The challenge of content preservation

How should we access our favourites in the future? 

Does physical media still have a role to play to preserve your favourite content?
Image courtesy of CNN

[7 min read]

We nerds love our content don't we? We pour hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars and countless hours into our favourite past-times. And, if you're like me, you use a range of media to immerse yourself in these different worlds - from linear entertainment such as books, movies and TV series, to interactive entertainment like video games and tabletop games. 

As a father of two boys who rediscovered a childhood passion three years ago (Dungeon & Dragons and other tabletop roleplaying games), I now think to the future when they're older and whether I can 'encourage' them to find joy in some of the same things that I do. I even built a bookcase as an homage to my favourite intellectual properties (you can see in this article here) and we regularly take out the books and board games to play with, even if they're too young to grasp what they're looking at.

When they're older, it would be great to expand these influences to other forms of media - movies, TV series, video games, music - but as I started to think this through I strayed into a problem typical of today - since most of this content is digital, what can I do to preserve it for more than the decade needed before they are old enough to consume it?

The problem statement

The internet and streaming revolution has given us access to more content than ever before, but comes at a price - we don't really 'own' anything digitally. But even for all forms of entertainment available physically, outside of our books, do we really even own these?

Sure, we know TV/movie streaming services are fraught - you've probably all done the dance of looking across your various apps to find the content you want to watch, only to realise it has been pulled from the service. Video games are increasingly online-enabled, and since you only have a licence to use it, rather than truly owning, it can be yanked from you at any time (see this Ubisoft example). Consumers have some power still - Sony walked back on removing purchased Discovery content on the PlayStation store after public outcry - but can we rely on that to preserve our favourite content in years to come?

And even if you own a video game disk, some games still require you to be online to authenticate (a form of Digital Rights Management, or DRM), or use the servers that might have already been shut down. Therefore physical media is no guarantee either. In the TV and movie space, 4K Blu Rays are available, but are incredibly expensive versus their digital download or streaming equivalent, making them very much Collector's items in today's digital world, much like what analogue records have become.

With these concerns in mind, I have set out to try and 'future proof' my geek legacy. But let's start by looking at the pros and cons of various formats.

Physical media

Examples include books, board games, video games bought at retail, and 4K Blu-rays. I threw out my old DVDs and Blu-rays in a house move, and I've been 100% digital on video games for a while, so going this path would mean high cost and some redundancy with content I have already purchased digitally.

Pros

• Looks nice on a shelf
• Purportedly the optimal visual and audio experience
• Works with no internet
• Can be resold in the future (and may hold value)

Cons

• Disk drives have virtually disappeared, so a games console or dedicated player is needed
• Disk drives can break and the disks themselves can be scratched
• Not all content may be on the disk and so you need to log in anyway to update
• The physical boxes take up space

Digital media (with DRM)

Examples include iTunes purchases, digital video games on Steam, Playstation Network, Xbox Live, eBooks and audio books on Amazon Kindle, plus D&D Beyond (an incredibly convenient digital service for D&D 5E). I have a handful of iTunes movies and series already, but all my video game content is spread across Steam, Playstation and Xbox accounts. I also have a large collection of D&D books on D&D Beyond, which is only a licence to that content - I don't have any PDFs.

Pros

• Doesn't take up any space
• Doesn't create audible noise when operating like disks do 
• Can be cheaper, depending on the service
• In the case of iTunes, maybe upgraded if a better quality version comes, at no charge

Cons

• Limited by hard drive space
• Files may be compressed and produce lower quality visuals and audio
• May require online authentication from time to time (depends on the content)
• Can't be resold in the future

DRM-free digital media

Examples include PC games bought on Good Old Games (DRM-free), PDFs of written content, or MP4 or MP3 files of movies and albums (which is legal in Switzerland for private use). I have a number of very old PC titles (such as the Dungeons & Dragons Gold Box series from the 1990s) through GOG that can just about run on any PC or Mac. 

Pros

• Original files can be stored on a portable hard drive and copied easily 
• Will never require an account login to run

Cons

• Very few legal, DRM-free, options for digital media available
• Requires some technical knowledge and a PC to store and run
• File storage could be lost

My approach

So in a perfect world of content preservation, we'd have both the physical artefacts and DRM-free digital versions of all our favourite content, and something to be able to access them on that doesn't require internet access. I mean, even in the zombie apocalypse we'll just fire up the generator to charge our Macbook and hope the portable hard drive hasn't been looted already, right?

But to build the kind of redundancy required across both the physical and digital realms would likely  require you to add an extra room to your house and refinance it at the same time. So I approached this challenge in two ways:

1. Prioritise the content to preserve
2. Employ multiple preservation methods, reducing time/cost at lower priority

Ranking my content

Showing just how seriously nerdy I am, I decided to categorise my favourite content. Initially I brainstormed a list of all the IP that have had an impact on me over the years. Then I categorised them into my different tastes (you can see how much of a fantasy buff I am, with not one but three categories of this beloved genre). Then finally I gave them a tier score using the tried and true S-A-B-C-D-F method. I dropped the F ranked IP - I don't think I need to preserve them...

A fun exercise ranking my favourite IP by current interest level and nostalgia value

Means of preservation

With that out of the way, I ran through all the types of access to these IP, and thought in which I would be willing to invest. For video games I had to make some decisions on platform too, given how spread out my purchases have been to date. I settled on a few principles on the overall approach:

1. The higher the tier, the more I am willing to invest in multiple categories and preservation types
2. For high fidelity video games, prioritise PlayStation (I believe Sony will keep physical disks for longer than Xbox, and I likely won't have a gaming PC in the future)
3. For older PC-only games, prioritise DRM free purchases on GOG where possible, that will work on any laptop
4. For audio, as physical media is largely dead, I will stick to my Apple Music playlists unless I can find disks or MP3s of soundtracks for my highest tier of content

Here's how those principles show up on a chart:

The higher the tier, the more I am willing to invest time and money in multiple areas

Final thoughts

So you might be thinking this amount of rigour is a little overkill. But given the personal importance of my hobbies and the value of the content I have collected, I don't mind investing a little time to bring some piece of mind to the question of preservation. Once I am done with this project, I should have a few key repositories: a bookshelf full of books, roleplaying games and board games; a Playstation 5 loaded up with digital games and the ability to play a handful of physical games and 4K Blu-rays; an iTunes account with movies, shows and playlists; and a portable hard-drive full of older PC games, and DRM-free back-ups of as much content as I can manage.

Once that is done, I think the last thing to do before I can lock it all in the time capsule for my boys is to write up a note on why all of this content is important to me, why I spent this time and effort in preserving it. That, and some detailed instructions on how to use what might be considered archaic in the near-future of endless, cheap content, personalised and delivered in virtual reality in the blink of an eye! 

Ready Player One,

Dashmeister