Patreon Letter - 3rd February, 2018

Hello everyone, Em here today to bring to you another letter. Sorry for the brevity of this one, I'm still juggling a dozen things as my life is up in the air and time is a little more precious than I'd like. Soon, soon I can actually chill out and begin enjoying things again, hopefully.

Without a whole lot going on I'm left with only one thing to do for the letter today: join the conversation and Discourse. So here are my thoughts about the newer, HDer version of Shadow of the Colossus going around:

It's Good, Actually. 

That's reductive, but that accurately sums up my thoughts after playing through SotC HD on PS3 recently for our latest episode of Abnormal Mapping and watching a lot of videos of the remake. It's stirred up no end of thinkpieces about how it's actually the tarnishing of an original work of art and a lot of normal people going 'well it doesn't run like shit so it's better, eh?' 

Boy, how much consternation we all have when people don't want their game to chug at every turn and allow you to actually see the vistas that are spread before you, huh? We're fragile little children about our games sometimes.

It would be silly to call it a failure of education, but my gut says that that's exactly what we should blame. Gaming is a medium built on insecurity, where the end user is constantly reaffirmed that what they're doing is important and valid, and thus Your Experience becomes enshrined as something unique and special because it's how you did it, you did it first, anyone who comes along must be lesser and their new-fangled ways of doing anything must be smaller and less important, suffering under such burdens as stable framerates and being downloaded from PSN instead of purchased at an EB Games. 

You see this expressed in how people handle HD versions of 2D games, and I'm as guilty of it as anyone. I balk at the idea that someone would play the PC/Mobile version of FF6, even though I didn't play that game on the SNES, because it 'looks wrong', but at the same time I'm never going to say someone should play Rez when Rez Infinite exists, unless you have no other choice. Same with Resident Evil, a much more dramatic re-imagining. And Metroid: Zero Mission? Throw Metroid in a bin. We're all hypocrites when it comes to what counts as the 'true experience' of anything. 

And this is not unique to games, either. How many people insist if you haven't seen [their favorite movie, probably from the 70s] on the big screen, in 35 or 70 mm, you haven't really seen it? That's super obnoxious, right? But on the other hand, how many of us feel the urge to replace all our DVDs with Blu-Ray, or did the same when VHS fell out of favor, because the newer thing has greater fidelity and represents a Truer Vision of the work? I guarantee you my Blu-Ray of Modern Times, my favorite movie, was not the format that Chaplin envisioned when he made his movie to be shown in every grand and run down movie house in the world. But I care, even if the version I have is actually over-correct compared to how it would ever have been viewed at the time. 

The reality is, the format and fidelity, the frame rate and resolution, that we invest in as people who care about games are just the extraneous features of presentation. It doesn't actually matter that a game runs at 30 or 60 unless you believe it does, and if someone else feels the other way it doesn't speak ill about either of you. It doesn't matter if you only want to play Shadow of the Colossus on your busted ass PS2, or if you want to set it to the HDR 4K whatever with your brand new PS4 Pro. The game is the game is the game, and if we are to ever actually have healthy preservation efforts in games we have to give up the idea that the formal trappings of package and platform and even resolution/structure mean all that much for what the piece of art is. 

Is a mass market paperback book less valid than a hardcover? Are monthly comic books invalid compared to the oversized prestige hardbound version for collectors? Nobody would claim so, but I also remember going out of my way to find widescreen DVDs before that was in vogue, because it mattered to me. The other way wasn't right! But also who cares? I didn't not watch a movie because I watched a VHS rip on youtube, and you didn't not play Shadow of the Colossus because you played the PS4 one. 

Games are a consumerist hobby, and thus we're taught to enshrine the medium as a product. Those PS2 discs and boxes matter, we're told, and so we put them on shelves and lament the passing of manuals and other holdouts of physical media gone by. But that's a trap all its own. If we believe that watching Let's Plays is valid, if we believe downloading games is valid, if we believe that hacking or accessibility options are valid, then who cares if the game looks 'too good' or the colors are slightly different? Games will absorb this blow, more people will play the game, and the world will turn on unimpressed by the lot of us. 

We all, collectively, should get over ourselves a little more, and remember this is all kind of ridiculous. I'm not saying caring is bad, but the consternation seems so unnecessary when we can all just celebrate climbing big beasts and stabbing them in the forehead, no matter the platform.

Until next time. <3