Exhibit C

Digital Access and Inclusion

My last media for digital access and inclusion is a .gif where Nintendo is hammering on Dolphin emulator, made using the free, open source, cross-platform video editor Shotcut (Dennedy, 2023). Nintendo is a Japanese company that engages in the development, manufacture, and sale of home entertainment products (“Nintendo”, n.d.), and Dolphin is an emulator that can run Nintendo’s GameCube and Wii game consoles on a computer with many added features (“Dolphin emulator”, n.d.).

Traditional media like books, letters, and newspapers, such as Benjamin Franklin’s On Protection of Towns from Fire (1735), can be bought or accessed for free online from multiple sources and often in various languages after publication. Even if no translation exists, one could still copy and paste the text or use optical character recognition for Google Translate. Modern media such as anime, cartoons, films, and TV series are usually available on paid video streaming services like Netflix or Crunchyroll, or physically through Blu-ray discs after premiering, along with subtitles for translations.

Video games, however, pose more complexities. After a game is released for a console such as the GameCube or Wii, play relies on functional hardware. This is a problem as older consoles, game cartridges, and their parts are not only no longer in production, most of them are also past their service life and are in disrepair, so even if you own a game’s physical copy, it may be impossible to legally play. Even if faulty parts were replaced, the saved data may be lost (Sebastian, 2022). Online games such as SWORD ART ONLINE: Memory Defrag become unplayable once the developers close the servers or remove them from the store, as many core functions require an online connection. For online games, a small part of the community would recompile the game files to create private servers so that people can still play the game, but for consoles, people must resort to piracy with emulators.

While some argue that game companies do make “HD”, “Definitive” or “Remastered” versions where assets such as textures and visual effects are redone or imported to a newer console for higher quality, not all games will receive this treatment. Nintendo’s Super Mario 3D All-Stars bundles 3 of the most iconic Super Mario games in a single game cartridge: Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, and Super Mario Galaxy (SMG). However, SMG 2 was not included despite being in the same console generation as the original, so the original can be played legally via 3D All-Stars, but not SMG 2.

Another problem is that the new versions of games may not be better. Using Super Mario 3D All-Stars as an example again, the three games were not remade in any way, but emulated. To be precise, some were emulated to 720p, and all were at 30 frames per second (fps) when unofficial ports and emulations such as Dolphin could achieve all of them at 1080p and 60fps (Linneman, 2020).

Needless to say, getting objectively inferior products at higher prices is disheartening, and emulation’s legal disparity is infuriating. Many people will miss classic and timeless narratives and interesting mechanics, and while this is a very niche topic, it is undeniable that gaming culture has heavily influenced society. Hopefully, accessibility to the fantastical interactive stories that are games will improve.

​