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Originally Posted by rhadin
At least in my generation we were inculcated with the belief that books are permanent knowledge sources and thus to be treasured and kept; games were not....
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I guess you haven't been to a bookstore lately.
But seriously, I'm not trying to draw an equivalence between the social or intellectual value of video games and books. Nor does the asserted inferiority of the medium matter. My point is that there isn't a great deal of protest about format obsolescence with digital products in general. People aren't completely up in arms that a game they paid $50 for a few years ago won't work on their current consoles. (Similarly, when we transitioned from 78s to 33 1/3 vinyl to CD's, the presumption that a vinyl record entitled one to a free CD didn't exactly take root; i.e. ownership does not always guarantee lifetime access to the cultural product.)
There are also many valid reasons to "treasure" a game from an earlier time, by the way, ranging from nostalgia to good ol' playability.
P.S., I'm not 16, and there are plenty of middle-aged people who grew up with video games. I don't think this is a "generational" issue, it's a question of why X is a huge concern with one medium but not an issue at all with another.
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Originally Posted by rhadin
Of course, also at play is that books of ideas have been banned and burned; games aren't banned or burned. Books contain dangerous thoughts; games are mind numbing.
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Video games are routinely attacked by politicians and "concerned citizens." Political games aren't especially common, but they do exist, and would get banned just as quickly as any books by a totalitarian regime. Ownership of paper books didn't successfully stop Qin Shi Huang or Chairman Mao from destroying untold writings (and academic writers) in the name of "unifying" China. (If anything, it is arguably more difficult to suppress content in a networked digital era.)
Plenty of books that outsell
Ulysses by an order of magnitude can also be characterized as "mind numbing." And many games can actually be both intellectually challenging (e.g. Myst) or involve elements of social connection and cooperation.
On a separate note, I have to say that viewing the ownership of books as a key element to their value is slightly absurd, given the huge value and contributions of a rather temporary method of accessing a book -- namely, the library.