On building video game vaults

[rynling]

PlayStation’s extraordinary effort to preserve its game-making history
https://www.gamefile.news/p/playstations-extraordinary-effort

Fredley’s talk covered the servers and underground mineshafts he and his team are using to save builds of games and scores of other digital artifacts from PlayStation’s past. He also talked about the logistical challenges of their effort and the value of preservation.

Apparently Sony employed a team of specialists to preserve its thirty-year digital history in mineshafts near Las Vegas and Liverpool. I mean, they could just as easily open the data to public digital archives, but still. That's cool as hell.

By the way, storing data (digital or otherwise) in old mineshafts isn't as uncommon as you'd think. In fact, Elon Musk recently tried to "shut down" a big underground facility called Iron Mountain, which houses a bunch of paper records for the federal government under a tiny mining town north of Pittsburgh called Boyers. He wasn't successful of course, but I just think it would be neat if the next Silent Hill game

Comments

[lassarina]

......too bad for him Iron Mountain is a private company??? (They did storage for multiple companies I have worked for/with.)

I love that they're preserving it, at least. Like you, though, I wish they'd put it on public archives.

[rynling]

I didn't follow this story closely, especially since mainstream news sources seemed be supportive of Musk's self-imposed directive to reduce inefficiency (which in this case apparently involved a misunderstanding of the practical logistics of keeping paper records so far underground).

I know saying "mainstream news sources" makes me sound like a crazy person, but I just mean it was difficult to find information that didn't come off as making an argument right from the headline. The best sources I found were on Reddit, of all places.

From what I understand, though, this story has an ironic outcome. Once the CEO of Iron Mountain realized he was on Musk's radar, he actually started campaigning to work with the federal government to increase the terms of the contract. Again, this is just my limited understanding, but it seems that the federal government has now been convinced to pay Iron Mountain more money to digitize paper records.

Whether this is good or bad or necessary isn't for me to say. I just think it's interesting that Iron Mountain has built an entire functioning town 200 feet underground in service of the storage facility. On one hand, it's very Shinra Electric Power Company coded. On the other hand, the photos are amazing.

[lassarina]

[hand waggle] we did a digitization project at work somewhat recently and the answer to the "good/bad/necessary" is basically, it depends. If someone who knows what they're doing has done really really clear requirements and thought about what will need to be accessed in the future and how, then it's possible that it helps a lot! If it's done poorly, well, you'd have been better off with the paper. That said, people are fuckign awful at defining what they want or knowing what they actually need, so the odds are on "bigger mess than you started with," which, given Iron Mountain's longevity, I would bet their systems are actually pretty functional.

To consolidate a reply to your other comment: It is deeply fascinating to me, as someone who works in public service, how incredibly little understanding he and his army of mini Nazis have of how anything works. Typical of that kind of cishet White guy and regrettably reminiscent of my ex, but. Fascinating in a "if this weren't reality" kind of way.

[rynling]

> Fascinating in a "if this weren't reality" kind of way.

Man, you said it. For real.

Thanks for sharing this btw! I'm too ADHD to work as an archivist myself (a fact that I unfortunately had to learn the hard way), but I'm very interested in the logistics of digitization. This is one of the many times when I wish I did MMORPGs so I could join in one of your FFXIX campaigns and be a fly on the wall while you talk about this.

[lassarina]

It's funny, I first downloaded the XIV open beta because I was trying to remind myself that I do not play MMOs, so that I could remember that and not buy the game when it relaunched as A Realm Reborn.

...you see how that turned out.

(Really in a lot of ways it does not function like any other MMO I've tried; there's an enormous amount of work put in to making it possible to play most of it alone, and the focus is absolutely on the story not on Number Go Up unless you are specifically trying to play it as number go up. If you ever want to give the free trial a go, I will be happy to run around with you!)

[rynling]

I’m sorry for adding even more words; but, since the world is strange right now, I want to try to document what this mess looked like back in February. So...

CBS News Headline: Elon Musk’s DOGE Aims to Reduce Inefficiency in Federal Retirement

Elon Musk: It’s bad that uh. The government can only process so many retirements a month because uh. They keep all the files underground and uhhhhhhh. There’s only one elevator.

Someone on Reddit: Once again, Mr. Musk is speaking out of his ass. I used to work for Iron Mountain. Here’s a photo of me at the PA facility. Here’s a photo of the facility itself. As you can see, trucks enter and exit via normal roads. There is no “one elevator” involved. The company’s clients are major corporations, and this facility is exactly what it needs to be. If there is a lag in the processing time for federal retirement applications, the fault does not lie on the company’s end. Mr. Musk may, however, wish to reconsider his termination of the employees who process retirement paperwork.

Me: Underground city underground city underground city underground city underground city