#i have a very niche love for ps2 era horror games

[skellebonez]

One day both Hunting Ground and Kuon will be mine and on that day I will own every single rare PS2 survival horror game.

But today is not that day and that day may never come because apparently Kuon had a price hike again and is over $600 now.

My bank account weeps for the future where in 2065 I finally buy it because the price dropped thanks for the ps7 being backwards compatible with every game and them just releasing them digitally.

[culturenosh]

on games, canon, preservation

been thinking recently about games & the development of the gaming canon. i finished bayonetta 2 last week, which was amazing and so much fun, but i kept thinking about how it & other really amazing games are constrained both by subject matter & style and by the way the industry is set up - games have a much higher barrier for entry, economically, than i think any other medium. not only do you have to buy the game, a $50-60 purchase, but you also have to buy the machine to play it, which is usually upwards of $300. (not counting emulation, but that’s a more complicated process & i tend to avoid it. i don’t think i’m alone in this.)

so while there are great and possibly influential games being made all the time, your exposure to games is limited in more ways than exposure to great films or music or books. a movie is $15 to see in new york - that’s expensive, but compared to a game it’s chump change. for $10 a month i stream pretty much all the music i want, and i can download the rest. books are priced similarly. so there’s a lot more that i can experience in those mediums compared to what i can experience through games.

so the only people who can really experience games in a comprehensive way, who can access everything that the medium has to offer, are really rich/independently wealthy people, or journalists who make the medium their livelihood, which is hard to do since gaming is still considered a niche interest. this tilts people who can write about games, study them, collect them, and play them to people who are already likely to be wealthy based on societal structures (i.e. white men). which therefore reinforces games as a hobby and a plaything for the privileged, rather than a tool for art and commentary, or as a space for shared fantasy and imagination. there’s not a lot of diversity in games criticism and i think the canon, such as it is, reflects that. a lot gets lost in the shuffle.

[edit] i think what this facilitates, actually, is a games criticism that focuses heavily on gameplay and innovative mechanics for interacting with the world - innovative, not necessarily well-executed or perfected. lots of games do zelda or final fantasy mechanics better/more seamlessly than the games that originated those ideas, but because those games came first, they’re placed on a higher level. maybe this is true of all canonization?

beyond good & evil’s worldbuilding is leagues ahead of any zelda game, and the way it encourages you to explore and become intimate with its environments (as game environments, sure, but also as natural environments, like a scientist) is pretty unmatched. but the individual gameplay components of that are nothing special - the photography mechanic is pokemon snap, the overworld is any ps2-era platformer, the dungeon-world flow is zelda. canonized games are often those that make the player rethink what their possibilities are within the world, not those that rethink what a game world could look like. i’m more interested in that side of it - games as exercise of imagination, as emotional affect - than games as exercise of player faculty.

all canons are personal, i suppose, but i’d be interested to see a largely accepted canon or criticism that takes a game like that as a central animating force, not just a niche title with limited appeal. [edit]

i suppose this might be true for every medium, and gaming is still working out how to create an economic environment that actually facilitates artistic depth (the rise of indie games, digital platforms like steam, itch.io, et al demonstrates this). but it feels very acute right now, especially since the medium is going on... 40, 50 years of existence? and i’m thinking about platforms like the saturn & dreamcast, wii u, virtual boy, neo geo and so on that failed and had games that were great, interesting, and had a lot of love and artfulness built in. without some kind of preservation mechanism or a unified way to access different games, a lot more is at risk of being lost.

i don’t really know what the solution is. i suspect games in the long run will trend towards a unified digital distribution platform, or i hope they will; it opens the experience up to more people and can only be a good thing for players. the economic incentives for doing that aren’t really there yet, though. so we’re in a weird between-space.

wrt bayonetta, for instance, it sold very poorly and was confined to platform that sold very poorly; i wonder if more than 100,000 people have even played it or heard of it. it’s a niche game by nature, to be sure, but it had a certain camp/queerness to it that could’ve found an audience if there was a different kind of distribution method for developers and publishers to use. if it were a movie, it would be a cult classic like rocky horror; as a game, it might not make it to that designation (though it was so well-received critically that it does stand a chance). i wonder about other games in the pre-internet era that are similar, but lost to time now.

[edit] point being, games are restricted access. far more people will have heard about a game than played it, double especially because the console model means that it’s harder to track down older games when the hardware becomes obsolete. this makes it harder for a thriving critical language to develop around games, and means that the narrowness of the canon and its criticism is self-reinforcing. unless the distribution method changes, there’s a limit to how much the medium can grow and articulate. [edit]