game, currently on Steam Greenlight. And things got even bigger when Neverwinter Nights 2 was released, bringing even more content & fans to the vault.

Well, here's all the content of the NWN Vault today:

 

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Take Matt Barton, for example. The guy runs a YouTube channel about gaming history, currently with 292 videos - most of those are long, detailed interviews with developers of classic games. Industry personalities such as John Romero, Brian Fargo and Richard Garriott, as well as legends now forgotten, like Joel Billings - founder of SSI, one of the largest game publishers in the 80's.

 

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There's no other source for all the information his channel holds, for all the exclusive interviews – and it's all licensed under Creative Commons. Matt will undoublty be a hero to future historians. Currently, however, his channel has 12,988 subscribers, and each video averages on about 5-6k views. Since 2009 he got 1,973,887 views over 292 videos.

There are days-old Garry's Mod videos with more views than that. The average PewDiePie video gets that in a couple of hours. I won't even mention Minecraft videos.