A musical score can be printed on paper, survive ransomware attacks, be understood by people in a distant future who doesn't speak the same language and be independent of the instrument that plays it. Computer software is however a lot more volatile when storage devices go out of fashion like floppy discs and cloud services get hacked. If someone would make a minimalistic hardware agnostic standard for describing classic computer games in paper format, what would be your preferences?
Syntax: Using a high-level programming language would have all the issues of alternative interpretations, dialects and transpiling that comes with scripted languages. English keywords would be like writing in latin once the standard gets old, so I guess math is the language somehow. Storing byte-codes with scattered error correcting bit patterns would not be human readable, but to mystery games, that might be the point.
File size: A tiny game could be read with a phone camera from a large book and played instantly, but a larger paper only used as a reliable backup could be scanned in a higher resolution and saved on the computer.
Security: Would you trust a game that you downloaded from a physical book to not contain malware? The exploit would be very old compared to your anti-virus, but books in a library can be tampered with.
Material: Would there be a point with only using cheap paper if it cannot withstand the inevitable era of nuclear winters? Would steel and wolfram-carbide printing plates be too expensive compared to opto laser crystal discs which store more data but are harder to decipher?
