Last week it was reported that GameStop, a clown show of a company peddling meme stocks and cheap video game merchandise, had unceremoniously and without notice shut down Game Informer, a magazine and website that had been publishing in some form since 1991.
The decision was a terrible one for many reasons. For readers and fans, it deprives them of one of the few traditional games publications remaining in the smoking ruins of this modern media apocalypse. For staff it's a nightmare, with everybody facing a job market where video game journalism opportunities simply do not exist anymore.
There are also consequences for the wider internet. And for the history of video games, the history of video game criticism and media and, on a more personal note for the site and magazine's staff, the histories of everyone who ever worked for Game Informer or saw their work printed there. Because when GameStop pulled the plug last week, they didn't just end the publication of an extremely long-running magazine, they also killed its accompanying website (and, spitefully, even its Twitter account). It's just not there anymore. Not a single article from a website that had been around since 2003 (or 1999 if you're counting its pre-GameStop days) is now able to be viewed, as Game Informer's front page and navigation menu have been replaced with a single statement ominously called "The Final Level".
In the 21 years Game Informer's website was open--and this was a magazine that was once the centre of the video game media landscape thanks to its lavish reveal stories and covers--do you know how many other websites linked to its posts? How many Wikipedia pages, how many reports on the pages of peers and competitors, how many forums, emails, tweets and Facebook posts? It must be countless.
Game Informer's posts--and the links pointing to them--are the bedrock of our modern, online history. So much of the internet is built around clicking one thing to be taken to another, links piled atop decades of older links, that it's become part of our subconscious user experience, as second-nature to being online as putting one foot in front of the other is to walking down the street. But that clicking only works when there's something to click to.
In tearing down Game Informer's website, GameStop has torn the nervous system out of a huge part of gaming media's dying body. You now can't read any old Game Informer posts, and most of the old links pointing towards them don't work anymore. Where Game Informer once stood there's now nothing but a gaping black hole, with torn wires hanging around its edges. Were it not for the Internet Archive (and Wikipedia editors’ herculean efforts in substituting its links with archived substitutes) salvaging some old stories and links, it would be as though the site had never existed in the first place.
Of course, Game Informer is not the first publication to be treated like this, nor will it be the last. It's only been a few weeks since MTV News suffered a similar fate. And every time it happens, I ask myself the same question: how is this allowed?
I know this might sound like the pissbaby whinings of one of the few people on the planet who would truly care about this--a video games journalist whose own archival contributions are hanging by a thread--but I'm coming around to the idea that it, if you own or buy an online media company, it should be illegal to wipe the site and its archives as swiftly and heartlessly as this.
You can't (unless you try really hard) erase a newspaper or book. They exist in a physical space, and can be archived physically, just as the Video Game History Foundation have done with Game Informer's own print edition. But you can very easily kill a website. You just...take it down. Sure, as I've mentioned, the Internet Archive can pick up some of the slack, but as I've found trying to retrieve some of my own older works (Kotaku's pre-2008 archives are all but lost), its coverage can often be patchy at best, and is no substitution for a site's own complete archives.
If a shithead owner wants to close a site and lay everyone off, there's not much anyone can do about that, the gods will come for them or their descendants sooner or later. But to erase a site's archives is wrong. To block them without notice is actively spiteful. It belies a contempt for the product, that this thing you owned means so little to you that it can be erased from history at the click of a button.
But it did mean something, to a lot of people smarter and kinder than anyone who has ever made a decision this cruel. At the very least, the writers and editors who worked there deserved a chance to retrieve their contributions, to catalogue some part of careers that spanned years or even decades. And the rest of us are entitled to some semblance of a working internet.
I'm not saying archives need to be kept up indefinitely--though Lord knows that comes in handy sometimes--as that would be unworkable, but maybe there should at least be regulations governing how quickly the curtain comes down on a commercial website, and with how much notice. How much time? At least enough for people to be able to retrieve their work, or in best-case scenarios, to find a new home for the archives that the current owners clearly value so little they were willing to throw it in the bin and turn the lights off.
I know this isn't a serious proposition. There's about as much chance of a government enacting a Digital Media Preservation Act as there is a commercial website's owners truly valuing the contributions of its embattled journalists. Whether it could actually happen or not isn't my point here though, my point is that murdering a website is such a shitty thing to do, yet is something that so many people seem totally fine doing, that it should be illegal because that would be the only way we're ever going to stop this from happening over and over and over again.
