Demon’s Souls (2020) is replaceable, but not fungible. Demon’s Souls (2020) re-contextualizes Demon’s Souls (2009) as not an object, but as a point in space, connected by a line extending from 2009 to the new point of 2020. It is not the same as the original, one could imagine a third version which has the best of both worlds: the audiovisual direction of the original, but the increased visual clarity and performance of the new. This imagined third version brings us further from a line to an arc through our imagined art-object definition space, which is of course ultimately a literal physical space represented by the simultaneously immense and minuscule recording surface of modern storage devices. The integrity of Demon’s Souls as an art-object is threatened, the game dissolves and is drained into a continuous flow.

The Context Zone – Tacky Parallels

	If the 2020 PlayStation 5 version of Demon’s Souls is spoken of in the future at all, regardless of the degree of downward spiraling the future of the games industry holds, it should only be mentioned in the same breath as E. T. the Extraterrestrial or Pac-Man for the Atari 2600. It represents the exact problems of modern video games and the exact dysfunctions of the industry which produces them today. It is a symbol of the tension that exists in every video game between art and product, and shows us nakedly which side is winning.

	I write this paragraph in particular having gotten about 5,000 words into this and realizing I’m only beginning to circle the actual point, I want to give a kind of warning. To get at what I’m really trying to say, I am going to spend a lot of time talking about things that may seem sort of boring and obvious. I am going to regurgitate points from other video game reviews, I am going to asynchronously argue with the posts of strangers whose names I never bothered to remember. I am going to examine what I think the point of art even is. I am going to attempt to philosophize in ways that I suspect more astute people might someday read and accuse me of virtually plagiarizing DeBord, or completely misunderstanding Baudrillard, completely contradicting myself and undermining every belief I purport to hold. I am going to write what amounts more or less to a half-assed high school economics essay. I am going to repeat things I only saw on Wikipedia pages and books I never finished reading, all in service of apparently reviewing a video game that I have purchased twice and at time of writing have never actually beaten. It is at different moments a stream of consciousness, the fleshing out of a logically organized schema, and overly conscious second-guessing, and I’ve chosen to purport that I have left my contradictions and inconsistent tone, voice, and structure unedited on purpose, because I believe the visceral, intellectual, and social elements to all be vital parts which must be communicated to allow another person to reassemble something approximating the precise total thing which these words could be said to represent. Writing this is an ultimately futile effort, but it’s about how writing it is a futile effort. It’s something I need to get out of my system, something I ultimately need to write for myself, but perhaps also a very long-winded and sort of insipid call to action. That I implore you, if you care about games (or anything else), not to think that talking about games (or anything else) actually shapes them in any meaningful way.

	It’s that time again: I’ve had a merely mediocre time with a video game and I’m going to treat it like a personal apocalypse. It seems like a kinda stupid way to use your time, right? So, first I’m going to spend a few paragraphs trying to make sense of why I’m reviewing Demon’s Souls (2020) in this way, why I’m reviewing any video games at all.

	When I lived in my parents’ house with my younger siblings, sometimes I would make note of small instances of uncleanliness or litter, and periodically check to see if they had been cleaned. On one occasion a piece of pepperoni sat next to our dinner plates until it dried and curled and shriveled and became unrecognizable. In disbelief, I finally said something, and asked why nobody had done anything about it in months, seeing as it was in such an obvious place that we all interacted with every day. They told me, “you’re the only one in the house tall enough to have seen it”. I’ve watched birds on  sidewalks nobody takes wither away, I’ve seen tadpoles smear together until they’re indistinguishable from the black tar the puddle in the disused parking lot they called home once occupied.

	In my most recent long-form review I spoke of the origin of my username, and because the thing which it comes from is not something I’m particularly proud of, it might be somewhat confusing that I still use it. I call myself this because I ultimately still believe it reflects my experience; that is, I do not see myself as an “actor” or “agent” in my own life. Whether it is in a feeling of powerlessness to do anything about the state of the world, or avoiding even minor confrontation in any social situation, I have long considered myself a mere observer. I am a camera, all I do is watch and keep record.

	I want to try and explain why I started writing game reviews, how my priorities changed, and why I write them now. I started writing game reviews over a decade ago in order to try and leech off of the popularity of Normal Boots-style post-AVGN YouTube content. These reviews were terrible not just because they were poorly made, extremely derivative, occasionally carelessly offensive, and broadly unfunny, but because I tried to balance being a clown with trying to present some objective rubric by which games’ quality could be measured. I briefly kept a blog for written reviews that tried to drill down even deeper into Total Biscuit territory, before a period between late 2015 and early 2017 where I basically didn’t play any modern video games that didn’t have the words “Counter Strike” or “Dark Souls” in their title. I rated games like a judge on a cooking show, for their fun, fairness, flow, functionality, and eventually also factoring in whether they were worth the money.

	In 2020 a number of shifts coincided to give me a new direction and motivation. I now lived on my own and didn’t need to worry about bothering family while setting up some kind of “production” in my living space, the pandemic pressured me to switch jobs and I had more free time as a result, a friend showed me this cool new website for keeping track of games you want to play, and I saw Tim Rogers’ Action Button’s review of Doom. That video completely changed the way I viewed games criticism, and I feel comfortable saying that I’m not the only one who feels this way about his work. Tim Rogers comes across to me as the “your favorite band’s favorite band” of game reviews. I’ve touched on this a bit in the past, but perhaps the single snippet of that Doom review which most affected me was when he noted that Wolfenstein 3D was the last video game his father played through, and that he had reached the age his father had been in that moment. I realized that I too had reached the age where my father had stopped playing video games when I was a kid.

	The first script I wrote for a new YouTube series that I never ended up finishing was about the strange and seemingly unusual and personal sense of disappointment I felt about the Nintendo Switch, and speculation about what causes people to abandon hobbies, and what (if anything) could make me stop caring about video games. I planned to make a series of reviews of games, in a style not unlike Action Button. I would review Donkey Kong Country and establish firmly that even in their oft seemingly apparent triteness, video games are without a doubt art. I would review Ocarina of Time and unpack what the role of video game reviews even is, how we measure a game’s merit. I would review Final Fantasy VIII, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, and The Witness; the first game which convinced me that games were more than mere time-wasters, the game which made me second guess myself, and the game that reaffirmed the medium’s worth to me. I would “review” Kingdom Hearts III in some kind of bizarre, clickbait-ridden, inflammatory treatise on intellectual property and marketing. It would culminate in a review of Mega Man. Not the individual Mega Man game for the Nintendo Entertainment System, not the Mega Man series of video games, but an attempt at a review of the total concept of Mega Man. A timeline of the fandom’s history, a thematic analysis of the overarching narrative of not just the games themselves, but the supplementary material, the shifts in its brand identity.

	I did not follow through with this for a number of reasons. For example, Ben Saint of the defunct Pro Crastinators Podcast put together an extensive lecture on the story of the Mega Man games that, while obviously different from my goal, was comprehensive enough to render a good portion of what I wanted to do redundant. Another reason is that in the process of beginning to edit together the Donkey Kong Country review, I realized that in order to actually reach the standard of quality I expected of myself, I was signing up for a great deal of work, and I wasn’t sure what I expected to come of it. I deduced, basically, that the ideal outcome of making these videos was reaching a wide enough audience that I impacted people’s tastes enough that more games would be made to my liking, that this outcome was extremely unlikely, and that making these videos would be enough work and require enough research and necessitate learning so many new skills that I may as well just be the change I want to see in the world and learn how to make games myself.

	So, why am I still reviewing games here? Is it just that sharing written text is a lot less time consuming than editing a video? Well, that’s certainly part of it, though frankly at time of writing enough months have passed since I hit control+n in LibreOffice that I’m not sure this is a particularly compelling reason.

	A friend of mine recently pointed out to me that I had written a short review of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater which “didn’t talk about the game”. I virtually never review a game to talk about that game. I am basically always playing more than one game concurrently, or at least having thoughts about games which span across several subjects. I review individual games because that’s how posting a review on this website works, you have to pick one. I can’t make a post about a specific type of level design or progression system or art style or engine, you have to pick a game and try to center the review around that. This review of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was less a review of the experience of playing the game, and more a review of the cultural moment that the game occupied specifically during a period of time when I’m pretty confident I did not play it at all. I actually cut another paragraph where I talked about things like the plateau of X-Games viewership, and broader acceptance of skateboarding in normal culture, leading cities like London to view skate-parks not as potential sites of criminal activity, but as controlled areas of surveillance.
	
	I write these reviews in part to keep my head on straight, as a record of knowing what I was actually thinking when I played these games rather than just relying on my present memory. I sometimes include bits of personal details in part to clue in potential readers on some context I might deem necessary for an outsider to understand these thoughts, for my own sake to remember what I was feeling at the time, and because it’s a cheap way to emotionally engage a reader and even at times make myself appear knowledgeable. There are games that I’m frustrated not to have reviewed after my most recent play-throughs, most of these games are role playing games. I played most of the Kingdom Hearts games in 2018, which is long enough ago that I don’t really remember what I thought about them, but too recent for me to believe that playing them again will be stimulating.

	I write these reviews now largely for the sake of personal utility, to be able to keep track of and easily recall nuanced and specific notions of what my priorities are, what I value in games. If I can’t articulate what I think a good or bad game looks like, how could I expect to make a game that I would actually like to put into the world? Social media already represents for myself and many others a kind of public diary, why not share this too? Furthermore receiving approval from strangers for sharing these opinions not only serves as a kind of ego boost, but also helps reinforce that maybe some of these ideas I have on games aren’t just my own preference, but that games I would want to see in the world may actually be enjoyed by others.

	This is not why I am writing this particular review, or why I intended to write those aforementioned YouTube videos. This is closer to that half-joke Harry Brewis once made, a poorly disguised self-therapy session.

	In his review of Cyberpunk 2077, Tim Rogers muttered that he should have reviewed the Demon’s Souls remake instead, that it would have been better. I don’t know his exact intentions in saying this or what his idea for that video might look like, but I’m here to say that I believe that if he had done what I consider to be the critical due diligence necessary to review the game, he may have produced a more compelling or succinct video, but I think he should have arrived at a nearly identical analysis of this game’s core issues and its position in this present as he did with Cyberpunk. He posted that video the week that I began the job I’m leaving at time of writing, I listened to it on the drive in to my first day, and I’ve re-watched it now to again familiarize myself with his points. In this review, I’m going to exhaust all the points I would have made in that ill-conceived series of YouTube videos, close the book on this chapter of my life, and hopefully purge myself of this specific type of tacky parallelism. Hopefully I’ll get enough of this out of my system, stop writing like I’m the main character of reality with something very important to tell everyone else, and start meaningfully nailing down the things I actually think are important to me.

0. The Fake Demon’s Souls Starts Here

	But why Demon’s Souls (2020)? It is, on one hand, an excellent center around which to look at the topics I’ve been thinking about. However I can’t deny that part of it is that this is a game that a specific type of critic holds in high regard, that I generally think is over-rated, and the fact that this specific version of the game is often thought of as lesser by many of those same critics gives me a shield from behind which I can poke and prod the original game, ideally with a bit more sympathy. I don’t think the Demon’s Souls remake is necessarily worthless, I don’t necessarily regret my time with it, in some granular aspects it may even be a better experience, playing it may give one a better appreciation of the original. But, it is without a doubt a totally disgusting thing to have been brought into the world.

	I want to look at how early developments in the games industry have continued to shape the current paradigm and how, even if it is more of an already slowly ongoing dissolution than an impending sudden crash, I believe we are currently in an inflection point where this paradigm is subject to change. PlayStation’s slippery hold on both IP and talent and Microsoft’s inclination to swallow as much as they can (consider titles like Crash and Spyro, developed by now first-party PlayStation teams, are owned by Microsoft, who will probably do nothing with these titles if the trend continues) have put both sides of the console war into a state of near paralysis.

	In part 1, we’ll try to tip-toe down the line between artwork and commodity to try and find where video games lie. We’ll ponder the individual qualitative creative input that makes games distinct, how games can be separated and quantified, what a real or fake game is, whether Demon’s Souls (2020) is one or the other. I warn you now, I don’t think we’ll really find anything approaching a conclusive answer until part 3.

	In part 2 we’ll shift gears and think more quantitatively, less about what a person puts into a game and more about how much. We’ll confront the value or meaning of caring about the work, or lack thereof; because of what a mess the process of writing this has been, the number of things I’ve already shuffled around, the things that I don’t think can be shuffled around as prerequisites of the push-and-pull nature of retracing video games’ steps, I’m sorry to say I don’t think we’ll really find answers about this until much later in the text either.

	In part 3 I’ll lay bare my post-Rankian (this is a fancy way to say “I only mostly understand and/or agree with this guy”) philosophy of art, how the history of the development and sale of video games fits into this framework, and how I believe Demon’s Souls (2020) represents a kind of breakdown of the cycle which has went on for the past few decades.
	
	In part 4, I might actually try to talk about Demon’s Souls, the video game.

	In part 5 we’ll talk more about Demon’s Souls (2020)’s nature as a remake or remaster, the way that technology has converged towards a threatening paradigm of distribution, and find a more real or at least more clarified answer for the question which spurred me to write this kind of review in the first place.

	In part 6 I’ll attempt to nail down what exactly the point of writing this was, and come away from the experience wondering if I can ever really be sure what I think about Demon’s Souls (2020) at all.

	In every segment I’ll start with a standout remark from the Action Button review of Cyberpunk, interrogate some snagged memetic cliché on the subject of politics, economy, or “work” generally, walk up and down the aisle of video game history, and try using whatever rust-encrusted analytical tools I might claim to have in order to try and figure out what any of this has to do with anything. The indecisive brain-picking of the early chapters eventually give way to what I hope are salient points, though I must say in the now nearly 8 months that I have spent writing this that I have basically ship-of-Theseus-ed myself. Not just in the biological sense in which every person does, which due to my autoimmune condition I’m pretty sure I just actually do more frequently than most people. I mean that I look in a mirror and I think about the things I wanted last summer and I just don’t know who that thing is anymore, dude. You people are not going to believe me when I say that I wrote the vast majority of this having not read Anti-Oedipus, and maybe you shouldn’t! I probably absorbed the whole damn thing through social osmosis years ago and haphazardly reassembled half of its ideas through a bizarre patchwork sublimation. I also feel like if I don’t say it outright some people will misunderstand or read the following things in the wrong light: this is not a character assassination of Tim Rogers in any sense, I am using his work as a framing device in a way not unlike Dan Olson’s I Don’t Know James Rolfe. Welcome back to video games, I know not where these coordinates lie.

	For those without the mana to brute force their way through this unfathomable, ridiculous scroll, let me give you the bottom line: Demon’s Souls (2020) gives us everything. Demon’s Souls, Cyberpunk 2077, the PlayStation 5 and the very concept of a video game console in the current generation give us everything only in the sense that they have fulfilled the promise of what they define as everything; as they say, “play without limits” but only in the sense that everything outside the necessarily extant limit is denied. The console paradigm is limitation itself, unnecessary and completely without grounding in physical reality. While it can be tempting to commend Nintendo compared to the current state of their competition, and while I’m more optimistic for what their future holds both in terms of their business and the quality of their output, the only thing we can truly commend them for is successful rather than failed trickery. Demon’s Souls (2020) is ludicrous and maximalist, but what made Demon’s Souls (2009) special was careful focus and idiosyncratic abstraction.

I. The Towel Czar’s Illusory Clothes – Dimensionality and Commoditization

	In the penultimate segment of the review, “Season of Trash”, Tim Rogers boils down his view on the state of video games, chairs marketed towards gamers, and of most modern products for sale in general, to the statement that “most towels are not real”. What he means is that good products at some point became expensive enough that regular people got priced out, and that manufacturers were so undercut by the proliferation of cheap and unreal goods that perception shifted such that the price of real goods became unacceptable to all but the most well off or discerning consumers. I have to wonder if he chose towels specifically as a subtle nod to the conflict between 1979 Atari’s former textile industry executive and the programmers who would found Activision.

	In this review I’m going to spend a decent amount of time talking about the economic situation of games, and in the process I’m going to try and debunk some leftoid talking points along the way. I want to make clear that I’m not using that word, “leftoid”, to disparage leftist ideas or those who hold them. I’m using the word correctly, to describe memes which seem to be merely “shaped” like leftist ideas. The first that we’re running up against here is the idea that “there is no such thing as unskilled labor”. Or as a former boss of mine put it, “everybody’s got two hands, so everybody’s doing two hands-worth of work”.

	Before going forward, I don’t want to paint a picture of Nolan Bushnell as some stainless visionary, I want to be clear that I treat the word “entrepreneur” with no special dignity. I’ll highlight Atari’s original manufacturing situation for their initial wave of Pong cabinets, apparently re-purposing a disused skating rink and looking for desperate workers at the unemployment office. I’ve worked in a few places like that, we’ll talk about one of them in a minute. What I do want to point out is that it’s clear that Bushnell was, at the very least, someone who cared about games. He was replaced by someone who cared much more about business.

	In 1979, Atari’s programmers were given a rundown of how profitable each new game had been that year, the idea was to allow them to try and identify patterns by which they could narrow in on consumer demand. Some noticed a more striking corollary, that only 4 of the 35 game programmers’ works had accounted for well over half of the company’s sales. While I’ve been on both sides of the equation, I can understand the frustration. I once worked for a couple weeks at a warehouse ran by the sporting goods company Dunham’s. They had bought an old grocery store, poured concrete on the floor, installed some of those big shelves you see at Costco and started rolling forklifts around the place. On my first day I was told that if I was hit by a forklift it would be considered my own fault with no recourse, that if I misplaced a price tag it would be considered tantamount to theft and I would be fired on the spot. At the beginning of every shift, they would have a meeting and go over how many units of product had been pushed out the door the previous night. Despite having as many as 50 pickers and packers moving up and down the aisles, despite being a brand new temporary hire, I individually accounted for more than 10% of the product moving through that building. I might have stayed if it weren’t for learning that they were not bringing any of their temporary staff on permanently.

	Those programmers went to the office of CEO Ray Kassar, the “sock king”, the “towel czar”, formerly of Burlington, and asked to be paid royalties; he responded that these men were “no more important to those projects than the person on the assembly line” and that “anybody can do a cartridge”1. He had made the mistake of believing that each of Atari’s games, and each person involved in the process of making them, were as fungible as the media which held them. Admittedly, this may have been an easier mistake to make in an era where the production of this media (the literal physical form of the media, not its content) was a lot more expensive than it would eventually become, and at a time when the ceiling of possible complexity of a game program was close enough to the floor of what could even be considered a game that virtually every video game on the market had an identically sized development staff. Though, consider that even in an age of multi-layer discs and digital downloads driving the cost per bit of game distribution asymptotic to zero, gaming continues to be a rather expensive hobby.

	Much ink is spilled on the subject of commodification, for example on the subject of arcade games, credits, commodified play time; I want to talk a bit about the idea of commoditization2, that is, the rendering of distinguishable goods, by changes in production or social forces and perceptions, into truly fungible commodities in the proper sense. There’s an interesting article on the subject by James Surowiecki that I ripped straight from Wikipedia and may link here, but I think his (now decades old) reading on the idea and the situation we find ourselves in slightly misses the mark. He treats commoditization as a sword hanging over the heads of major corporations, but I would say he inadvertently makes it clear that they hold the sword in the first place. Table salt is such a simple good that it ought to be fungible with all other table salt, and yet the slightly more expensive name-brand salt dominates the market, what gives? Maybe we’ll get to what that could be in a couple thousand words or so, but for now let’s try to nail down what this has to do with video games.

	I’ll start by, at risk of mangling some more traditional economic terms, recasting the typical idea of commoditization (the one that Surowiecki spoke of) as a “buyer’s commoditization”, one in which the perception of the buyers in a market has rendered all products in a category fungible in terms of exchange value, and bring forth the idea of a “seller’s commoditization”, in which the internal use value of the product is identical, but the seller is in some way able to inflate the exchange value above it’s actual worth to the point where it is considered non-fungible with its competition. Art presents a unique problem for a business. Compare it to clothing, for example: outside of boutique fashion, clothing is produced to be worn, and is bought to be worn, with not a great deal of grumbling about where it came from. A book though, is produced for the general activity of reading, but can only be purchased and used for reading that particular book. As said before, we’ll get to how this can apply to salt, or to clothes, or anything else as well in a bit, for now pretty please just come along for the ride.

	Consider the repeated attempts by Ingram Content Group at further vertical integration, attempting to sell themselves to Barnes & Noble at the turn of the millennium, attempting to buy other wholesalers and distributors, not to mention their print on demand services. When every single step of the process is such an intimately known quantity, every book sold may as well be as fungible as the paper each one is printed on. They have no reason to care if their paper carries the ink of hentai manga or bible verses, whether their back-to-school peak consists largely of creationist textbooks. Paper is paper, and someone will buy it; they may as well be selling empty pages. The competition is no longer between what books are sold or even how many, it is now explicitly a competition between authors for whose works occupy those pages. The commodity is internally fungible for the seller, but externally non-fungible for buyers.

	There’s a nonzero chance that regardless of whether you just rely on the manufacturer’s warranty or pay extra for extended coverage from a third party, regardless of which phone number you call or what address you send your e-mail to, that your defective product will be sent to the same place, possibly worked on by the same person with the same tools, the only differences being what desk they sit at, what guidelines they follow, and which company gets to claim a cut. I knew there had to be some truth to Hannibal’s pretzels or the Simpsons Duff Lite sight gag, but I’m continuously shocked by just how true to life they are. Advertisements and product packaging will tell you that some savvy connoisseur searched the whole world for the best they could offer you, and maybe that’s technically true, and they just happened to find that in the whole world there was only one business that could deliver the product at all, and it was the same business working with all their apparent competitors.

	In this way I find it difficult to not think intellectual property, virtually the only form of modern commercial “artistry”, to be anything other than a form of rent-seeking. By manufacturing an effective enough vector of desire, the artist is able to lay claim to a slice of the surplus value generated by a relatively static body of labor. As far as Ingram is concerned, the role of an author is to make their paper desirable. As far as Spotify or YouTube is concerned, the role of a band or blogger is to make web traffic towards advertisements or recurring subscriptions desirable. The role of game developers is to make ROM chips and optical discs and access to a file on a server somewhere desirable. Today, if they fail to do this, there is virtually no loss for the manufacturer or platform-holder. Books which don’t sell are simply not printed, transactions not made are simply not served; if a few gigabytes on the server are not accessed, so what?

	“The symphony is becoming the prize for listening to the radio at all…”

	What this means is to assume that the radio exists to allow people to listen to music is incorrect. All that a radio does is transduce a signal, and that signal may carry a pop song or talk show to sweeten the deal, but it isn’t the signal’s purpose. One might say that the purpose of the signal is instead to advertise, though the context of the quote is in saying that even this is too specific, that under capitalism the propaganda of the private sector is every bit a method of control as it would be if it were government messaging. In the current American Midwest, where there is a church on every block, an advertisement informing the listener of the Christian God in the same tone as a pharmaceutical commercial serves more as a reinforcement and normalization of what is presumed to already be the listener’s ideal than any legitimate attempt to sway a non-believer, and yet it is not unheard of to find street preachers with megaphones shouting outside grocery stores, only hundreds of yards away from a place of worship in any cardinal direction. The supposed “actual” content of the signal, the entertainment of music or commentary, even the more practical emergency alerts, are dangled in front of the audience as rewards for further propagation of whatever ideology prevails to the point at which it can monetarily dominate the airwaves. Or even that the medium is the message regardless of the nature of the content, that the broad dispersal of a single signal to such a broad group contains in itself a control.

	I flipped through my paperback copy of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment to find that quote and make sure I got it correct. I noticed in doing so that the text on the back cover was unusually blurry, not very well printed. On the final page beneath that cover is the text “made in the USA, Middleton, DE, 20 July 2018.” Sure enough, I check my Amazon orders, that’s the very same day I purchased it. The apparatus of the modern “press”, whether literally of physical books or digital distribution, whether of career authors, gig journalists, or total outsiders, is as passive a receptacle of signals as the radio. If the money comes in, it doesn’t matter to the platform-holders what comes out.

	When Dialectic of Enlightenment was written, it spoke in these terms about music and only speculatively about how this might apply to such mediums as film in the future, that every kind of art would be delivered like radio as soon as technology made it possible. Today we can look at music and how the progression of technology has continually devalued it, and see it as a blueprint for what is to come for every medium of expression under capitalism.

	Video games are somewhat unique though, in being complex and demanding programs, and in their unique relations to platform-holders. For example, music’s continuous devaluation tends to happen before all other mediums because of its low dimensionality. Consider the continued prevalence of stereo recordings, even in a world where surround sound has clearly made it’s case, and even in the realm of headphones there exists the matter of psycho-acoustics; in short, stereo has clearly not made itself the standard in service of the limitations of the number of ears that a human has. In the form of media which has longest been sold as a carrier of audio signals, the vinyl record, a stereo recording takes up all axes of the 3D space of our reality: one for the sum of the two channels, one for their difference, and the third axis for the motion along the track. At any instant an individual sample of a monophonic recording can be represented by a point within a single dimension. As soon as the first microprocessor was created, it was only a matter of quantitative progress until this singular dimension could be captured with precision and frequency outpacing even the number of atoms in the surface of high-gauge pressed vinyl. We have long since passed this point, it is absolutely unheard of for a piece of music to not be available in some way, and an individual piece’s absence from a particular platform is virtually always a matter of unusual personal artistic or economic disagreement within the production of music itself, rather than any intent of consumer experience. Through both technical limitations and brand management, these factors have been near constant in the distribution of video games. The high value, programmatic nature, and dimensionality of video games is likely the only reason that their devaluation in services like Game Pass, ideas like “training customer’s not to buy”, is seen even in popular view as a problem, rather than the relatively uncritical adoption previously seen of music and video streaming.

	When Demon’s Souls (2020) released, it was as a launch title for the PlayStation 5, one of a number of games countable on one hand which were truly exclusive to the platform. Supply buckled under the weight of the unbearable demand for the console, with resellers putting PS5 units back on the market with an additional 60% markup or more. I tried to buy a PS5 in 2021, and settled for a PS4 so I could play Bloodborne again. I tried to buy a PS5 in 2022, and settled for an Xbox Series X so I could play Elden Ring at decent frame-rate without constant stutters. By the time demand softened enough that I could buy a PS5 for MSRP, I was able to pick up a copy of Demon’s Souls for about 40% of it’s original price. Consider the PS5’s role as a finite number of access points, and the fact that Sony’s multi-platform multi-player surprise hit of early 2024, Helldivers II, has sold more copies than every game released on the PS1, and more than every game on the PS3 without the words “Grand Theft Auto” in the title.

	When Kassar said that “anyone can do a cartridge” he spoke of an apparent, but obviously false, seller’s commoditization of video games. Asking if such a thing could take actually place today, or again at all, would require us to deduce what a game even costs. If you ask Sony Interactive Entertainment, a video game costs over a quarter of a billion dollars and nearly a decade of work. If you ask Microsoft, a video game costs some function of the cost of your subscription, how many games you played this month, and how long you played each of them for. If you ask Nintendo, it simultaneously costs a whole lot less (for them), and a whole lot more (for you).

	I guess if I’m going to assert, as I did at the very beginning, that a video game contains some internal conflict between art and commodity I had better attempt to define those things and what the difference is between them. I’ll get more deeply into my philosophy of art in the third chapter but for now let’s at least try to keep things simple. Starting with the most broad category of things, objects are any discrete things in the world would could be said to be separate from their surroundings. Objects can be natural, or man-made, though the line blurs. A tree for example can be a natural object in the sense that it came to be without human intervention, but the concept of the tree itself is man-made. At some point it was decided where the boundary is between the tree and its surroundings, the roots end where the dirt begins, the bark and leaves end where air begins, and so on, and the tree is only on one side of that boundary. And there are many kinds of trees, and many more kinds of plants with only some of them being considered trees. Each physical thing has some dimensions and elements which are cut away and considered irrelevant to how the object is classified. If one has two apples, and one apple is red and the other is green, one is large and the other is small, one is heavy and the other is light, these two things still share enough in common to both be apples. Art, to me, is synonymous with man-made objects; a painting is art, a language is art, an abstract concept is art. Later I’ll also be talking about the relation of performance to art, so let me establish specifically that art-objects are a subclass of objects. The art-object is a thing that people have defined by excluding certain specific dimensions, “these things do or do not define the object as such”. The commodified-object is one which has been defined not just by the exclusion of certain dimensions, but the claim that those remaining dimensions can be given a quantifiable value, “these things do not define the object, and the remaining things are worth $5”, but importantly this value is not uniform across all instances of the object, a red handkerchief is worth $2 but the blue one is $3. This is not the case for the commoditized-object, though it’s important to note that I had to add the dimension of color to the commodified-object of the handkerchief in order to give it differentiation. The primary difference between something which is commodified and something which is commoditized, or a “true” and absolutely fungible commodity, is the sheer degree to which its dimensionality as a physical thing has been abstracted away. The “buyer’s commoditization” is the lowering of necessary physical dimensions of an object to the point at which the definition of the commodity’s use value is so limited that the exchange value necessarily becomes uniform; the “seller’s commoditization” is the fabrication of new and abstract dimensions by which commodities with completely uniform and fungible use value can have their exchange value inflated and once again differentiated.

	Something interesting to me about simple, low-dimensionality “true” commodities is that as the number of things which define them shrinks, the more likely that failure to meet those requirements renders the object not merely a qualitatively poor example of the thing in question, but flat out categorically not the thing in question at all. If coal or steel doesn’t do what it’s supposed to, it probably isn’t actually coal or steel, but even if the use value of a complex commodity is annihilated by some kind of damage or deficiency in manufacturing, burnt food is still categorically food, dysfunctional software is still categorically software, and even for a towel with poor absorbency, any degree of absorbency at all is enough to be a towel. This perhaps is why it may be useful to distinguish between apparent “true” and “false” commoditization, where a disregard for the object’s purported use value has detached the object from the exchange value which that intended use value would demand. The more complex a commodity is, the more unreal they are permitted to be.

	I think about Tim Rogers’s review of Pac-Man wherein he recalls a childhood story of telling his mother that in comparison to Atari 2600 games, Nintendo Entertainment System games are “the real video games”, a statement which of course contains the implication that Atari 2600 games are “fake” or at the very least unreal “video games”. I think that this implied statement is grazing the precipice of being objective truth. Have you ever looked at the box-art of Atari 2600 games? Robert Whitehead’s Casino proudly displays on its packaging that the box in truth contains 4 video games. Alan Miller’s Surround claims to contain 14 video games. David Crane’s Outlaw apparently consists of 16 video games. Larry Kaplan’s Street Racer supposedly contains 27 video games. The Atari 2600 version of Space Invaders claims on its box-art that a single 4 kilobyte cartridge holds a whopping one hundred and twelve games (if you’re wondering how that’s possible or where they got that number3, basically it would seem there is a single manipulable byte of data which determines things like whether there is a second player, whether the players take turns or play simultaneously, and whether they are competing or cooperating, as well as how fast certain game elements move, and every single possible combination is regarded as a separate “game”). That’s about 286 bits per game, and judging by scans of catalogs4 I can find online, about a quarter a pop at MSRP, about one dollar in today’s money. Applying the same calculation to the infamous Action 52 yields a per-game cost of nearly nine dollars in 2024 money! Perhaps both the formation of Activision and the crash of ‘83 happened for the same reason: employee and customer alike became privy to the simple fact that to Atari, holder of near-majority market share in the video games industry, saw the individual video game as undefined and nearly worthless. In 1982 the 2600 was the best selling console in the world at over five million units sold; in 1984 not a single console available in the USA cracked the top 10 best-selling platforms, with every relevant piece of hardware aside from the then Japan-exclusive Famicom and Sega’s SG-1000 being home computers.

	I think it’s interesting how for a young Tim Rogers the crisis of the unreal video game came from behind, that the new threatened the legitimacy of the old. For me, it came from ahead. When I was a kid they came out with this crazy new thing called eBay (the service now called eBay is actually slightly older than me, but it wasn’t called that yet, and back then nothing on the internet became universally culturally relevant overnight). It was like a garage sale, but it was always happening everywhere, at any moment you could decide to turn anything into money. You could get anything on there, even happy meal toys that McDonald’s doesn’t have anymore; in fact you can still get the yellow Jubjub Neopets plush that was one of the first things I ever asked my parents to order for me from the site, tag still attached, for roughly the current price of a fast food combo meal. When the PlayStation Portable was current, I asked my parents to sell virtually all of my toys and games, including my Game Boy Advance and Mega Man action figures, on eBay so that I scrounge together the money to buy one. They instead used the money to buy a Wii for the whole family. I obviously didn’t particularly appreciate this decision, not only because it wasn’t the system that I wanted, but because playing it was contingent on nobody else wanting to use the TV, and because it wasn’t as private as a handheld. Anyone in the living room would watch and judge, and everyone would be expected to share or take turns.

	But the worst of it came from actually playing the games. The Wii was, as far as I was concerned, not the real video games. My parents basically didn’t buy any Wii games that didn’t have “Wii” in the title: Wii Sports, Wii Play, Wii Music, Wii Fit. Ironically there were obviously games much more unreal than this for the system, but still, these weren’t real games. I remember at one point telling my dad that Wii Fit wasn’t a real video game and as a retort he drew comparison between the marble mini-game Table Tilt and Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble. “You sure liked that, so what’s wrong with this?” Table Tilt obviously has a lack of theme, character, music, but also perhaps more importantly it is much more mechanically subdued; it has more in common with Tilt ‘n’ Tumble’s mini-games than with the core game, which makes sense because it is also a mini-game of course, but more importantly this seemed to be all that the typical Wii game was constituted of. If my parents had been discerning enough game-likers to have sought out a game like Kororinpa, for example, I may have had less to complain about, but I digress.

	There’s a Brian Eno quote about the “sound of failure”, the voice, the guitar amplifier, tape, they all have a boundary, a limit, that trying to cross this limit results in a point of failure that becomes its defining and at the best points most cherished characteristic. But on the other end, opposite the limit where the voice cracks or the tape becomes saturated, is another failure. The voice so loud it struggles shows an emotion that is desirable in art, the voice so quiet it is literally not heard is not desirable, it’s nothing. The blank tape still creates an unwanted hiss. Likewise, on one hand we have a game like Kororinpa that could convince players that the Wii remote has a gyroscope5, and on the other hand we have Wii Sports Tennis.

	A digital button is on or off, an analog trigger gives a point in a single dimension, an analog stick gives a point in two dimensions, the Wii remote offers so many unique dimensions with its accelerometer and IR pointer that using that information in ways that are interesting, engaging, and perhaps most importantly reliable, requires a level of game-making sophistication that even Nintendo largely gave up pursuing and presented to their widest audience a cavalcade of micro-games barely on par with even the most basic entries in their Game and Watch series. I’ve said before that Tilt ‘n’ Tumble was like the ultimate case-maker for gyroscope controls, it was like Wii Sports and Skyward Sword in a single coherent package. Ape Escape also presents a killer app for what analog sticks could do to open possibilities beyond what games had been before 1999. Today, just as the Wii remote was reduced to “waggle”, to approximating a single digital button press only separately defined by unnecessary physical exertion and mechanical lag, an implosion of meaning has constrained the analog sticks to character movement and camera movement, with any deviation being regarded by many as literal objective failure. The analog trigger is reduced to replicating the feeling of the trigger of a gun. Some decry Nintendo’s continued use of digital triggers, but outside of racing games this is just plain preferable, not only in the sense that it’s more responsive due to the lower travel time to actuation, but because it’s more honest about the way the input is used, for virtually all intents and purposes it’s just another button, to the point where the standard HTML game-pad inputs don’t even recognize analog triggers. The only interesting use of analog triggers in recent years has been the adaptive triggers of the PS5’s DualSense controller, which obviously do not give the player any new input or meaningfully shape the player’s interaction with them, they are another output, another way of passing information to the player, this time kinetically instead of audio-visually.

	In the same way, a second and drastically different version of Demon’s Souls results in the new necessity of navigating a kind of Harmanian duomining (undermining and overmining) when trying to define what Demon’s Souls is. Demon’s Souls (2020) begs us to dig through and keep or throw away dimensions of Demon’s Souls (2009). Is the new version illegitimate? Is the old version non-definitive? Is Demon’s Souls defined only by the commonalities of the two, and even then which of those commonalities set it apart from other games?

	These Atari programmers met with the towel czar knowing full well the possibility that they were replaceable (and make no mistake, they were!), but also for certain that they were not fungible. That even if Atari had more weight to throw around and obtain the rights for arcade conversions or movie tie-in projects, that they as individuals could make something uniquely valuable. So they went out on their own, and Activision’s Pitfall became one of the best-selling games for the platform, and several of their other games would yield sales neck-and-neck with Yar’s Revenge (the single best-selling original IP from the platform-holder).

	Again I get ahead of myself, but we could say that the reason this was possible at the time was because video games were in such a primitive state that there was, as Deleuze and Guattari describe in Anti-Oedipus, a surplus value of code (and here in the most literal sense). There were so many different platforms that games were made on, each with their own unique hardware, their own unique programming challenges. The processors inside were so limited in speed compared to today’s that they had to “race the beam” and barely keep up with the TV on a scan-line by scan-line basis, it was necessary to extract as much performance as possible, which meant interfacing with the hardware as closely as possible. Knowledge of how to make any game at all, let alone a good one, had an extremely high value.

	In the 80’s, a “PC” game might be released on nearly a dozen platforms, but this changed as DOS and later Windows established a virtual monopoly on home computer operating systems. By the late-90’s, it was pretty common for a PC game to work on just about anything current. By the 2010’s there was such a convergence in hardware specs that both of the more “core” consoles ended up just being x86 machines, and Nintendo released what was more or less an Android tablet. Even in the 90’s, consoles like the Saturn had completely absurd development environments, even having a compiler for a more human-readable language was a luxury not always guaranteed. Now engines just have ready-made export options for a number of supported platforms. The narrowing of disparate workflows and technologies into common standards reduced the value of code (this time not quite so literal) as it became more universal and less exclusive, a classical (or classicist) state of games.

	We’ll really be able to dive into this in chapter three, but for now, let’s just say that as this convergence nears a kind of breaking point, we reach a state in which Kassar’s miscalculation becomes more understandable. How could he have known that video games were in such a primitive state, how could he have known the value of code? The input and output of the machine is not determined by the piece through which the flow passes, but the piece’s position relative to the entire machine and the flow’s direction. How could he have known that despite the (relatively, compared to sticks and stones) sophisticated nature of the technology Atari was dealing in, it was not so developed that value was to be found solely in the recording surface of the cartridge?

II. Paying Artists for Their Numbers

	Tim Rogers claims at one point in the Cyberpunk 2077 video that he “does not care about the numbers”, that he “cares about the work”. He emphasizes that a lot of the things we like about the things we like are the direct result of crunch, of someone being willing to overwork themselves. I think about how many times I see people say, for example, that the song Aquatic Ambiance from Donkey Kong Country “didn’t need to go that hard”, or that David Wise “accidentally” made a transcendental piece of music for the silly game where a monkey swims6. It’s as if he was wrong for caring or trying, it’s as if he had been hired to phone it in. Donkey Kong Country was advertised at the time as having the highest number of man-hours put into a single video game ever up to that point, it was the most crunched game of all time when it was released. It was such a leap for a game that despite obviously resembling then decades old stop motion animation, people lining up in stores described it as “realistic”. How could it have been made by mistake7?

	I want to spend some time talking about an axiomatic phrase I sometimes see enter the popular discourse online: “pay artists for their work.” Although, first we’ll have to open a critique of capitalism, by first confronting a critique of socialism that hinges on picking apart another slogan: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” I’m now going to paraphrase that old saying not because I think it needs explained but because I think slogans tend to become pure symbols, that once repeated enough times the words disappear and the connotation is all that remains. Socialism as embodied in this phrase presents the ideal society as one which is able to efficiently extract from each laborer what they are capable of, in order to concentrate a supply of resources which can be distributed such that everyone’s needs are met.

	A critic of the phrase might point out, as already established, that human laborers are not fungible, that different people have varying abilities and needs. They might for example grossly claim that a disabled person, or any other person with low ability in some regard and high relative needs, is therefor a burden on society. They might claim that people of exceptional ability, such that it well exceeds what they actually need, ought to be compensated beyond mere necessity. They are claiming, essentially, that the ideal society is one in which from each is labor taken according to their ability, and in turn paid back according to their ability.

	In response to this it is really not even worth pointing out that capitalism is not a meritocracy, whatever drink these people are mixing is a few ingredients short of even Kool-Aid, it’s nothing but an after-the-fact justification for the lasting outcomes of primitive accumulation. In search of ever-increasing profits, under capitalism the expectations placed upon a worker are always trending towards the limit of their output, and their compensation in turn trends to the limit of precarious financial and living conditions as well. And when the trend leaves these bounds, and even people who have no time for themselves are destitute, when workers die on the job, there are a limited number of courses of action available, and simply working harder, if even possible, will not generate results.

	Artists are not paid “for their work” because virtually nobody is paid “for their work”, and a lot of people probably wouldn’t like it very much if they were. People are paid for their time, in many cases explicitly so that the actual productivity of their work can be obfuscated, especially in post-industrial economies.

	If two people are paid the same hourly wage for the same job, but one of them works more efficiently than the other, the less efficient worker’s labor is more valuable. That is, if they are both paid $15 per hour, but one can load 200 packages into a truck in one hour (a little over 7 cents per package), and the other can load 400 (a little under 4 cents per package), each package loaded by the quicker laborer has only cost the employer half as much in payroll. Moreover depending on the nature of the job, the more efficient worker may be sent home early when the work is complete and bring home less pay, while the less efficient worker is made to work overtime and receive more pay.

	As established in the previous section, the house owns the pie, and the players settle for winning what slivers they can. Writing a book, even a bad one, is a huge, stressful time investment. I saw recently a thread on a game development forum wherein the poster complained that they hated designing levels, that it felt so utterly fruitless spending hours carefully putting together something that the player would breeze through in seconds. I refuse to recalculate a few years later, but last I checked I had spent a couple thousand dollars on instruments and audio equipment over the course of the past decade, and who knows how much time writing, practicing, recording, and editing music, and my lifetime earnings from this activity have yet to cross the $5 threshold.

	A friend recently sent me a link to a song from this cool new band they were listening to. The “band” was actually one person, singing over instrumentals they bought from others. I found a YouTube video where the person who made the beat broke down how they put it together, they used simple effects on an off-the-shelf guitar plugin, they admitted themselves that it was simple and boring. I found the artist’s social media profile, they were learning how to play guitar for the first time because one of their songs hit 40 million streams. A week later they tweet “real music always wins”.

	At the Dunham’s warehouse the shelves were all split into numbered sections, each shelf was filled with empty boxes, throughout the shift you would fill the boxes with the appropriate product until they were full. When a box was filled, it was to be closed and placed a pallet, and when the pallet was stacked to eye level it was to be wrapped and taken away by a forklift. A lot of people refused to tape up full boxes, refused to carry closed boxes to the pallets, and refused to wrap the pallets. To try and remedy this, to figure out who was shirking this responsibility, and to hold those people accountable, each section of shelving was assigned to a particular packer who was expected to periodically check this area and close and carry any filled cartons. Some people would still refuse to manage their assigned area, saying “I didn’t fill that, someone else refused to finish the job, I don’t care if it’s assigned to me, it’s not my problem”. Because I clearly had productivity to spare, I would close and carry these people’s boxes just to get them to shut up for a while. Obviously I’ve already gone over what informed my decision to leave this job, but I assure you that dealing with these people every day did not encourage me to stay.

	As luck would have it, these people were employed by the same temporary staffing agency as me, and followed me to my next job, bringing their attitudes with them. When friends and family asked me about my new job I would complain about this, and they assured me that these people wouldn’t last, that if they had quit the last job they would quit this one too; it never happened. I found myself running an entire department myself, and running half of their department too. I thought to myself, we all make roughly the same wage, we’ve worked here for the same amount of time and can put the same information on our resume, but I’m practically working half the stations in the building and trying to program games in my off hours, while these guys are functionally illiterate and never get anything done. I put more thought, effort, research, and practice into how I make my morning coffee than these people put into literally anything they do. What am I doing any of this for?

	What the hell did I learn to produce music for? What was the point of learning how to play guitar, of training my voice to go a few semi-tones higher? What was the point of learning music theory, of obsessing over detailed countermelodies? What was the point of experimenting with intonation, of tuning guitars and synthesizers to match an out of tune piano? What was the point when paying a stranger to slap together something they don’t believe in and mumbling the first thing that pops into your head is worth 8 digits of attention?

	The essence not just of artistry, not only creative labor, but of all precarious labor seems today to be a willingness to sell oneself as short as possible. To either absorb the necessary knowledge and skill to do things as one wants and drive the value of your own work to approaching zero, or to surrender yourself to the apparatus, to communicative capitalism’s gig economy. To find your slot in a division of labor that no longer actually values specialization, except insofar as you can undercut the next guy. And make no mistake: wearing a lot of hats, multi-tasking, covering other people’s asses, being underemployed in general, these are all forms of undercutting, all forms of abasing one’s self. That when people would in angry or nervous hushed tones tell me to slow down so that we wouldn’t be assigned to some other task, maybe they had the right idea.

	I have a better computer in my home than any computer that has ever been set up at any desk at any place of employment I have ever spent 40 hours a week in, and most serious PC gamers would probably scoff at my specs. I was shocked one day while looking through the liner notes of Yes’s Fragile to see Chris Squire sat in front of the same model of reel-to-reel tape machine that sits next to me. Having the literal physical means, the necessary tools to produce a game or an album or whatever else, means absolutely nothing without the social apparatus of production. And I don’t mean “having people”, I don’t mean that this requires employees, it means having the time (which in our society really means having the money) to do something other than earn a wage.

	I guess thinking about Tim Rogers’s time at Kotaku, or his time at the “unbelievably boring” job he had at Sony in Japan, or even these Activision founders programming games at Atari, has me confronting the fact that sometimes it doesn’t matter if you have a finger in every pie. At the end of the day, you still aren’t getting a slice. Something I think is worth keeping in mind to keep one’s expectations in check is that if you are poor, and an opportunity is available to you, that means that this opportunity has been devalued. In a Twitch stream many months ago Tim Rogers disclosed, in an apparent accidental spasm of loose-lipped-ness which discourages me from actually repeating the number, his salary at Kotaku. Again, I won’t repeat it, but I’ll say it’s meaningfully less money than what the average bottom rung factory worker makes in buttfuck nowhere, USA, and catastrophically impoverished compared to what a bottom rung factory worker could make if they took the very much really extended offer of never taking a day off, a schedule which Tim Rogers seems to have chronically subjected himself to.

	When Atari’s “gang of four” met in the towel czar’s office, they didn’t ask to be paid for their work. It’s an infamous problem in computer programming: how could you even meaningfully quantify that? Would you count up each line of code? Add together the cumulative force behind each keystroke? Measure every calorie spent in the office? No, so they asked to be paid for their numbers. When the czar refused, they left and took the knowledge and skill which drove their numbers with them, and until their IPO and resulting loss of control, not to mention the crash of ‘83, they seem to have been eating pretty good off of that. Atari didn’t give them what they asked for, they weren’t taken seriously, their work could not be valued even when represented by a pattern of better numerical performance.

	There’s more than one type of number that can have value, we’ll talk more about the specifics of that value in the next section. For now though, consider aside from sales and MetaCritic scores the numbers which Tim Rogers focuses on in the first chunk of his review, search results. As Jodi Dean puts it, under communicative capitalism the use value of language, of messages, as carriers of content, has been largely superseded by its exchange value, as mere contributions towards amplifying already existing content. Searching the phrase, in quotes, “Demon’s Souls” on Google yields about twice as many results as the phrase “Ratchet and Clank”, which yields about twice as many results as “Jak and Daxter”.

	It’s not just Donkey Kong Country’s Aquatic Ambiance, the work of Tim Follin and especially his soundtrack for Pictionary is often spoken of in the same way, just recently a song from an old Smurfs game has been making the rounds on Twitter for the same reason. They bought those much-ballyhooed “Jurassic Park computers” and sat a room full of early-20-somethings who barely knew what they were doing in front of them for nearly every waking moment of a year of their lives and bragged about it in magazine advertising. Today even Tim Rogers holds it up next to Tropical Freeze and calls it a “gnarled plaything for knuckle-dragging rubes” by comparison. There is of course some irony in that, for example, Stickerbrush Symphony is actually a very simple song in the key of C (and a satisfying learn for anyone starting out on piano), or that Donkey Kong’s design has still barely changed in three decades, now only gradually refined from the moment someone folded a sphere in half. We’ll talk more in the next section about how the evolution of technology helps shape this, but for now I want to assert the likelihood (and in some cases the attested fact8) that video games being taken less seriously in the past was actually the exact reason that this creativity and “mistaken” artistry were allowed.

	We know that this is the apparent story behind Demon’s Souls. Hidetaka Miyazaki aimlessly found himself working in finance before Ico convinced him of the possibilities of the medium of video games. He ended up at From Software, whose name at the time held nowhere near the prestige it does today, because nobody else would hire him due to his lack of relevant experience, but being an otherwise well-credentialed professional he was likely in a position where he could afford to undersell himself. Demon’s Souls (2009) was able to be his pet project because nobody believed in it, it was already a presumed failure, and there was no reason to believe he could make it any worse.9

	Contrary to what Mark Cerny seemed to imply in a recent Games Industry article, “generalist” jobs virtually do not exist, and the ones that do will not offer you an interesting career.10 Of course, as the article points out “when Cerny was starting out, games developers didn't really have roles” but even beyond that, we’re talking about someone who dropped out of university to work for Atari before they were even a legal adult. Even if there was a surplus value of code at the time it was nested within a surplus value of labor, just as the primitive state of games was nested in an already developed capitalist economy. Maybe not everybody could have had the means to form their own Activision, but even so, anyone giving their game development labor to an employer was still allowing themselves to be exploited. Despite this exploitation I do think it is also true that someone like Cerny was still given a great opportunity, an ability to more deeply ingratiate oneself with the industry across multiple lines, to become the kind of mythological “generalist” figure of Cerny or Hennig or any number of rock-star game developers. Demon’s Souls (2009) and its relation to Miyazaki perhaps represents the last gasp of the primitive era of game development; even as Miyamoto retreats into decades of only working on games indirectly, as Kojima’s career creeps toward the end of its fourth decade, the new batch of auteurs seems never to come from the bottom rungs of established corporations or even from newly transferred leadership at smaller studios, but from tiny independent teams. I have a feeling that there is a real chance that Miyazaki is the last of his type, with Demon’s Souls (2020) representing a point of no return.

	There was a post circulating around literal years ago that got under my skin and has never completely left me alone since, somebody said something to the effect of “music producers, beat-makers, and people who make instrumental tracks are not artists; the people who sing or rap over that music are the transformative agent which ultimately produces a work of art through that material.” Obviously, and as will become only more clearly as we go on, I fundamentally disagree with this definition of art, but I do also now see more truth to it than I would like. As the value of code shrinks further and further, the worth of the recording surface itself grows more and more; as the value of code, knowledge, experience, and skill all get lower it gets harder and harder to undersell oneself, the undercutting more extreme, the cost of labor more uniform. The work of inscription gets more and more difficult to find any economic gain in, even as a “side hustle” art becomes impossible. Work in the form of flux becomes the only way to sustain oneself, and with space increasingly annihilated by time, time becomes the only valuable flow. In a philosophical sense I find it undeniable that a beat-for-sale is a work of art, being an object made by a person, but in the sense of the current economy the role it plays is as a recording surface, and in this same sense the person who sings or raps over it is the one who undersells their inscription.

	There is something worse than taking advantage of passion, and that’s taking advantage of simple, sheer desperation. I was sort of surprised by the passion exhibited by Nintendo QA employees when this11 story hit. Working in a place not unlike that described in the article, I initially made the incorrect assumption that I was unusual, that I was a temporary placeholder. That the strange hostility my coworkers seemed to show me was a byproduct of them being more knowledgeable and experienced and I myself being an outsider. It took me over a year to realize that the opposite was true, that virtually everyone had been hired in the same way that I had been, simple coincidence of the temp agency roulette. That the antagonism of the workplace was a consequence of nobody really caring, that I was an exception not in being the only outsider, but virtually the only insider, one of very few people who already had a personal interest and experience in repairing electronics because I liked it. That aside from a handful of underemployed recent graduates and imminently retiring senior staff, nobody here was a credentialed professional. Many of them were homeless, or living in a motel down the street, or in an abusive domestic situation that they couldn’t afford to leave.

	I have literally had president-level executive finance people tell me in-person that I am the most capable person in the company for a given task while paying me less than the fast-food restaurant down the street. Did that guy actually have any good reason, qualitatively or quantitatively, to claim that? Even in the absence of reason, did he actually believe it?

III. The Joyless Con – Who Made Shuhei Yoshida a Liar?

	Tim Rogers spends a great deal of time in his review of Cyberpunk discussing the various manifestations of the idea of “authenticity”, though I think in doing so reveals the flimsiness of centering his points around this specific word. At one point he relays to the audience a statistic that he knows he has made up, admits to doing so, and say “You believed me because of the graphics.” The fidelity of his recording equipment, the snappiness of his editing, the gloss of his overlays, his brand name gamer chair, appropriate style of dress, and assuring demeanor all contribute to what he repeatedly reveals to at times be only a thin veneer of appearances, of false authenticity. I’ll cut to the chase: the thing he’s talking about is not authenticity, it’s confidence. We have a lot of terms for people who peddle confidence, “snake oil salesman” is one of them, and its important to note that it doesn’t matter if the claims of snake oil being an effective remedy are true, those people were never selling actual snake oil in the first place. The only thing in the entire transaction that has to be real is the buyer’s own confidence. I want to be clear, in case some misunderstanding is starting to brew in your mind, that this is not some kind of hit piece or character assassination. Despite having been subscriber to the Action Button Patreon for some number of months at one point, and despite the Action Button YouTube channel and Patreon both having gone without some kind of update in nearly 2 years, I am not accusing Tim Rogers of having somehow swindled me or of being a confidence man.

	Or, at the very least, not any more of a confidence man than the rest of us.

	Explaining this is going to send me down the path of broad philosophy of art, so let’s start at the beginning, the absolute beginning. Calling the “big bang” an “explosion” is sort of uninteresting. Imagining the beginning of all things as a simple “poof, and then it was” invites a magical thinking that seems to be derided by the religious as a matter of projection precisely because it resembles their own beliefs, their ridicule a fig leaf to cover any actual scientific or philosophical idea of what the concept constitutes, the latter idea being the present concern.

	The idea of an atom is sort of funny because the term well predates the established scientific concept which bears the name. The fact that the “a” in the term is a prefix should give a clue; an a-tom is something which cannot be divided, uncuttable. The idea is that at the absolute base of anything which physically exists there is some kind of particle which cannot be split, there is something absolutely fundamental that everything is made of. Obviously eventually the atom was split, it was found to have constituent parts. The term “quantum” comes from a similar place (ignore anything I say here except for illustrative purposes, it’s not about a minimum quantifiable mass, I guess, but rather of energy, but maybe that’s kind of the same thing at a certain scale? Who knows, who cares, the whole point of this is as a philosophical exercise anyway), that whatever fundamental particle exists, while it seems clearly not to be the cell or the organelle or the atom or the quark, it is something so small and so uniform that the only way in which it can be measured at all is in its quantity, that it is pure absolute quantity in and of itself, each singular object-instance of this fundament of matter being a single quanta. Whether it exists in reality or everything is turtles all the way down is not particularly important, the possibility alone deserves consideration, maybe we’ll get to why soon enough.

	I imagine the quanta as a sort of pill shape, a positive and negative pole (though this alone may invalidate it to some as a single “thing”) its only intelligible characteristic being the 3-dimensional vector in which one end is directed. At one point, the initial singularity, all of existence consisted exclusively of singular quanta arranged in an absolutely uniform shape, end to end in a massive grid (or perhaps an infinitesimally small grid, with such uniformity it wouldn’t really be possible to differentiate this), going on “forever” in the sense that there would be nothing outside of it, and not that there would be “emptiness” outside of it, for this was all there was. And at some point some thing, any thing within this structure, shifted, and the ensuing “magnetic” resistance or friction or pressure or whatever force governing or governed by these poles set off a chain reaction which continued to reverberate through the entire initial quantum mass. These particles formed structures and super-structures and hyper-structures. This event was the “big bang”, though because of the completely alien idea of space in that moment, because of the completely different senses of motion or time (or lack thereof, of course, since no thing lived), it may have resembled less of an explosion had anything been there to witness it, and more of a slow motion ripple.

	A new big bang happens every time a new creature is born. From the uniformity of the womb and its darkness, warmth, comfort, uncharacterized as such not only by the undeveloped brain but perhaps even more important the lack of experienced difference, comes the contrast of light, cold, pain of the outside.

	A new big bang happens every time a person becomes conscious. As a person develops internal conflicts between basic instinctual desire, individual morality of right and wrong, social ethics of what is and is not acceptable, and juggles each of these, shares them not only within but among their group, they develop a knowledge of consensus, of understanding and conception.

	A new big bang happens every time a new concept is created. When we slice apart reality and say a thing is separate from its surroundings and call it something distinct, we define a thing as much by what it is as what it is not, and as a byproduct of defining a thing invent a new universe of possible anti-things to juxtapose against it.

	These are the four big bangs, the four gods (the “all-is-one” ever changing matrix of the finite state machine of the real world, the “self-god” desired matrix state of any one individual, the “socio-spiritual-god” mean average matrix state of each combined desire, and the library of all possible states necessary to account for “things”), the four original sins, the four facets of every thing which exists, and all of them are in tension with one another. Where is the foundation of all that is? We may claim the primacy of matter, but knowing this relies on complex conceptualization of elements of the world; we may claim the primacy of concepts, but knowing this relies on the limitations of what we can sense and what sensory information we can exchange with one another; we may claim the primacy of our senses, but we know via instruments that there are phenomenon which exist outside of our normal perception. If we assume the primacy of matter, the essential qualities of discrete things can only be approximated through social construction in a unity of belief between the self and others. If we assume the primacy of the individual experience, the social must be built through the mutual occupation of space and the exchange of concepts. If we assume the primacy of society, the self must be differentiated by the physical body and internal tensions between ideas. If we assume the primacy of concepts, symbols, and appearances, real matter must be triangulated via a combination of sense and social consensus mediated by common tools. To borrow from Latour’s critique of modernism as a double-think wherein nature and society exist in a contradictory mutual transcendence, and the same for god and man, I instead say that they mutually rely on one another and these wavering tensions are what keep all that is together.

	To a certain degree we have to concede that matter is the true primary foundation of reality, in the sense that on an intellectual level we seem to have developed the knowledge of things which existed before us, of tendencies if not hard rules which imply how things moved into their current state. Though this is somewhat uncomfortable both because we can only know this on an intellectual level and thus its primacy is not solid, and because at this moment the physical nature of the world cannot and may never be understood in absolute totality.

	To play off of Graham Harman, who sees any individual thing as being a real object with real qualities as well as a “sensual” (perhaps best interpreted as “sensory” or “sense-able”) object with sensual qualities, I see a slightly different fourfold. The object as it exists in the real as a physical arrangement within the quantum heap continually reaching out from the initial singularity. The object as it stimulates the senses of the individual observing it. The object as it exists within the social consensus which understands it. Finally, the object as it exists separate from its environment as a thing in itself.

	In a sense we have here worked backwards from the computer as a finite state machine and assumed the same of the properties of the arrangement of the physical world, the sensory capabilities of the body, the psychological capabilities of the mind, and the possible delineations and definitions of what constitutes a particular object. I want to emphasize that I don’t claim this to be knowledge, but rather assertion; I don’t intend to say that this is necessarily the way that all things “really work under the hood”, but to say that the computer perhaps best reflects the most prevalent ideology and most widely applicable metaphor by which to try and make sense of anything in the present. In the same way that Land sees Kant’s Copernican Revolution as belying a kind of phenomenological exchange value, I might assert that along the lineage of the philosophical atom, the alchemical transmutation of valueless matter into gold, the scientific atom of chemical reactions, the quanta, there underlies an ideology of the commodity form as the ontological fundament of reality itself.

	Next we concern ourselves with the formation of ideas, discrete objects, things, memes, individual works of art. As an example, when a creature is born and experiences contrast, light and dark, they seem mutually opposed on a single gradient or binary. With the introduction of hue, even before knowing red, green, blue, everything in between, before knowing of ultraviolet or infrared, the never to be truly known fourth color looms large somewhere within the psyche. In knowing differentiated relations in the senses, but knowing things can exist beyond the immediately known and directly experienced relations, the capacity for imagination is brought into play as, basically, a misunderstanding of the actually existing potential of sensory experience.

	Art goes through cycles which could be described as primitive, classical, and romantic. To use vocalization or language as a metaphor, or to perhaps claim that languages themselves are art-objects, or that all art-forms are a type of language, or that language and art-forms are divisions within a single category: primitive language could be described as arbitrary vocalizations to alert others of ones presence or express pain or aggression, classical language as socially agreed upon vocalizations for the sake of accurately trading information, and romantic language as poetry. I want to emphasize that these words as I’ll be using them do not necessarily correspond to how they are used in other contexts. For example, romantic art does not here necessarily refer to art from the 18th century, and primitive art does not need to be of any culture that may be crudely described in such a way, nor does primitive neatly describe art which is merely old. As evidenced by millennia-old cave paintings in Atxurra (Altxerri? Is this a different place or just an alternate spelling?) even an art-form such as that experienced an arc of sophistication that I believe could with certainty be described as classicist, and likely romantic even if our sheer temporal removal from the cultures which produced these works might leave us incapable of properly finding that angle. As I said before in my review of Kirby: Tilt and Tumble, where I describe it as a classicist pinnacle of what could be done on the Game Boy, a primitive exploration of the possibilities of gyroscope controls, and a high-tech romantic version of Pigs in Clover, an individual work of art can and typically does possess all three qualities relative to its position in the continuum of human artistic development and expression.

	I have on several occasions engaged in the ill-advised activity of showing YouTube videos to my parents to pick their brains, sometimes invoking interesting conversations in the process, but usually just either embarrassing myself or at the very least uncovering a personal dissatisfaction with the videos ideas or execution and experiencing a secondhand embarrassment as a result. Having known they would not watch anywhere near the entire thing I made the mistake of showing them the first part of Tim Rogers’s review of Cyberpunk 2077. To them the long-winded segment where he goes on meandering brief recounts of the wide variety of games he played in seeming relevance and preparation for his review, partly in service of an apparent joke about not wanting to review the game and setting up the pretense behind each of the review’s disparate parts, and likely in some sense an advertisement for future videos and a showcase of his increased capacity for capturing and editing high fidelity audiovisual material of relevance to subsequent reviews, must have seemed like an endless parade of naked and empty consumerist grandstanding. Still, I don’t think I’ve ever had a video soured by the experience of showing it to someone else as when I asked them to watch Tantacrul’s video on reality television soundtracks12, in particular the segment wherein he tries to explain the concept of reification.

	His explanation is basically “what if you were omnipotent and knew everything about a piece of music, but then one day you heard that music in a commercial, and from that point on that was the only thing you could associate with that piece”. He goes on to showcase how pizzicato strings are used to portray prey animals as stupid, how non-western regional traditional music is used to portray predatory animals as dangerous or alien, and how different music is used to flatten complex real people into cliches and reinforce the emotions that the show-runners want or presume the audience to be feeling. The two main things I realized upon having another person in the room with this line of thinking filling the space between us were A: this is a poor explanation of the concept, and B: I don’t actually think this is a bad thing, at least not in as broad of a sense as the video seems to make the case for. The video seems to imply that reification represents a kind of reinforcement; even though in some cases this can be an effective working understanding of the concept, it’s important to note that the first syllable of the word is not the prefix “re-” (as in back/again) but rather “res”, that the word more or less means “thing-making”. Thing-making, reification, concretism, hypostatization, whatever you want to call it I think that these are all excellent words to describe the process of making art, or at least claiming something to be art. To take the abstract and make it concrete, to piece together parts of the world and say this is something discrete and of itself.

	In the final chapter of Psychology and the Soul, Rank attempts to relate his own theory of psychology to the then new Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, that in trying to perfectly develop an objective understanding of the physical world, to have a knowledge of the world utterly removed from subjective experience, physics necessarily discovered an absence of causality, because the probability and uncertainty inherent to the physical world means there can be no perfectly known current state, no true Now, while the Now is all that the conscious subject can know. The creation of art, the externalization of internal thoughts and feelings, the concretization of the abstract, of bringing the subjective out into the world, is the reordering of physical elements and making the claim that it represents a Now that is to remain in some sense static. That yes, paint will chip and wear, stone will erode, data will rot, the physical processes of the world cannot truly be utterly interrupted, but the artist who is finished with his work reaches a point of cutting off and says “I’m done” and for as long and as much as the chaos of the physical world will allow, this representation of the human experience will remain frozen in time. Reification is the apparently misplaced belief that a thing which the human mind can conceptualize must necessarily be capable of materially existing; in what better way could the construction of art, of virtually all man-made “things”, be described so succinctly?

	Even outside of the context of accompaniment in the sense of television, games, film, theater, what purpose could music have other than the reinforcement of human experience? Even if it is complex, shifting with culture along regional and temporal lines, varying from person to person, depending heavily on what else each listener may be experiencing, what piece of music could not incite or strengthen or counter a human emotion? What purpose does music serve except to be cliché (or to subvert cliché which is obviously cliché in itself)? Even if the specific use of one cliché or another is problematic, flattening and simplifying a complex reality which ought to be better understood (the literal meaning of “understanding” and “hypostasis” are basically identical, by the way) more thoroughly, this cannot possibly call for the renouncing of all music-as-accompaniment, because in existing within the world, being concretized abstraction and necessarily not being separable from the world which made it, music cannot ever be free from its status as accompaniment!

	But of course when people talk about reification they’re usually talking about something a bit more particular. Thing-making could be compared to Baudrillard’s simulation, the production and performance of something one doesn’t have, the display of real symptoms for a disease one doesn’t have; whether the unicorn, God, mathematical concepts, or capital-T The Mona Lisa, these are abstract concepts and not things which we materially have, we produce and perform the having of them. The way reification is more typically used in the popular sense could be compared to the simulacra, the “short circuit” of symbols. Instead of abstractions, ideas, ideology existing on the far end of a gradient opposite and dependent on the sensation of a material world, today we find ourselves with the abstract on both ends. We are born into a world of borders and roads and brands, we find so many concepts ready-made, abstract but concretized, that these become the foundation of reality, as if they have always been here and maintain themselves, simple facts of life. When people travel without consequence, when roads are under construction, when the sale of eggs and fruit and software turns out not to be a service of goodwill or even a neutral distribution but of some particular group’s method of profit extraction, these are treated as deviant aberrations and failures of the system rather than the means by which these things operated and came to be in the first place. Concepts like gender and money are mere social constructs and yet they not only have profound material effects on people’s lives, they seem utterly immutable by way of largely unquestioned ubiquity. Becker by interpretation of Kierkegaard details the ways in which people become stuck in ruts of consciousness, only ever given right of way through the world by means of social codes, never able to materially understand themselves as a creature, to know their own limits as if by the play-fighting of young cats. Even before being “raised by television”, or the internet, or the smart phone, people were raised by schools, by churches, by print or spoken word.

	So called “outsider art” is able to be so compelling to us because even if it seems to come from a “primitive” place, we as a society have reached such heights of cultural and memetic complexity that the average person is equipped to interpret these works through a romantic lens. Even if the work of Daniel Johnston for example is in the classicist consensus simply written, poorly recorded, sloppily performed, it is precisely those qualities and their deviation from acceptable norm that allows people to extract from it such powerful emotion. Even if I don’t like her work, I can easily offer a lukewarm defense of poet Rupi Kaur for this reason. Even if the words seem to be artless, even if they seem overly blunt, making insipid and obvious surface level points, this does not prevent people from finding sophisticated meaning or prevent the poems from provoking response. AI has not killed poetry13 because it was already dead in the sense that culture has reached such a high point of development that even disorganized and intuited use of language is indistinguishable from poetry, the most banal everyday conversations carry poetic abstraction and implication. As they say, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and “there are cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see”.

	The commodity nature of video games might pose problems for interpreting them as art, but perhaps just as pressing is that their high dimensionality virtually requires forming a philosophy surrounding them, which most people and especially self-identifying consumers are unlikely to do (at least consciously so in the case of the latter). It is perhaps precisely because of this high dimensionality, compared to theater as well (I have said I don’t consider the performance itself to constitute art), that many don’t consider video games to be art. Considering or constructing games or performances as art by objectifying them requires a dimensional flattening; the atoms of the real human actor become pixels on a display, the real input of the player is cut off and considered separately. But cutting a highly dimensional real performance is often precisely what renders powerful art. The reverb and harmonics and unusual timbre of shoegaze call back to the tiny imperfections of tone and rhythm between orchestra players which gives the concert hall its sheer sense of ceremony. The play or musical caught on film can give the viewer the best seat in the house for every scene, even when that seat is not consistent across the length of the whole piece. Consider the folk mythology surrounding how exactly Kevin Shields might have constructed that particular sound, or the idea that you’ve missed the best of a band in not seeing them live, but it is exactly the absence and implication of those unknown or excised details which make the recording so powerful. I would perhaps argue that the beauty of art itself, of all forms of art, is found in resonances of the “sound of failure” across the barrier between abstract and concrete.

	Great art implies a greater dimensionality than it actually physically holds. The objects which people might call non-art, or the objects which adhere closely enough to accepted art-form but are considered pretentious, or bad art, these are art-objects for which the real dimensionality seems to swell in comparison to its implications. Necessarily then it seems, in accordance with the Baudrillardian implosion of meaning, that a more complex, more high-dimensional art-object is more likely to physically dwarf its abstract implications. What does land art give us that a natural land formation itself does not? What experience or feeling does Michael Heizer’s City, a work I would likely never see even if I wanted to, give us that an actual city could not? What fraction of stone could make a sculpture so evocative, and what meaning does so many such sculptures worth thereof packed into nearly 2 square kilometers have?

	They say that you have to “know the rules before you can break them”, and maybe this is true, but I don’t think that you need to consciously know them. YouTube has shown us that an average person has probably absorbed enough film and television to be able to compose decent shots and make decent cuts without formal education in the medium. It’s often said that artists like Kurt Cobain probably didn’t know what to call the unusual chords they would strum, they just knew they liked the sound. People often shirk music theory, saying that understanding somehow actually ruins creativity, that they prefer to work off of vibes, instinct, intuition; but as soon as you structure sounds you are making music, and as soon as you decide that some things sound better than others you are doing theory! Arguments “against” the usefulness of understanding music theory are usually instead favoring the uncritical use of ready-made theory. Even without any knowledge of chords or scales, even randomly mashing keys, if you do so in twelve-tone equal temperament so much of the work in making this sound approach acceptability has already been done for you. While music theory is in a sense inescapable because there will always been some discernible logic to the creation and appreciation of music, even in the sense where “music theory” is used as synecdoche for the practices of a specific selection of western composers, it only seems invisible and disconnected from their own musical activities because it is so overbearing in the modern music landscape that it can be hard to find things outside of it without actively looking for it!

	Art-as-form is the creation of art-objects (individual “dead” works of art) to ignite the proliferation of new cultural processes; art-as-content is the creation of art-processes (ongoing “live” performance) to maintain existing cultural objects. Materialized essences versus the short circuit or feedback loop of essentialized materials. The art-object is thought provoking, not in the connotative sense as “deep” but in that it provokes ideation, imagination, critique of that which lies both within and without the work. The art-process is thought terminating, cliché, a new generation putting on the same Harlequin mask. The game-as-art, as code, trends towards the production of use-value (if not a practical one), the game-as-performance, as flux, trends towards the continuous reproduction of exchange.

	Let’s now focus our attention on how this relates to video games, specifically launch titles and exclusives. I know some people don’t really gel with the whole taxonomy of “console generations” but I do think that comparing major platforms of roughly contemporary release with one another can provide some interesting points of divergence and convergence to consider. So, let me lay down what I think are some of the more important developments that occur with each subsequent “generation” of hardware.

	Generation 1 (Magnavox Odyssey, Pong Consoles): the possibility of video games inside the home at all.

	Generation 2 (Atari VCS/2600, Intellivision, Colecovision): games inside the home that are mechanically equivalent to arcade games, though not visually. The Activision split establishes third-party game development.

	Generation 3 (NES, Sega Master System): visual equivalence with arcade games is still not possible, home video games need to define and justify themselves as their own category (for example, emerging genres like the JRPG). Nintendo’s lock-out chip and licensing practices normalize the walled garden platform of virtually all major game consoles going forward.

	Generation 4 (Super Nintendo, Genesis): with console games defined on their own terms, generation 4 is the first flatly iterative generation, which ironically makes it uniquely important as they need to justify this iteration.

	Generation 5 (N64, PlayStation, Saturn): perfect conversions of 2D arcade games become nearly universally possible, 3D explodes the possibility of genre and design, the CD format both lowers the cost of distribution and wildly expands ROM size.

	Generation 6 (Dreamcast, PS2, GameCube, Xbox): the distinction between the capabilities of arcade and home console hardware becomes virtually meaningless. Realistically proportioned 3D human figures are no longer an exceptional novelty (as in Ocarina of Time, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater). Virtually every major game genre is established at this point.

	Generation 7 (Wii, PS3, Xbox 360): for the “core” consoles this is largely an iterative, quantitative leap, but a large enough one that it causes some growing pains. The internet is now a standard, expected part of the average experience. This is basically the only “console war” where the major players were so close to one another in unit sales that everyone was a winner.

	Generation 8 (PS4, Xbox One, Wii U): the distinction between the capabilities of PC’s and home consoles becomes virtually meaningless, at first only qualitatively but quantitatively too as incrementally better hardware is released.

	Generation 9 (Switch, PS5, Xbox Series X|S): the distinction between the capabilities of consoles, across manufactures and generations alike, becomes negligible; Xbox games release on PlayStation, PlayStation games release on PC, Nintendo merges their portable and set-top-box product lines into a single platform, mobile phone games are scalable to high-end console fidelity and vice-versa.

	I would say that the first few generations pose some interesting problems that make them difficult to relate to the current concepts of launch titles and exclusives. Despite obviously not being exclusive nor being a “launch title” in any meaningful capacity, Pong is the original “system seller” or “killer app”. Even once games were sold separately from the machines that played them, the medium was young enough that not many eyes were watching it so closely. Information didn’t travel as fast, the temporal window of cultural relevance moved slower, people’s purchasing decisions and habits were doubtlessly less informed (possibly for the better as much as for the worse). Nothing really had definitive release dates, products were “released” whenever they happened to be put on the shelf, a lot of games from this time have little more known about their release date than the year. The 2600 did have launch titles, but how many people anticipated them? Even in the case of the NES, that platform being so cagey about being a video game console muddies the waters, not to mention the fallout of the crash of ‘83 in general. I suppose I can imagine someone picking an Atari over an Intellivision because only one platform between the two could play Berzerk (at least until a year later when Mattel released the System Changer), but I can’t imagine this was a common type of person.

	Pong consoles were unique, both in the relative sense compared to virtually all subsequent systems, and in the sense that they literally were not anything else, could not do anything else. A Pong console might have a “computer chip” at its heart but it isn’t a general purpose computer, it doesn’t really have a processor and it can’t really be made to do anything but play Pong without just making an entirely different chip. The Odyssey may have introduced interchangeable “games” but they didn’t actually contain any information, they were closer to the “battle chips” used for the Mega Man PET toys (which look like SD cards but are really just bridging loose connections in the device rather than transferring any data to it), with their function approximating the game selector switches on the 2600; still in a sense this could be argued to be the point at which the tug-of-war between deterritorialization and reterritorialization of the home video gaming platform begins. Relative to the home computer, the 2600 could be described as a closed system, but ultimately Kassar was more right than he may have liked to be. Anybody could make a cartridge, as long as they understood the codes and had the manufacturing capability to do so. With the Nintendo Entertainment System this was no longer the case (this was the intention at least).

	Once Nintendo had lured people into their box-and-stick trap, the next generation had to give people reason to stay, and in this sense the launch lineup of the Super Nintendo may have been one of the most important in terms of setting a precedent. I don’t think that the SNES lineup is the best by any means, but it does stick out in my mind as a kind of “minimum viable product” of a console library. Super Mario World offers tactility, exploration, a quantitative furthering of a last-generation boundary pusher (Super Mario Bros. 3). SimCity gives the player a canvas for expression, customization, decision-making. Gradius III gives the player a taste of that finger blistering arcade action, and with a relatively true-to-arcade appearance even if it comes with some slowdown. F Zero and Pilotwings both offer a graphical presentation that wasn’t possible on prior hardware. Jumping, racing, flying, shooting, crunching numbers, it’s all here.

	Demon’s Souls then seems perhaps like a perfect launch title in some respects; after all, some would say Bloodborne alone justifies the purchase of a PlayStation 4, Demon’s Souls could also be seen as a kind of single-game minimum viable exclusive launch lineup. The complex movement and tactility of a Mario, the customization and number-crunching of SimCity, the difficulty and combat-focused adrenaline of a Gradius. Exploration, characters and storytelling, competition through online multiplayer, collaboration through online messages and phantoms. The replay value of different builds and increased difficulty in new game+.

	The problem is not that Demon’s Souls is an unsuitable launch title for a console, the problem is that it’s a suitable launch title for the PlayStation 3. If it had been at the PS3’s launch in the same way that King’s Field released only weeks after the PS1, or in the same way that Eternal Ring was available day and date with the PS2, Demon’s Souls (2009) probably would have hit a lot harder. Though, in at least a spiritual sense, in being From Software’s first fantasy action role playing game for the console, and given the lagging adoption rate of the PS3 compared to its contemporary competition and both its precursors and successors in the Sony home console lineage, considering the point at which the PS3 may have reached a kind of cultural saturation, it may as well have been a launch title for the PlayStation 3.

	If Cyberpunk 2077 would make a person question why they bought a PlayStation 5 to play a PlayStation 4 game, what would Demon’s Souls (2020) make them ask? Is it to be implied by this new release that Demon’s Souls (2009) had unwittingly been the ill-conceived last-generation version of itself, only fully realized at present?

	The original PlayStation and the PS2 both eventually received a model which greatly reduced their size. In the case of the PS2 they initially achieved this by externalizing the power supply, but even this was reincorporated into the main chassis in the latest models. The PSone being roughly the size of a portable CD player, the PS2 being roughly the size of a DVD case, not only reducing the amount of raw materials necessary for each unit and lowering production cost and complexity, but also making each of them more desirable because of the spectacle; remember in those past decades when it seemed technology kept getting smaller, and how impressive it seemed? Even in excising every vestigial organ they could from the over-engineered launch model, the third and smallest major revision of the PS3 is still about as big as two Wii U consoles sat side by side. In an apparent response to this over-complex design, the PS4 (and its competition in the Xbox One) moved to using the more standard X86 architecture used by computers instead of the more specialized hardware of each prior generation. The PS4 slim being only slightly smaller than the launch model in spite of this apparently reduced complexity served as a kind of harbinger for what to expect with the PS5; even the PS5 slim is unusually large compared to every generation of hardware which came before. Even with all the attempts at efficiency, we’re now pushing things so far we find our backs against concerns of thermals, airflow, and power which did not apply to this degree before.

	Today technical exclusivity is a complete fiction.14 Even Cerny would admit that what specialized hardware does exist in the PlayStation 5 is a purely quantitative cost-cutting and efficiency measure, that the only drawback of playing the same games on a PC would be slightly higher CPU or RAM usage to achieve the same result.

	Capital resists the new, it resists the romantic in production even as the romantic takes absolute hold in culture. The romantic is too messy, too individual and subjective, too difficult to replicate. Capital relies on the reproducible, on the nigh fungibility of every worker, that the machine of its growth might be sustained indefinitely by a single continuous process. So the culture industry runs into a problem, the romantic taste of this developed society craves novelty. Capital absolutely cannot except by pure accident create a romantic work. Capital can only, by the creation of new unexplored technologies, create environments of expression which are not well understood, requiring a new generation of products which necessarily take advantage of this technology in the primitive sense, allowing for a kind of “high-outsider” media to be created in the intermediate period before the technology is understood well enough to reenter the classicist status quo.

	But we’re hitting the limit. The earliest forms of at-home Pong were not “computer” games, they were purely electronic. The Atari 2600 was effectively a machine built to compute Pong, and it just so happens that the necessary functions to do so could be repurposed to play other games. The challenge in programming for these old consoles was “how do you get it to do something else”, or “how do you do anything of interest at all with so little”. As time went on we eventually reached the advent of the Windows operating system, many games were no longer even made for specific hardware, but to run in an existing software environment. As the quantitative power of computers continued to grow, more and more of the work was already done and able to be reused. For generations the upper limit of creative possibility could be taken for granted, throw enough people at it, and it “just works”, it was “just possible”. For many people, for smaller creators, this is great; the ceiling of how complex a game could be used to be low enough that one person could reach it, now that floor was at this same point. But for the large companies who unfortunately the production of games hardware is reliant on, this presents a dilemma. We reach a point where the quantitative power of the average computer (represented perhaps by the consoles) has reached such a high point that the difficulty has become “how do you even use this much”, how do you use this much power efficiently? Games have performance issues, but in many cases it isn’t necessarily because they demand so much, but because relatively little of the available hardware power is even being utilized! It takes longer to make a game than it does to design the hardware it’s going to run on, nobody has time to optimize anything!
	
	Something has to give. Either the game is early access, or a live service, or is for some other reason in a perpetual state of ongoing development, never actually finished. Or perhaps the game is a single work, but with no time for optimization some “automatic” solution is necessary as in the implementations of up-scaling, super-sampling, temporal smearing, AI bullshit. Or maybe you do put work into crafting a finalized and total product, but how? By neglecting to design a new game at all, repackage an existing work.

	I think that one of the reasons why some critics and creators specializing in other mediums have such trouble recognizing video games as a rich art form is because the implications are sort of terrifying, both because of what it could mean for other mediums, how deep the possibilities within video games could be, how high-dimensional they are, and because of what it means for games themselves, especially in how they are limited by our seeming inability to engage with the medium through any means other than commodity, denial of their existing artistry as repression of the tragedy of their yet unexplored artistic potential.

	A great many of the best “exclusives” on each platform are only such by coincidence, mistake, limitation. Were Everybody’s Golf and Boku no Natsuyasumi exclusive to PlayStation because Sony took a unique interest in those ideas, or because the compact disc was cheap to manufacture and distribute software on? Did those titles move to Apple and/or Nintendo exclusivity (in the form of Clap-Hanz Golf and Natsu-Mon) because Sony lost that interest (in general perhaps, and in at least some specific sense certainly!) or because the iPhone and the Switch simply have a larger install base?

	In an interview for Ars Technica’s War Stories, Lorne Lanning spends a great deal of time recounting the business and career decisions which lead to the creation of Oddworld15. To sum it up as shortly as possible, the games got made because games were cheaper to make than movies so it was easier to convince investors, and that convincing investors is how you get things made. He makes a point of having to follow “dumb money”, of having to know what the current buzzwords are that will make people with more money than sense give you what you need. This is the only length of rope that I will give to industry veterans who emerge from hiatus to announce that they’re working on some kind of live service, non-fungible token peddling, micro-transaction riddled garbage. I’m not convinced Eric Chahi came out of hibernation to make Paper Beast because virtual reality gave him some unique inspiration; rather, I believe he was afforded the opportunity to make any game at all because the memetic weight of virtual reality gave investors confidence. I’m not convinced that Alan Wake II was an Epic Store exclusive because Remedy thought it would sell well on the platform. I can’t even be too mad about finding out that Jay “Zeebarf” Ziebarth, creator of The Visitor and The Several Journeys/Ballads of Reemus which were some of my favorite Flash games in middle school, is an NFT guy working on a cartoon adaptation of The Red Green Show. I can’t wait for the blockchain game based on A Prairie Home Companion.

	In the same sense that Watergate was not a scandal, that the idea of it as a scandal exists to mask the fact that there is none, that the punishment for misuse of power by a President exists only to hide that the supposed highest office in the world is that of a mere figurehead, so too should it be understood that it is not by some misguided and failed master-plan of Jim Ryan or whoever else that the PlayStation brand has become a husk, but it is specifically that nobody has been steering the ship at all for quite some time. Put simply, Demon’s Souls (2020) exists to hide the fact that PlayStation is no longer willing or capable of producing a game such as Demon’s Souls (2009).

	This is at the very least adjacent to the reason why they won’t release a patch for Bloodborne, why the minimal fixes in the remaster of Dark Souls couldn’t be a patch and had to be a new release. The same reason that it seems like every few months I hear that the record for most expensive television production of all time has once again been broken by a completely unnecessary remake, sequel, or spin-off of an intellectual property that saw its peak at least two decades ago. Certainly to some degree there is a necessity to appear as though the new incarnation of a product has the value to justify a new purchase, and there are cases like the “Taylor’s version” albums where legal issues play a factor. But more than anything these reveal that to the powers that be, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings, Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, Swift’s Fearless, Bloodborne and Demon’s Souls (2009) are not art-objects.

	Today most media is delivered as predicted by Adorno and Horkheimer on the model of the radio, but only as pretense and surface appearance; we are living in a post-information age defined by complete denial of what the computer is capable of or even is. The radio and the analog television were true receptacles, receiving only an instantaneous signal representing at that moment how the diaphragm should vibrate or how brightly the beam should fire. The streaming of digital music or video requires an asynchronous storage of a segment for future playback, which is discarded once emitted. Video games are high-dimensional enough that streaming is often impractical if not impossible and an inarguably worse experience than local play at best, though gaming hardware is still treated the same as a mere receptacle. The language of distinction between “physical” and “digital” tells us a lot: does an Atari 2600 cartridge not contain digital data, do the electromagnetic charges in a hard drive or SSD or SD card not physically exist? On a long enough time-frame, all memory is volatile, all licenses are expirable, and the physical/digital distinction truly only represents where along that gradient a particular purchase is purported to fall.

	But what they believe (or perhaps more accurately, want or assert) to be selling you is less than even that, not an art-object or a physical arrangement of electric charges, not even a license. A consumer of cake cannot have and eat it at once, Coca Cola does not sell the object of a drink, they sell units of the active performance of drinking, the object of the name-brand foodstuff is not the food but the brand itself. Each new adaptation of Lord of the Rings is replaceable in its function, to the executive each may as well be a portal to Middle Earth. The music of Taylor Swift or any pop-star is not the object; whether recorded and released in 2008 or 2021, Love Story is only a performance which exists as an intermediary vehicle for the commodity of Taylor Swift herself. Sony’s CFO bemoans their supposed lack of IP, not their lack of games, because they deny that games as art-objects even exist, and they are nothing but living processes connecting players to the ether of the brand itself.

	And it seems that a lot of players and critics agree. Games like Resident Evil 2 (2019) and Final Fantasy VII Remake and especially Rebirth feature completely different presentations, aesthetics, re-recorded music, different voice actors, sound design, controls, and completely different basic game-play to the point of not necessarily being classifiable as the same genre. In spite of this the games are lauded as some of the best games in recent years, certified by MetaCritic as “must play” titles, while the original Resident Evil 2 (1998) remains unavailable on modern consoles, and was only recently made available on PC again through GOG. Audio and visual recordings are remade, reinterpreted, re-recorded, but aside from gross mishandling these new versions virtually never replace the original in either the literal sense of availability or in their cultural weight, but games are much more often rendered unavailable by their rights-holders and culturally disposable by their apparent appreciators. Demon’s Souls (2020) is in its absolute best light the equivalent of a tribute album, a broad range of instrumentalists paying homage to the existing composition; the responsibility for it may have crossed the Pacific, but this is closer to Punk Goes Pop than Yellow Loveless. If it were a film or an album, nobody would dare call it a remaster.

	It’s interesting to consider Demon’s Souls (2009)’s relation to Bethesda Softworks (side-note: you know what, living document and all that, I think this is actually just bullshit! I’ve seen this claim all over the place, as recently as in this podcast clip here16, but looking around I can’t actually find a source at all for the idea that Sony approached From Software asking them to make an Oblivion-like!). The original King’s Field and Elder Scrolls both released in 1994, both first-person role-playing games but with very different objectives. As time went on Bethesda swallowed the Fallout IP, the structure of the original first two games in that series being directly inspired by Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters; the then-definitive 3DO version of that game, which the modern open-source version is based on, also released in 1994. The Ur-Quan Masters has an absolutely incredible pulp aesthetic and dignified adoration of space travel and science fiction which still feels fresh today, it has one of the most immediately engaging openings of any game I’ve ever played. The hero is such only by happenstance in a fantastical world, and the arc of its narrative and the player’s ultimate goal reflect an optimism of human technical and artistic progress. By comparison an ongoing game of telephone has given us Bethesda’s Starfield, with its mundane and industrial lifeless universe, its discontinuity and seeming total disinterest in space itself, and its “NASA-punk” aesthetic betraying a classicist obsession with believability at the expense of all else. If we believe the (as I mentioned, dubious!) claim that Demon’s Souls (2009) was intended as some kind of direct response to Oblivion, Demon’s Souls (2020) has been made only more Bethesda-like by taking on the NASA-punk equivalent of a flattened fantasy aesthetic.

	The transformation of dead art-objects into live art-performances, of mechanization, is necessary for the ongoing maintenance of all elements of the status quo as objects. The whole of human life becomes a chain of thought-terminating cliches. We afford our bread by periodically clocking in to the Chinese room, and see the circus in the Portuguese stadium. There has been a tendency among some to attribute the most recent failed aspirations of the tech sector and gaming industry to a frenzied denial of the limits of resources in a finite physical universe, but surely an infinite or even effectively infinite universe would pose at least as many problems! Even if we assume the universe to be a finite state machine, the machine could not comprehensively model itself; from the inside as we necessarily are, both the scale and granularity of our world may as well be infinite, whether it truly is or not barely matters. Our understanding of the universe will always be a mere model and will always be imperfect, there will always be some subjective or ideological cutoff point. The danger in encroaching technology is the notion of quantizing subjectivity itself. The threat that AI poses is not in whether it is conscious (even if perhaps this is a question worth asking for its own sake), but whether we treat something with nonhuman senses as equivalent to human subjectivity; the danger is not whether it answers questions with objective truth, but whether we treat its responses as valid or worthwhile subjectivity. Anyone who has driven with GPS during construction should know how worthless the “reified space” of the proposed “meta-verse” would be. The tech sector has already normalized calling machine learning algorithms “AI” and now chase true AI as “AGI”, the danger is not just in where they move the goalposts but where they eventually decide to cement them in place. They will never truly capture total human subjectivity in digital and quantized form, what should be worrisome is what arbitrary boundary they may select and claim “we did it”.

	“A failure of long-term narrative development and a bastardization of a generation ready to claim their own version of heroism.” says William Mai on Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker17, and like Rise of Skywalker, so much of popular culture today feels like very expensive ships that nobody is really steering. As companies, particularly in industries requiring a kind of granular subjectivity like entertainment or technology, grow older and more people are replaced across all levels of authority, managers specializing in that industry are replaced by managers who merely specialize in management, workers who merely specialize in work. Just a computer only truly understands binary math, only able through sheer speed at this one task to give the appearance of understanding human language, the current state of creative and technical industry does not understand the creative process, only the industrial process through which prior products were made, distributed and maintained.

	I suspect despite the clumsiness of the video’s actual script that me and Tantacrul agree on a lot of the finer points (after reading Difference and Repetition I even wonder if “reification as reinforcement”, re- instead of res-, is even such a bad definition), specifically I would say that the actual problem of reality TV and the documentaries that he portrays more negatively are that the fetishism of art, the necessary truncation of dimensionality via abstraction, is used not to create a delimited object which invites speculation across the breadth of subjectivity, but that it engages in this same quantization of subjectivity required to take AI seriously as anything other than what it is: a very complex averaging machine. The market would very much like its customers to be nothing but perfectly understandable averages and clear archetypes with internally uniform and predictable demands, so that being so limited these demands could be perfectly calculated, met by products which could numerically reach the market-tested ideal point along every remaining dimension of the commodity, with such products being the only kind that could be pasted together by machine learning algorithms. It’s appropriate that the flood of reality TV in prior decades is typically attributed to gutting production staff in response to writer’s strikes, as these new technologies seem not to target higher quality products or even more efficient production in any material sense given the sheer amount of electric waste required, but a trim to payroll.

	If we accept the existing philosophical assertion (apparently by Hume but I’ve only heard this idea secondhand, most recently I believe in a Mark Fisher lecture) that the self is a bundle of processes which mistakes itself for a single coherent thing we have a starting point from which to examine a path to where we are now. The computer is a man-made object, a work of art, a commodity, cut from the material of the dimension of the physical world, which consists of its own manipulable dimensions in the form of memory, which can be reordered to house any number of software objects as physical controlled arrangements of electricity. The physical process of the duplication and transfer of these electromagnetic structures is virtually instantaneous and memory has been miniaturized to the point that literal billions and soon trillions of these charges can be semi-reliably stored in an object that is roughly the size of a fingernail and priced about the same as a small kitchen appliance, the conversion rate is in cents to billions. Digital data is by its physical nature valued at approaching zero and free in every sense of the word, and this is unacceptable, so the computer and data must be denied as fixed and physical things at all. The computer is instead only a receptacle for software, and that software is always in flux; computers used to come with manuals detailing exactly how to make use of them, now even the basic functions in the form of the operating system or firmware change often enough for such a manual to periodically be rendered useless; everyone has a computer, but actually making that computer do what you want it to is an activity that has become exclusive to professionals and aficionados, most people instead do what the computer wants them to do. In being recast totally and for so long now as a mere collection of processes, and with those processes becoming so numerous and complex, the door has been opened for the computer to be mistaken for something completely different, a subject.

	“What do you mean, ‘the game thinks’?”

	It’s honestly not actually that difficult to understand the appeal or assumed utility of the banal AI use-case of automating e-mails, it’s the same supposed benefit of deregulation, a decoding in the attempt to increase flux. There’s so much work activity that requires customer permission or manager approval, but communication is slow, information exchange between humans just isn’t fast enough. What if someone is away from their phone or keyboard? What if they’re in another country or time-zone, and their worksite isn’t operating at the same time as yours? E-mails might need to circulate from customer to company to company to company and back, every message an opportunity for stalling. Even if the AI might not quite give the answer you would have, even if it makes mistakes, it gives an answer! It keeps things moving! If we roll back food safety or environmental protections, we’ll have fewer things to need to monitor and check on, things can move so much faster! If we let the machine guess what the image should look like, we can push so many more frames! Subscribe to our streaming service, we’ll manage the content selection, don’t worry about it, there will always be something new to listen to! Always something new to watch. Always something new to play.

	Chinese manufacturers give Amazon the confidence that they will always have products to sell, Amazon gives consumers the confidence that anything they want will always be available quickly, insurance providers give consumers the confidence that if they buy something shitty or an accident happens or they don’t take care of it that the consequences won’t matter. Warranty service providers give insurers the confidence that they won’t need to pay out claims. Staffing agencies provide zombie companies the confidence that it doesn’t matter how many people they churn through, there will always be another set of hands at the door. The day that I’m writing this bit in my notes, NVIDIA, a “fabless manufacturer” of graphics processors, has just become the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, less than two years after board partner EVGA announced that they would no longer work with NVIDIA or make graphics cards because despite it being the vast majority of their revenue, it wasn’t profitable enough to be sustainable.

	AI art poses little new threat, it’s just perhaps the most obviously gross manifestation of extant threats. There has been no money in art for some time, the grift is in selling the grift. I saw someone complain that gamers watch commercials like it’s a holiday and get angry when they aren’t catered to. A console sale is a social contract that this walled garden’s plants will grow, this closed computer will have software worth paying the toll for. The thing that makes money is not a product, it’s confidence. Convince people that there is money in art, and art in money. If the human-written e-mail is a junction of information exchange disconnection to be propelled through the haphazard caulk of AI, advertising serves as a presumed propellant and prevention for consumer product exchange disconnection. The product, the object, is an effective first sale, but confidence is what keeps people buying the brand they trust, what keeps Coca Cola flowing instead of Pepsi. The advertisement serves less as a message, information in the sense of literally informing potential buyers, and more as an egoistic reflection of already accounted for economic flows.

	It’s popular today to give Nintendo a lot of credit compared to the competition but as I said in the introduction I believe we should temper this. To sell a console today is to sell confidence, the false confidence that you need another computer, that this one is somehow different and special and does worthwhile things that the computer(s) you already have cannot. Nintendo’s success is not in doing us some kindness, but in succeeding rather than failing at conning us. By launching the PlayStation 5 exclusively with the unrecognizable puppeted remains of the “impossibly bad” Demon’s Souls and the bizarre post-purchase advergame of Astro’s Playroom, before closing the responsible Japan Studio less than half a year later, Sony revealed that they had no confidence to sell, and yet they sell it faster than ever before anyway.

IV. A Leisure Theory of Value – Time and Anxiety

	Closing out the first season of Action Button Reviews, book-ended by videos covering the two new games he still yearned for, a remake of Final Fantasy VII and a big open-world cyberpunk game, Tim Rogers states “I am done playing huge new games I don’t even know if I’m gonna like, I wanna play old stuff I know I already like.” I trust him enough to believe that this is not an old man yelling at a cloud or believing the children to be wrong, but is rather, as I think he clearly lays out in that final part, a centering of priorities with the imminently conscious knowledge that he has a limited amount of time to communicate the meaning he finds himself having extracted through experience. I can believe that this focus requires a comprehensiveness of taste that I don’t necessarily believe myself to have formed, that I still find an odd personal duty to go out of my way to find not only unfamiliar experiences, but expressly to seek out things that I know I will not like in order to better navigate why.

	When I first heard about Demon’s Souls and later Dark Souls the games did not quite yet have their public discussion so obsessively concerned with the games’ difficulty. It was definitely not absent from the conversation, for both games it was popular to recall the experience of shooting a dragon with literally 200 arrows. The main appeal of the games was repeatedly communicated to me as “this is a new game, but it’s like old games.” The ways in which it was like old games did, generally, correlate to being more difficult but I think it’s an important distinction that this difficulty was largely seen as a knock-on effect rather than the explicit primary goal. It’s a game that doesn’t hold your hand, it’s not overly tutorialized, it’s not on rails, it lets you explore, the story doesn’t really consist of a plot, it requires interpretation. Demon’s Souls (2009) was a new game that was like old games. Demon’s Souls (2020) is an old game that’s like new ones.

	“Communism is free time and nothing else.” Is this a leftoid meme or a genuine leftist position? I don’t know, or really care because this isn’t the truism I want to argue against here, I’ve just seen the phrase floating around online, and from what minimal research I was willing to put in, from what I can tell it just originates from some blog post. Something I’ve been trying to get at is that I believe video games, perhaps especially Demon’s Souls, as virtually irremovable from capitalism especially in the historical sense of their inception and ongoing creation in the present. Things done out of genuine desire and for their own sake seem to be the obvious antithesis of capitalism.

	It seems obvious that we play games for fun, and equally obvious that we often play games for something more, or at least something else. A person might play a game for the first time and intrinsically enjoy simply interacting with it, then may be extrinsically motivated to accrue a high score or a fast time, and then may be intrinsically motivated once more by the act of skillful play being fun in and of itself. At risk of reinventing someone else’s wheel, I’m going to call this phenomenon “trinsic inversion”, because I’m so smart and clever that I get to make up new terms (god, I googled it and this doesn’t even actually seem to be a neologism, there are multiple research papers in completely different fields that contain this two word phrase).

	When a game has content that is divided into “main” and “side” content, despite the entire game being a piece of entertainment and the player having no real obligation, there is an impulse to describe these as “mandatory” and “optional” content. We see the critical path towards beating the game as a kind of extrinsically motivated social relation, either with other people who play the game, or with the developers, designers, directors, generally speaking the collective arbiter of the game, who serves a sort of asynchronous dungeon master role. In this sense we can describe the central nerve of a game’s structure as things we “must” do, for the now extrinsic purpose of proving that we can finish the game, and everything which branches off of that as things we “can” do for intrinsic enjoyment if we so wish to do those things for their own sake.

	However, games are not passive, they provide friction, escalating tension. It’s generally accepted that the path towards the primary goal of a well designed video game will constitute a series of incremental increases in difficulty. As the game’s expectations increase, most players are eventually defeated; not only in the sense that they die once or lose an individual life, but that they may reach a point where progress towards their goal seems impossible, they lose morale. Here we see another trinsic inversion, the thing the player “must” do has become something they “cannot” do. Conversely, unnecessary goals in the game are now seen in a new light, no longer things that the player is free to do for simple fun, they are now things that the player does extrinsically either for an in-game reward that will make their actually targeted task easier, or as a source of practice to become more skilled at the game for the sake of overcoming that roadblock, intrinsically motivated play is disrupted.

	One of Elden Ring’s strengths is how it not only avoids this inversion in the first place, but how it manages the inversion when it happens. Very little of the content in the game is actually necessary for completion, most problems have multiple solutions. Not only does the loose exploration provide solace from the more cautious play-style demanded by the dungeons, you can improve your chances against difficult encounters just through that exploration by finding golden seeds and sacred tears, without ever entering a dungeon at all. I don’t mean to say that Elden Ring is without friction or tension, but so much of it can be postponed or circumvented entirely that by the time the player truly finds themselves up against an insurmountable wall, they’ve already seen most of what the game has to offer.

	When the player does hit that wall in one of these games, the character of the play experience completely changes. Bloodborne’s biggest wall is the gatekeeper of its very first stage. Gascoigne’s first phase is heavy on tight reactions, his second phase best dealt with using limited resources, and he is just overall a very action-focused boss fight in a way that these games typically reserve for their second half. The game has barely started and already the experience of its structure has completely been flipped on its head. Sometimes I complain that Bloodborne has both the shortest and most linear critical path of any game in the series, and the typical retort is that it also has the most optional content, but this early moment changes the way that I view every non-essential stage of the game, it all immediately gets recast as a checklist of things to begrudgingly do when I get stuck.

	Demon’s Souls has the opposite problem in being the only one of these games to have absolutely zero optional bosses or major areas. If one thing or another seems too difficult, there isn’t really anywhere for you to find something easier, because everything else available to you will be approximately just as hard at best.

	I make inconvenient trips to the prison of hope’s grocery store to buy magic refills. When my weapon breaks or needs a tune-up I haul it to the stone-fang tunnels to visit the mechanic. I nervously consult the internet to make sure I don’t get on Patches’ bad side so I don’t lose access to his cheap healing grass. Even in Bloodborne I feel comfortable leveling up as many times as I can and only using what’s left afterwards to restock my blood vials; beating a boss in Demon’s Souls often feels like getting a paycheck and spending the entire sum on toilet paper and freezer bags. Even among a series of games in which money and power are literally the same, a single quantifiable force, where the story of each game revolves around some decaying old god clinging to power to the detriment of all else, Demon’s Souls is unique. All subsequent games through their action-choreography, their balance, their relief, posit via their mechanics that the precarity of late-capitalism can be overcome. Demon’s Souls does not offer a single moment’s reprieve from the entrepreneurial grind-set.

	Every time I jump to my death in the nexus to make sure I don’t lose world tendency feels like waking up before work in the morning, brushing my teeth, looking in the mirror and making a finger-gun gesture at my temple. Everything in Demon’s Souls is something that I simultaneously feel I must do, and feel that I cannot do. To say that a game feels like work seems like a sort of banal critique, a mere exaggeration of the game’s tedium; what I mean is that Demon’s Souls feels not only exactly like working, it feels like working at a bad job. It doesn’t feel like an adventure, it feels like driving from small town to small town to fix random old people’s old printers and copiers. It feels like being stuck in traffic on my way to pick up my things from my ex’s house.

	I’ve sort of buried the lede here in assuming the primacy of intrinsic motivation. Perhaps first playing the game in 2015, still coming down from the high of finishing Dark Souls for the first time, I initially sought out Demon’s Souls for it’s own sake. I played Dark Souls more or less on a complete whim because I bought a PS3 to play Final Fantasy XIII and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and GameStop happened to have a buy-2-get-1-free deal at the time; I played Demon’s Souls back then with high expectations. Now though, I return to Demon’s Souls again and again because of its reputation, because everyone else seems to see in it things which I’ve failed to suss out.

	I think it should be clear at this point why a review of a game simply cannot, for me, be a collection of points made only about the game itself. I simply could not talk about Final Fantasy VII, a game wherein the hero who once inspired the world is dead, where you go on a globetrotting journey in search of that hero only to find that the worst parts of him are haunting your own thoughts and actions, without talking about a road-trip to a concert that I took in the time between starting and ending that play-through. In the same way, I cannot talk about Demon’s Souls (2020), a game I am playing primarily because it is critically well-regarded, a game which intensely reminds me of what it feels like to live paycheck to paycheck, a game which feels so obviously like a grossly unnecessary expenditure of excess labor, I cannot talk about the game without talking about all of the external elements of the world and my experience which relate to it.

	The actual leftoid talking point which I want to address in this section is a false idea of what constitutes “productivity” or a “productive laborer”. There is a prevalent idea among certain types of people that everything beyond the secondary sector of the economy, all service or information workers of any kind, are superfluous. That only a person who plants or picks a coffee bean has produced something, that the workers employed in the transport, preparation, and sale of coffee are simply leeching off of that initial burst of productivity. It should be noted that the thing that is produced in “productivity” is not some necessary good, but profit; put simply, a productive worker under capitalism is a worker who produces profit. Even in obviously unnecessary business like American tax collection services or American healthcare and insurance administration, areas of the economy that are apparently subject to clear bureaucratic bloat, these workers are not “unproductive”. The astonishing cost of these services should on its own make it clear that profit is being collected from this work! A leftoid would present the tragedy as one in which these people are having society’s riches wasted on them, that these people ought to work in mines and fields and factories instead. The actual tragedy is that even in the face of blistering efficiency, technological advancement, and seemingly diminishing socially necessary labor time, that because a proletarian needs to sell their labor in units of time in order to survive, the workweek and workday resist shortening, and new demands must be invented so that their satisfaction can be sold.

	I think that the name “Letterboxd” as the name of a movie review and logging site tells you something about the social tone and atmosphere of the “cinephile”. A movie being letter-boxed or pillar-boxed means that it’s being displayed on a screen that it has had to be reformatted for, such as a theatrical film being viewed at home on a television. It emphasizes the “armchair” aspect of this environment for amateur film criticism. Playing off of that name, you’re reading this on a site called “Backloggd”. It is now a longstanding notion that a certain type of gamer, especially a PC player, has amassed a large library of games, especially digital games, which they have never played at all. Buying games just because they’re cheap, because some surface level aspect of them is appealing and the cost is negligible, because even if it’s not something you want to play now you’ve heard good things and imagine you might want to play them some day. Eventually you accumulate a kind of “leisure debt”, with a faux obligation to spend time with these games to justify having purchased them, or to engage and have a take on something critically lauded, or to play the rest of the games in this series to have a better understanding of its context.

	I replayed Demon’s Souls not because I truly felt like I wanted to for its own sake, but because I wanted to extract something from it, or to use it to extract something from myself, because I was between jobs and knew it might be a while before I again had enough consecutive hours of free time to keep myself mentally engaged with a game that in some sense I was surely supposed to like and had not been able to bring myself to experience in its entirety. Lately I’ve found myself deferring gaming experiences that I believe I’ll enjoy simply because I don’t think I’m in the right head-space for it, it would be more efficient to wait until I’m more “up for it” to extract the maximal pleasure from it. I picked up Natsu-Mon and had the idea of catching the in-game date up to the current day in August and “playing along” with it for the rest of the month, only to not boot the game up since the day it launched. I’ve still not played past what I assume is the halfway point of Lil’ Gator Game despite being pleasantly surprised by my initial session with it (update several months later, I finished it! I liked it a lot!). I picked up Part Time UFO and enjoyed it but felt like I probably should have played it nearly 7 years ago. For a long time I felt glad that I played Majora’s Mask when I was young enough to not know what frame-rate was, and had avoided replaying it in anticipation of the Ship of Harkinian treatment, but it’s been playable at 60 frames per second on PC for months now and I’ve only just turned Link back into a human.

	I look at my shelves, I see albums on vinyl, CD, cassette tape. Music can be engaged with almost completely passively, I’ve listened to each of these recordings from start to finish. While movies and TV require more time, more attentiveness, I’ve still watched the vast majority of the DVDs and Blu-ray discs I own. On the other hand, books and games each require near-total involvement, and the time investment of finishing a single piece of either medium both varies much more wildly and has a much high upper limit. I look at my books and see unfinished work, bookmarks that haven’t moved in months or years. I look at my Steam library and see easily over a hundred games that I have never even installed, let alone played.

	I wait until a new podcast episode is posted before I do the dishes, I get up between rounds of Tetris to stir a softly simmering pot of curry sauce, I let critics lecture me to sleep, I listen to an album during my commute, I daydream and make plans while I work, I read and make notes on my lunch break. All at once I must be entertained while I work, and I must feel productive while I play. Not a single moment can go to waste, no time goes free.

	The average person is a cyborg not only in the sense that cyberspace has become something we carry with us everywhere and all the time, not only in the sense whereby social controls and advertising dictate how we spend time and money alike, but in the sense that in the age of automation a huge portion of the workforce is made up of people who are more or less just there to fill the gaps in that automatic process. To do tasks that are menial and repetitive but just nuanced enough that the machines can’t do it, or at least not economically so. As much as I might like to think of myself as over-skilled and underemployed I am at absolute best only a half-step removed in being someone whose job is typically to watch and verify the process and wait for things to go wrong. Wait for customers to come to my desk, wait for a truck to pull in, wait for a package to come down my conveyor, wait for this device to fail testing, wait for this machine to jam. As we’ve established already, workers are paid for their time, and I am paid to spend time being attentive towards what will at best be nothing, to watch paint dry while anxiously waiting and being present and available for the moment it spontaneously erupts into chaos. In a way the defining aspect of the gig economy is unpaid anxious labor, where the time a person would spend behind a desk or in a building bearing their employer’s name goes without compensation by way of disruptive technicality, to be present and attentive for the desires and whims of a customer in the same way as the retail worker who stands behind a counter, but to be subject to absolute poverty in exchange for some illusion of “flexibility”.

	Keeping this in mind with the role of AI generated e-mails as explored in the previous chapter it becomes clear that the role of human labor in the present economy is to wait for and restart stoppages in an economic flow whose automatic momentum is presumed to already be at speed. Customers will keep coming through the door, boxes will keep coming down the conveyor, broken computers will keep piling up, everything will spill until it floods if you can’t keep up, so keep up or die in the street.

	Being a workaholic probably functions nearly identically to gambling addiction. Work addiction is probably only possible today in the Deleuzian hypertrophy imposed by capitalist decoding and axiomatizing, the global criminalization of all too slow craftsmanship, the death of learning and its supersession by conditioning. Without proper training or reliable equipment the successful completion of work tasks becomes arbitrary, the factors leading to that success drift over time from known-knowns to known-unknowns to unknown-unknowns, experts in a frenzied rush to retire teach their replacements how to go through the motions, and eventually people who only know the motions teach only the motions. With so many work tasks being the management of random breakdowns of automatic processes the ideal worker in the current economy is someone who is conditioned by these failures to compulsively check for them as often as possible, someone who finishes a task and immediately starts looking for another.

	I’ve seen some criticism of Dark Souls III in particular claim that beyond a certain point the From Software action role-playing games devolved into choreographed combat tangos of little more than rote memorization of frame-perfect dodge-roll timings. I’m not going to claim that this isn’t a viable method of overcoming the game’s challenges, I’m also not going to concede that this is not a satisfying way to play the game. Having played the game from start to finish dozens of times, sometimes in dozens of hours of trawling completionism and sometimes in under two hours of hurtling somersaults and spinning slashes, desperate grinding and soul-level one frugality, I would say that the game is only this experience if you want it to be, and wanting it is fine.

	I do think that, as perhaps with all art, there is an undeniable libidinal quality to video games; just as the excitation of sexual activity culminates in the relief of sudden unwinding, so too does a song build tension in anticipation of release. The rhythms of game-play loops follow this same blueprint, from the worming and winding feeling out of unfamiliar dungeon tunnels finally leading to sunlight, to the breakneck vein-bursting red-eyed 300 mile-an-hour slipstream before the depressurization on the other side of the checkered flag. It’s cliché at this point to describe the bosses of a Souls game in this way. Replaying, optimization, speed-running, and meta-gaming of all kinds represent for the individual player a long tail reduction of the base level of tension. What may appear as (and in some cases perhaps genuinely be) rote repetition gains in this continual reexamination greater and more particular recognition of differences, nuances of possible enemy maneuvers, weapon move-sets, and new-game+ exclusive item placements. The machine zone obsession with a single game only justifies itself by being a repetition of an event delimited by the euphoria of the game’s end, and maybe it’s no surprise at all that action games like DMC5 and Bayonetta 3 give the player a new game-play tool only just before the credits roll. I have now been writing this review for nearly five months, and having revisited both the PS3 and PS5 versions of Demon’s Souls I have still not finished either game. If in the sense of game-economy Demon’s Souls is like working a bad job, then in the sense of game-libido Demon’s Souls is like having bad sex.

	Underneath all my pretenses of rationalizing, I too feel the pull of the machine zone. I felt it while playing Cruis’n Blast in the arcade, I imagined what it might be like to actually come back to the machine and punch my password in and keep up my progress. I could easily pull myself out because I knew it would probably make a lot more sense to just play the Switch version, that driving to an arcade was an inconvenience I would not actually put up with, that literally nobody was interested in arcade games in the USA anymore and that despite having the feature of a profile system that this would never see the kind of use it did in Japanese arcades. I perhaps felt the pull of the machine zone most strongly in 2021 and again in 2022 during the times that I unsuccessfully attempted to purchase a PlayStation 5. During my recent ahead-of-schedule Spring cleaning I found within my desk a full page of handwritten notes on what major retailers were expected to restock the PS5, some of them random, some of them expected on a given weekday, some of them down to the hour. I followed guides on how to try and get through the checkout on various sites as quickly as possible to try and beat bots and scalpers. I watched live-streams and peered into odd “communities” of people brought together only by the activity of attempting to make a purchase that most of them would fail to finalize, communities in which the explicit goal was to leave. It was a totally bizarre, compulsive, viral (in the most literal sense of disease) social and economic activity that most closely resembled, to me, the small glimpses into NFT communities shared by people like Folding Ideas.

	When I first started trying to more deeply interrogate my problems with Demon’s Souls I initially found myself wondering if what I was encountering was an experience that resists mechanization, but I now believe that Demon’s Souls is simply an unreliable machine, and of course as laid out by the findings of operant conditioning we know that it is precisely this unreliability that gives a process a tendency towards compulsion. Demon’s Souls’ difficulty curve has a pretty shallow slope, and because so much of its appreciation is retrospective, much of its learning curve has instead been taught by its successors. The bulk of the friction often comes not from dealing with the game itself, but breaking from old habits picked up while playing other games like it. Subsequent games give the player both a more varied set of challenges and a more complete set of tools; generally the only defense of Demon’s Souls in response to this is to give it a pass for being first, but history does not begin in 2009. In a sense, compared to their previous games in the genre, by adopting a third person perspective, dual-stick camera and movement, putting attacks on the shoulders and triggers, equipment management on the D-pad, Demon’s Souls adapts the already existing FromSoft RPG into the then dominant third person action game formula in a way that is just as trend-following as Elden Ring’s open world. The idea of Demon’s Souls as something wholly novel or original in comparison to future explorations of the style sort of necessarily depends on retrospective engagement in a world where it is already common for a fantasy RPG to have the same control scheme as Uncharted.

	Demon’s Souls is an action game, and like all action games (and indeed many games generally) it is at the mechanical level concerned primarily with space. In The Hidden Dimension, Edward T. Hall lays out the idea of proxemics, the study of the social effects of space, personal territory. He defines 4 distinct fields in which the distance between 2 or more people has a noteworthy effect on their behavior. Intimate distance is defined as less than 18 inches, personal distance at less than 4 feet, social distance at less than 12 feet, and public distance extending beyond that and more or less dropping off around 30 feet. I believe that all of the richest games, the few truly great open world games, the masterpieces of the role playing genre, the cream of the crop of action-adventure, are all defined by a kind of proxemic dynamism; that is, they cover the full spectrum of Hall’s human territories, if not literally than at least in analogy.

	Despite the apparent lineage that could be traced from a modern Bethesda game like Starfield, to modern Fallout, to the original two Fallout computer RPG’s, to their obvious inspiration in Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters, that eldest game of the bunch has much more in common in its use of space with Elden Ring than basically any noteworthy western RPG. In The Ur-Quan Masters public space is represented by intergalactic travel, social distance by traversal within a solar system and within a planet’s atmosphere, personal distance by communication with other vessels, and intimate distance in combat. Elden Ring similarly funnels the player down through public distance in the open world, social distance in towns, safe areas, and wider hostile areas, personal distance in the more tightly wound dungeon crawls, and a final culmination in its intimate choreographed boss fights. I must preempt inevitable retorts here and note that Elden Ring is dissimilar from both most other open-world games and most other Souls-like games. I would make the claim that the specific surreality seen in games like Oblivion and parodied in memes is a side effect of the Bethesda game (and indeed many other open-world games) never really being able to convincingly leave public distance, and on the opposite end a game like Demon’s Souls never really gives the player the relief or privacy of public distance at all.

	Just as Hall explains how a person’s territory extends beyond their body, especially in games with “modern” camera controls the player extends past their character. Whether in the corpse-run or “lion-strat” (god, will anyone even know what this means anymore?), ignoring and running past enemies, or in exploring a cleared out area, it will inevitably become clear both outside and in the transition back into combat through the lock-on, or attempts to do battle with the camera unlocked, that the player character’s model really represents a kind of danmaku-esque tiny hit-box tethered to the greater apparatus by which the player peers into and interacts with the world. Dimensional implosion renders the left analog stick a gas pedal, the right stick a steering wheel, the modern twin-stick movement and camera controls risk flattening every game into W+M1.

	Darkroot is natural, Anor Londo is abandoned, Sen’s Fortress is well guarded, Ash Lake is secret. Every area of Demon’s Souls is just a video game level, or perhaps more accurately each setting within the game is an archetype selected because of the ease of its translation to a particular kind of video game level, a labyrinth of entrails. From circuit-boards to highways humanity loves to spill its guts all over. The automobile falls apart as a symbol of independence in the face of the imploded meaning of the “metaverse” as represented by GPS. The best thing a drive can be is short, or effortless, a straight line, an opportunity to zone out. The world shrivels into a maze, the maze fades into a single tunnel. That is modern life, and that is the dungeon crawl of demon’s souls. An ideal play-through of Demon’s Souls is a series of absent minded commutes punctuated by temperamental exercises of the game’s apparent “real” systems.

	“Country road, take me home” they sing, the road here is the actor, the agent, the traveler is passive. Driver and player alike are reduced to a dying worm in god’s bowels, an endoscope already past the anus. Every level is series of organs punctuated by clenched sphincters to force your phallic swords and staves through, each culminating in increasingly awkward encounters with new and unusual partners. In later games boss fights are like dances, here you awkwardly jut your elbows into the enemy’s rib-cage trying to find the ideal position and rhythm for a repetitive action to finally just get it over with. I have only half jokingly described Demon’s Souls as a defamiliarized 7th generation gray-brown cover shooter, and honestly, from it’s control scheme to its level design to the rhythms of its combat encounters I think this is just flatly true. On closer inspection, compared to nearly every subsequent game of its type, Demon’s Souls is closer to the games it apparently stood in contrast to than I think many would be willing to admit, that further and further outside of its time it only becomes more clear that it is of its time.

	To criticize more the “action-oriented”, polished, tactile, successors to Demon’s Souls for the endpoint of their skill-curve being a falling away into mechanization is like bellyaching about the dishonor of speed-running, ignoring that the precise beauty of the game is its high-dimensional arrangement of both problem and tool-set. The final stage of having become rote can only happen after a process of becoming-rote, and it is the length and enjoyment of this becoming process, the prolonged minimizing of resistance wherein resistance still recurs, 

	When trying to explain my reluctance to sing the praises of UFO 50 to a group of friends I compared the game to Hydlide. I must be absolutely clear that I do not mean this as an insult; in fact, that From Software’s games from King’s Field to Shadow of the Erdtree have so readily and consistently continued to carry the torch lit by those kinds of early action RPG’s is one of my favorite things about them, and if anything the comparison to UFO 50 was too mean to Hydlide. Hydlide is a bump-combat action RPG, if you and the enemy touch each other while facing each other, you both get hurt. If either of you is looking away from the other, that entity deals no damage, meaning you want to attack enemies either from the side or behind. The first enemy that you fight and the only one initially practical to engage with is a slime that doesn’t have different sprites to visually communicate what direction it’s facing, you have to try and intuit this based on how it moves. My comparison to UFO 50 was that most of the game’s require this kind of multilayered approach, most of the games are this hard, this “unfair” by modern standards, they require you to closely pay attention to details that would be trivial or even nonexistent in most games. Hydlide does something that I don’t think many games in UFO 50 can claim (though I’ll admit I haven’t played them all), it uses its mechanics to create situations. You don’t just fight the vampire, you cleverly navigate a labyrinth to sneak up behind him (funny enough, this is replaced by a simple head-to-head combat encounter in Virtual Hydlide). The levels of 1001 Spikes are mechanically, aesthetically, perhaps even thematically comparable to Sen’s Fortress, but the former is only mechanic and aesthetic for a very straightforward platforming system, and the latter is a situation build on top of the base mechanics of an action RPG. The Souls games are full of statistics and frame data and move-sets and builds, they’re full of encounters but so are a lot of games, the thing that makes them special is the situations that they put the player in. Is the relative safety of claustrophobic and tangling underground halls worth recoiling from the straight shot patrolled by ranged attackers overhead? Is it worth it to permanently unlock and open this door to pick up the items on the other side knowing that this will also free the enemies within? Do I bait the explosion and pass through after the blast or run to the other side before it has a chance to go off?

	In previous reviews I’ve implied a difference between a game’s systems and a game’s mechanics without really defining exactly what I mean when I make this distinction. Mechanics are ways that the player is able to communicate to the game, systems are ways in which the game communicates with itself. Menu navigation, for example, is a mechanic, but leveling up, equipment customization, and the relaying of dialogue are all systems. I do also have something to say about the way the game communicates to the player and the way that the player communicates with themselves, but because that’s the bulk of what has changed in the 2020 version, and this section is concerned primarily with the underlying commonly shared game of Demon’s Souls, I’m saving that for the next chapter.

	The situations in Hydlide are made in the meetings between system and mechanic, the mechanics of movement and combat, the systems of tile-based environments and power-ups. While as outlined a couple of paragraphs ago, the situation is not absent from Demon’s Souls, but I would also say there is nothing in the game as powerful or interesting as later examples like being afflicted with the curse status in Dark Souls, or being transported by a trap chest in Elden Ring or a Snatcher in Bloodborne.

	The linearity of Demon’s Souls, the course-clear/flagpole Mario of Souls, renders every system an opportunity for a short-circuit, only a roadblock. The systems serve not to connect to and heighten the mechanics into a situated experience, but encourage or require a pulling out, a disengagement. From weapon durability to carry weight to mana, the solution to dealing with systemic inconvenience is never to do something interesting. The solution is always either to stock up on an item that lets you brute force your way past the numeric limit, or to go back to square one. The first time that I played Dark Souls I shot a bunch of arrows at the dragon outside the undead parish to get the drake sword, and once I got back to Firelink I immediately squandered its durability by overusing the two-handed heavy attack while testing its move-set; in that same play-through I used the halberd as my primary weapon, and upgraded it to the permanently breakable crystal type because I thought it sounded cool. Not being able to just fast-travel anywhere at any time means that a setback like this requires a spatial interaction in Dark Souls, and a necessary rethinking of combat strategy in the meantime now that one of your tools is unavailable, but in Demon’s Souls it is a pure matter of wasted time, effort, resources, and a pure repetition to return to the same point. Even the system of leveling up itself, one of the most basic pillars of the RPG genre, becomes a pure time-theft in the end. To be fair, if there was ever a remotely appropriate time to do it, it was the final boss, but that only softens the blow so much.

	Would Hydlide be better if you could press a button to swing your sword? Would Legacy of the Wizard be better if each character was restricted to a more linear path? Would Faxanadu be better if it was in 3D and you could control the camera using the right analog stick? Would It’s Strange World: Gunman’s Proof be half as good as it is if you didn’t need to return to your bed at home to save your game, and the very first thing that happened wasn’t your main character getting kicked out of his parents house and thus being unable to save until defeating the first boss? Would Final Fantasy VII be improved by being able to look up at the sky prior to leaving Midgar? Would Eternal Ring be better with a Metroid Prime-style lock-on targeting system? Would Demon’s Souls be better with weapon-arts and guard-counters and more checkpoints and poise-tanking? Would old game be better if it was like new game instead? Even if it would, it wouldn’t be the same, it wouldn’t be itself.

	Even if Demon’s Souls wasn’t perfect, could someone else, even with the benefit of hindsight, possibly make it any better? And could they do it without turning it into something else?

V. Backlogeddon, or Reinventing the Everlasting Gobstopper to Suck Myself Dry

	Tim Rogers claims that “In the world of PC game playing, games exist to sell us the hardware we already bought.” As I believe he is implying when he says that Cyberpunk 2077’s latent Windows-like nature is palpable even in the console versions, this paradigm has already spilled over onto the PlayStation and Xbox platforms.

	How do the artist and aesthete interact with art? How is art used as a conduit for transferring information? What is the commonly accepted treatment of the art-object by creator and observer before and after the moment that the artist cuts the cord and kills the process?

	The artist spends what can be a great deal of time drawing from experiences, shaving away details unnecessary, honing skill and craft. The artwork is a living thing so long as it is continued to be worked on, work in progress, subject to endless revision. The artist themselves also changes, throughout the creation of a single piece the artist could become an entirely different person, shifting priorities, economic situation, death of a loved one, the artistic process becomes haunted by things unplanned at the outset.

	The aesthete is barred from interfering with the hypostatized object. The museum forbids touching the plastic arts, sculptures are suspended in the air, paintings are put behind glass. Even aside from grossly belligerent acts of destruction, shattering, tearing, even the small destructive capacity of the oils of the skin are taboo. Everyone has visited a library or used book store and found books for borrow or sale with coffee stained pages, frayed edges, missing sleeves. Even if the book’s content, the real art of the medium, is intact, the art-object is so fragile; beyond the effect of cosmetic damage on the exchange value, how many milliliters of liquid would be enough to render a book’s use-value moot? The destruction of art’s content is seen as equivalent to the destruction of culture or history itself, even a person who owns the art (not in the sense of IP-holder but in the sense of private collection) is typically considered ethically in the wrong for destroying or even altering a piece, even restoration efforts are dubious. Only in the digital age has total transformation by someone other than the original creator become in many cases unambiguously acceptable, because infinite perfect duplicates can be made and changed without affecting the integrity of the original, or as said Baudrillard because there often simply is no true original.

	More and more the aesthete is also barred from allowing their interaction with art to interfere with surrounding others. Plastic, graphic, and sequence arts are localized to space and seen with the eyes, but the oral tradition could not be simply turned away from, it was necessary non-private, social, unable to be shut out in the near locale, like a smell. Writing allowed for the local containment of the story, but prior to the printing press this couldn’t be private in any particularly personal sense; the theater rises as a closed space for reading aloud. With mass production the written word and sublimated oral word enter privacy. With cinema we find a distinction from live theatrical performance, that the film doesn’t care, that leaving one’s seat is no disrespect to the art (even if perhaps still to the audience). The interactivity of video games reintroduces the necessity of audience presence, the arcade game loudly beckoning customers. The console brings games into the private home, but portable media, the Walkman, Game Boy, and headphones unite to reintroduce bookish isolation. Various platforms have tried to reintroduce features more conducive to social interaction with art, but link-cables, download play, and StreetPass still require both parties to already be within that specific game’s hardware ecosystem. With the Joy-Con, Nintendo opened the possibility for people to play with a stranger even with a single console, but how many people actually do this? The more portable Switch Lite doesn’t have this feature, and the larger and thus less portable Switch 2 will doubtlessly also cost more and be subject to a greater paranoia of possible theft.

	The commodification and mass production of art-objects has a clear tendency towards further and further privation (as in making private, or privating, I mean this not in the sense of privatization in a corporate sense though this can and does happen as an effect, nor in the sense of privation as deprivation, I’m honestly shocked by my difficulty in finding a more unambiguous word for this), both in its appreciation and in its creation. The Velvet Underground were not being defined by unique creativity but by coincidental place in history, Dan Johnston is defined by technology in the same was that the post-Alien pixel art aesthetics and Japanese 80’s porn games are: as artistic tools become private, private perspectives previously unable to be distributed or recorded become more easily communicable. The bedroom pop artist is a factor of privation, as is the beat-maker/artist dichotomy, that only private individuals and discrete economic actors can consistently create music with success in most circumstances, because even if the tools are ubiquitous the social apparatus is not. More than half of the world has a smart phone, everyone has the tools to make a great film, but they don’t. They make short-form vertical influencer marketing because that’s what they have the time and space and relationships for. If the genius of the insider-artist is an excess of knowledge relative to will, expressed in the Rank-ian creative will and inhibited by neuroticism, the outsider-artist has an excess of ready-made intuition. The creative will is a post-breakthrough schizophrenized consciousness, but the will of the atomized outsider is pre-conscious.

	Compare Sonic Frontiers to Spark the Electric Jester 3. One has 997 people in the credits, 946 personnel and 51 special thanks, the other has 133 total, 58 personnel and 75 special thanks. Most of Spark’s credits are given to Patreon backers, effectively customers, albeit who paid for the game in advance and/or several times over. The majority of the rest of Spark’s credits are given to individuals and organizations who made assets which were used in the game, but not explicitly made for the game. Software tools, sound effects, textures. So much of what makes a game is work that has already been done, so many of the tools are ready-made, so much of what still needs to be done can either be done by a single individual or papered over by scraps of other bits of work that has already been done. Whether Steely or Johnston, the works of post-millennial Dan’s sound indistinguishable even in a medium as complex as games.

	YIIK: A Postmodern RPG is one of a single digit number of games that I have personally seen crash on a console and I would still say it is without a doubt a better and more artistically interesting and worthwhile game than the third entry in the Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy could possibly be. God, people are so annoying about that game. If you really look at a game about a guy who is more interested in the mysterious death of a stranger he heard about on the internet than the suicide of the family member of a guy right in front of him and your only takeaway from it is “the guy who made this must be an asshole” (even if the guy is an asshole, who cares! He’s a stranger on the internet!) I think you just maybe need to go back to reading books with fewer than 100 pages and mostly consisting of colorful pictures. When I was in high school a kid with the same first name as me killed himself, and someday I might make some art about what listening to everyone around me talk about that was like, and that art might not be perfectly edgeless and cozy and wholesome, and if you have thoughts about that any more personally confrontational than “wow, it sure sucks for everyone that that happened” then maybe you should just spend all day listening to nursery rhymes. Here are the exact 2 artistic concerns I have with YIIK:

1. The title. A postmodern RPG? Dude, the role playing video game has existed exclusively within postmodernity, what RPG isn’t postmodern? Have you played Final Fantasy VII? How does this game actually distinguish itself in a way where it is discernibly postmodern by any comparison? Or is the word “a” just doing a lot of heavy lifting?
	
2. Even if YIIK I.V is better than the original, and it probably is, it’s just sort of breaking the other side of this art-taboo that I’ve gone on some tangent from.

	The artist is barred from interfering with it as well, an art-object cannot clarify itself. The player can say many things, but an object, even a programmatic object that only reveals select parts of itself based on varying interactive input, only says one thing. There is no conversation, this is my problem with morality in games. It’s interesting for a character within the game to struggle with morality, but it is not interesting to implicate the player in this (I think most readings of the Astraea boss fight as anything resembling a piece of a “story” in the sense of anything resembling the moral arc of a character are just utterly deranged in such a linear game where you puppet a silent, custom Udeis). The player interacts with the game on a mechanical level and the systems of the game can respond selectively to this to give superficially “differing” information, but the decisions have all been made in advance by the developer. The entire existence of the “genre” of Choices Matter is another element of quantized subjectivity, where preconfigured, ready-made choices taken as originating in the player rather than the game.

	The more the player can do, the less that the artist can. The more an artist does, the less the player can. This applies to all art, the dimensionality of a text and its interpretation behave similarly; the more the writer lays bare, the fewer unknowns that are up for debate. The choices matter game is a pincer attack, all player choices accounted for in a work that says nothing, a work that says nothing provokes nothing in the player, the ideal “choices matter” game is a mirror. And what a presumptive implication of opposition! That a game wherein choices “matter” is limited one with a dialogue system, that the choices of painting, star, route, and specific maneuvers in Super Mario 64 don’t “matter”. Narrative, theme, interpretation, even if the raw materials for triangulating things like story are limited to the single object of the program, and the communication a response to input and limited to the sight and hearing of the player, the exegesis is a matter of the player interacting with themselves.

	This then is to me such an absurd aspect of the Bluepoint remakes, which so loudly and proudly proclaim to be the same under the hood. The game’s systems should then respond in the same way as the original, the way that the player interacts with the game, the way that the game interacts with itself, these are unchanged. But the way that the game responds audio-visually has been altered, so surely this necessarily implies a great likelihood for different interpretation when the player circulates that information within themselves. Games had been re-released, remade, remastered in this way before, but Miyamoto never considered the All-Stars version of Super Mario Brothers to be a work of art. The absurdity is in games like Shadow of the Colossus and Demon’s Souls (2009) being heralded as great artistic works and doubtlessly chosen to be remade in this way because of their renown, but the information the work gives the observer has been completely altered! Demon’s Souls (2020) is like a Hollywood remake of a film from another country, where every good idea was already made in the production of the original, and every deviation from that original film, casting choices that are too obvious or distracting, less evocative lighting and framing, limper editing, just shaves it down into something unrecognizable, something less valuable.

	The ethics of objects and performances. Theater’s inherent proximity to kink, revoked consent manifests as outright withdrawal (safe-words). Music’s tendency toward non-consent. Film’s tendency toward inattentiveness. Video games’ dual tendency to engagement but also mechanization.

	There too exists a kind of ethics of the impression exuded by the object or performance. If one is not in control of the source, it’s not really feasible to opt-out of engaging with audio except by psychological means like dissociation, or more casually, “tuning it out”. Video is necessarily opt-in by way of the direction of one’s gaze, with even halfhearted engagement giving way to an inattentive opt-out. Theater lays bare a sort of proximity between art and sex by way of a spiderweb of possible analogies to kink, the actors who may do things otherwise personally uncomfortable under the pretense of the show, to do them under the voyeuristic watch of an audience, the potential discomfort of the audience members themselves, the social pressure not to revoke consent in the form of outright withdrawal from the room, oft seen as disrespectful. The necessarily total engagement of the video game form gives the player comfortable points of withdrawal, which is usually necessary given the length of many games, and for perhaps the first time the object and aesthete have a mutual respect. The greater danger perhaps lies then in a multiplicity of opt-ins, active appreciation or the passivity of the machine zone.

	The arcade game exists to sell the eye-catch. The customer is the arcade owner, not the player. The customer of a Nintendo game is usually a parent, the player a child. The person buying a game was, in the earlier decades, typically not the person playing it. The game exists, basically, to trick you into entering a market, a Family Entertainment Center with its play-money gambling, a walled garden software ecosystem. The customer-player disconnect may have given developers greater freedom of expression, the customer may have economic concerns, but only the player necessarily has artistic concerns.

	Obviously there must have been adults interested in games even in the 1970’s, that’s who was making them after all, and on account of being localized to places like universities and Pong’s initial prototype being installed in a bar, a lot of them were probably even played by adults exclusively. That said, the growth of video games as a market and “gamers” (a term Jeff Gerstmann claims arose in board meetings when businessmen realized that enough people were paying attention to them that they couldn’t call their customers some variation of “those fools” anymore) as a demographic of paying customers buying games for themselves to play (rather than the secondary recipient behind arcade operator or parent) is a definitely extant shift in majority, that I would say likely reached its peak at some point in the 00’s.

	This paradigm was then overtaken by a new circulation of adults no longer buying games to play them, but as speculative assets. I might even say this not only in the sense of collectors who genuinely like games, or collectors who literally only see them as financial vehicles (the kinds of people who get their games graded by companies like Wata), but even the amassing of backlogs represents in my opinion a kind of personal speculation on an exchange-value of activity (time for enjoyment). God dude, when I was in high school I bought a complete in box copy of Beyond Oasis for the Sega Genesis at a local used electronics store for less than $20 and now just a loose cartridge goes for multiple times that amount. I feel like I can never part with a game again, what if I really want to read the instruction manual for Haven: Call of the King five years from now, and by some weird coincidence it ends up being a kind of holy grail for no reason?

	As the exchange-value of a game further and further outweighs their use-value, as they become outside of themselves more commodity than art, so too does this happen internally. The live-service game sees the game become its own market, its own closed system or walled garden. Individual games are talked about more and more as if they are “platforms” and really this is sort of true in a world where, as Cerny says, developing a game takes longer than developing a console; this is especially true of software that is never really meant to be “finished” in the first place, as popular online games like Final Fantasy XIV and Grand Theft Auto V have now spanned 3 console generations.

	The live-service game is constantly changing, never cut off, never in stasis. Player interaction and feedback, not necessarily in the form of direct survey but even in the telemetry inherent to communicating with a server, is taken into account and the game is altered. Changes range from the granularity of minor balance changes, UI/UX adjustments to encourage spending, or total overhaul. The player-base and developer both give input and receive output, but the thing in the middle, the “game”, the “work”, the “object” and conduit of these flows is totally subject to change. Like a play, the concept of the game exists as an overhead and encompassing pretense, but it is constituted not of an art-object but of performance.

	Performance (as something distinct from mere action) is not real in the sense that intent does not functionally matter. A performance of theater is not art in the sense that the performance itself is not an object. The script, the props, the set, stage, and the object which is constructed in the process of performance, the total play itself, these are objects; but the performance is only the process which uses these smaller objects, songs and lines makeup, and constructs the whole art-object. Two actors whose lips meet on stage still meet even if under pretense, the things which physically happen in reality are not distinct from if their feelings were genuine. The performance of the stage actor is not meaningfully different from the performance of the retail worker, which is not meaningfully distinct from the factory worker. Theater has become the norm, everything with its own front-end and backroom. In the peak of COVID-19 the popular concept was hygiene-theater, performative cleaning, ineffective cloth masks worn only to give the surface level perception of increased safety. So too has Fisher’s proposed solution to market-Stalinist bureaucracy been a complete failure: nobody has stopped filling out their forms, they have instead stopped doing the duties that those forms represent. Papers are forged from the level of the individual, company, industry, self-auditing is pervasive. In any situation this would be viewed as obvious trickery, deception, the performed tasks exist only to hide that the intended tasks are not actually being done.

	If Baudrillard posited the model for society at the time which he wrote Simulation and Simulacra was the nuclear power station, today society is modeled in the ghost kitchen. What else is “fabless” circuit production? What else is print-on-demand? In every case it is no longer enough to sell products, but to sell productive capacity itself. The product itself must become its own market, its own center of exchange, the inscription has to become a new recording surface. This is where micro-transactions and especially IP cross-promotion or other real world brand deals come into play. Fortnite and every other game like it sells its capacity to its trade partners, and sells the products of that capacity to consumers. Bluepoint launders the prestige of the past while having made nothing of merit themselves at this point (and given the recent cancellation of their live-service project, it’s probably going to be a while before it even has another chance to happen). Companies outsource both their acquisition of staff and their acquisition of work itself to other companies; hire whoever the staffing agency sends, have them cook whatever food is specified by Mr. Beast. Some of these companies may have specialized equipment or persons with specialized knowledge, but in the absence of these, what does the company do other than own a building and the land it’s on (though of course, many don’t even own that)? If the work could be performed by the same people elsewhere, anywhere, what is that company’s role if not a simple landlord, “work-lord”?

	Jodi Dean says “communicative capitalism seizes, privatized, and attempts to monetize the social substance without waiting for its crystallization in products of labor.” Paraphrasing now, she says that under this current state, the purpose of a message has shifted away from its use value as a container for information, to its exchange value as a contribution, numerically bolstering already circulating content. “Our relations are the means of production.” “… a direct subsumption of sociality that happens without having to go through the commodity form.”

	Even if it seems that the “Quaternary sector” of the economy only seems to manifest in well-developed countries, this fourth sector, the economic activity of knowledge, of code, is directly at odds with the modern paradigm of the surplus value of flux. Capitalism develops its own underdevelopment, constructs internal peripheries, decodes flows, by dragging information kicking and screaming down through all sectors, destroying meaning by transforming information itself into raw material. Anyone can do a cartridge, it’s just like being on the assembly line. Anyone can repair a computer, it’s just like digging for gold. Human labor becomes automated, mechanized not only in the sense of being performed by machines, but that humans themselves only go through the motions, not understanding what they do or why, a blanket axiom, Fisher’s dream-work.

	Holy hot shit dude, I’m gonna keep it real with you. This here is the exact moment I’m just calling it quits, I’m calling it done, I’m cutting the cord on this goddamn thing. I just hit 40,000 words and if I don’t just stop I’m going to write this bullshit forever, and I don’t want to do that. I’m just not even going to flesh out the rest of this outline, everything in this stupid review just devolves into barely coherent tangents anyway, you can probably piece my point together about as well as you could have for the entire rest of this thing up to this point. And hey! It’s another tacky parallel with the Action Button Cyberpunk 2077 review where he did basically the same thing in Part 5: Sweeter the Honey-tunnel, Vaster the Blast-waste. So whatever! The rest of this section is basically just outline, and I’m sticking all my still unincorporated notes all the way at the end for you freaks who need every last drop.

	The non-final or ongoing game, downloadable content, patches, updates.

	The shambling game, presupposed serialization.

	The unceremonious replacement, remasters and remakes.

	Quality not only reduced from matrices to a one-dimensional magnitude, but a lessening of the magnitude. A lowering of the qualitative area, “lower quality” not in terms of being “bad” but of being less defined. Games routinely release “definitive” editions because non-definitive games have become the standard. The remaster and remakes render a game into an IP flux by destroying existing definition.

	“Stop Killing Games”? Wrong. Start killing games, stop letting them “live” in the first place.

	I’ve found the answer to the question I asked in 2020: I would stop playing new games altogether if games-as-flux overwhelmingly supersedes games-as-code.

	Backlogeddon is here because licensed games prior to internet distribution represent a recorded history that is more or less all-encompassed, recorded in its totality, finalized and set in stone.

	Video games will necessarily be constituted of flows, not just in the sense of the game loop or computing process, but in the sense of reliance on electricity.

	The greater the phenomenal fluxion the less effective the machine.

	The precise beauty of art, of finished and dead art, static art or hypostatic or hypostatized art, is that it can be interpreted and misunderstood. A flux, a purely mechanical process, a mechanized flow simply is.

	With the Magnavox Odyssey, all data flux was in the user’s hands, all the games were already inside the machine.

	With the Atari, data could only be added to the flux by the introduction of completely new and discrete programs, and once purchased were effectively still user controlled.

	Nintendo adopted a more direct control of data flux in terms of entry into the ecosystem. Mapper chips expanded the potential size and complexity of games, making them more interesting with virtually no drawbacks except perhaps manufacturing costs and unit price.

	CD-based consoles introduce the problem of disc access, a massive increase in appreciable flux. The read-only nature of pressed discs means that re-writable save files need their own component separate from the game.

	Hardware/software mediation.

	The PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii introduce the additional flux of firmware. They made an Xbox 360 with only 4 gigabytes of storage, installing games was not the paradigm yet. I’m all too familiar with the fact that even on PS4 there were games like Until Dawn, a game where you could still just pop in the disc and immediately start playing.

	Steam’s function isn’t just that of a store, after all with the release of Half Life 2 it was required even to play physical retail copies; Steam is also, effectively, a package manager. It controls not just the market fluxes of buying and selling software, but it manages the flux of the data itself where it had previously been a wild west situation.

	Today, playing a game straight off of a disc is absurd. Even as storage size and speed increases, games bloat to such a degree that one can no longer even remotely assume that the drive either included or onboard the console will be sufficient for the full duration of its service life.

	Now the purpose of a disc is, if anything, to slightly speed up a process which would otherwise be done over the internet, which needs to be finalized by the internet anyway in virtually all cases (as in the day one patch), and what we are purchasing is literally in effect only a configuration of a device that we already bought.

	The console, now only a vessel for configurations, is open to transition to a totally radio-like model. Like all computers it is treated less as a recording surface, and more as a receptacle for flux. Like the radio or television it becomes a shiny noisemaker, useless without a signal to drive it.

	The rocks have already cried out, and every day we stray further from God’s light-speed.

	The stretching of the definition of games, visual novels, handlebar mustache, a game that doesn’t end is just a thing that people are doing.

	I don’t want to play new games that I don’t know whether I’ll like, I don’t want to play old games I know I already like. I don’t want to play games born from provably true conclusions, or games made out of games, I don’t want to play games that are good in uncomplicated, straightforward ways. I don’t want to play the reified and shriveled remains of yesteryear. I want to play the dead ends and trimmed fat. I want to find the games that did things right and got left behind anyway, I want to play the games that did things wrong and question our present insufficient solutions. I want to play new games that are like old games, not in the sense of retro revivals, but in the sense that they are discontinuous with the presumed trajectory that inhuman and artless market forces suggest games “ought” to take.

VI. As Said Baudrillard: “Gaming is Wonderful”

	“I’m over here reciting scripts that purposely channel the meticulous prose stylings of a local politician writing a speech before losing an election in rural Victorian England, and for what?”

	Once upon a time, many pages ago, many months ago, I wrote in this very review that I would poorly paraphrase a great number of books which I never finished. It is with a halfhearted sense of knowingly undeserved pseudo-victory that I tell you now I am instead poorly regurgitating the ideas laid out in a great number of books that I have finished. In 2024 I read more books than I have in any year since I left school; honestly, I probably read more this year than in any previous year of my life, period. In 2024 I read Graham Harman’s The Quadruple Object, Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, Edward T. Hall’s The Hidden Dimension, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Otto Rank’s Truth and Reality and Psychology of the Soul, Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Did you know that a significant portion of Dialectic of Enlightenment is a critique of The Odyssey? Even if you had heard of the book, probably because of the essay on the culture industry, you could easily be forgiven for not knowing. It isn’t mentioned anywhere on the book’s otherwise relatively informative Wikipedia page. Even if the notion sometimes posed in some phrase approximating “super-heroes are like modern myths” is sort of vomit inducing, I guess that realizing an entire third or so of this well regarded text amounted to what could very reductively be described as a couple of book reviews gave me a doubtlessly unearned and still limp confidence that maybe writing too many words about Demon’s Souls (2020) was not a completely stupid thing to do.

	In 2024 I reread Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, because it was short and I was listening to a lot of his lectures and had talked about it with some friends and wanted to make sure I wasn’t misremembering what he had said, and then I gave the book to those friends. I read The Foucault Reader, a compilation of abridged passages from various works of Michel Foucault, as well as snippets from interviews with him. I read Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death and its direct “sequel” Escape from Evil, which was sort of disappointingly close to just being more of the exact same thing, more of an extended epilogue. I read Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation and Fatal Strategies. I read Difference and Repetition, by Gilles Deleuze, and at time of writing am about a hundred or so pages into him and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.

	It should be no surprise to anyone that I am always reading things on the internet, whether it’s the news, posts and messages from friends, information on wiki pages, reviews on this very site. I’ve never really stopped writing, but I probably have gone entire consecutive years of my life without needing to hand-write a full sentence with a pen on paper. I have never really stopped reading, but I have probably gone entire consecutive years without finishing a book; I think I have still not finished reading a fiction novel of any respectable length in over a decade.

	So why now? Why did I read all these books? It’s not like this was even a new interest, I had accumulated all of these books and more and let them gather dust on the shelf over the course of about seven years. Part of it might have been the sunk cost of buying all these books only to let them sit, or the festering guilt of bringing up what snippets I had read in conversation; a finally boiling over shame for the only thing worse than being a pseudo-intellectual, I was a pseudo-intellectual poser… until today?

	Part of it, I suppose, was that I was writing this review, that I wanted to make some kind of point or another that would make it seem as though I knew what I was talking about, that being able to point to all these concepts from such legitimate fields as critical theory, psychoanalysis, anthropology, et cetera would allow me to make some strong ethos appeals as I tried to most completely explain why I can’t get as much out of one of the past couple decades’ most acclaimed and influential games as many others can. That while I have had aspects of these books fed to me like a baby bird’s dinner by video essayists, lecturers and synopses, I did not feel I could adequately allude towards these ideas without engaging with the text directly. This is the same reason that books like Verbal Behavior and Addiction by Design are on my reading list.

	And, of course, as I’ve said before, the main role that I want my game reviews to play is that of self-articulation, in service of finding what I most want to be reflected in or excised from my own artistic projects. Surely, if I were so well read as to so totally critique one game or another, this would translate to a total enough understanding of my own goals as to be better equipped to approach such work. Indeed, so many people say that they are tired of art in some medium which is clearly informed only by a feedback loop running through “makers” who only ingest that same medium, anime made by otaku, games made by gamers; would it not be better to absorb literature so as to diversify the input which informs my output? Or perhaps, is this just procrastination? I sure have spent a great deal of time writing sentences instead of scripts, playing games I don’t like as an “intellectual exercise” instead of trying to make, or even just playing, games that I do like, reading last century’s diagnoses of what ails society instead of reading technical documentation.

	Part of it was definitely that I was working a newly obtained job that gave me an odd combination of a long commute, an unusually low amount of truly free time on my work days, and an unusually high amount of break time while at work. I started listening to more music again, something which had largely fallen out of my routine since 2020, because it was something I could entertain myself with while driving. I started reading on my breaks because I had so much break time that I would get antsy, and because it was the middle of the night I could only spend so much time checking my phone before I ran out of content generated the previous day by the now sleeping population of the internet. I started reading because anything else that I might want to do in my free time would either not conveniently fit into the fifteen minute chunks I was periodically permitted to spend outside of the work area, or would be something I was too embarrassed to do in front of potentially judgmental coworkers. I started reading in no small part because it was an effective and inconspicuous way of signaling to others that I was not available for fraternization.

	In short, I think there is no small chance that I started reading exclusively for the wrong reasons, but I think we aren’t even at the meatiest one quite yet.

	It’s not uncommon for a joke to be told with a kernel of truth at its center. A whole lot of people snappily repeat the quote apparently originally said by one Bill Haywood, “I’ve never read Marx’s Capital, but I have the marks of capital all over me.” Generally it’s repeated as a meme, a thought-terminating cliché deployed to denounce theory in the name of praxis while short-circuiting both, or at least I guess that’s how it’s thought of, I don’t know or care. As someone who got kicked off their psoriasis treatment when a certain highly contagious illness overwhelmed hospitals and still hasn’t gotten back on it, let me overshare a bit and tell you that I have an inordinate amount of what could be described as “capital’s marks” on me and I have no idea what value reading anything has. We’re so utterly subsumed within post-modernity that it isn’t at all revelatory to acknowledge it. Every sloppy rewording of critical theory that I’ve made in this review is roughly analogous to a banal observation coworkers joke about among themselves during down-time. Is Capital the same way? I don’t know, I haven’t finished it, and indeed I suspect most of the people repeating that phrase do so earnestly and haven’t either, but who am I to judge?

	More recently a post has been circulating which must be a joke, which even as I hope is a mere joke I know now from experience that it surely must only have struck a chord precisely because of its implicit truth. The post was more or less “why read earlier to learn when you could read later to agree?” Why read philosophy or critical theory in a moment when you aren’t sure what you think, when you could develop your own system of thought “independently”, and then instead read to pick and choose snippets which reinforce what you already think?

	While reading Baudrillard’s Fatal Strategies I came across a funny turn of phrase at the start of a new paragraph on page 76, “Gaming is wonderful,” and I couldn’t help but feel giddy at the thought of removing these three words from their context and attributing them to such a writer. That laughter grew louder still but more uncomfortable as I ruminated on the idea and realized just how beyond the pale this was. Fatal Strategies was first published in French, and even without knowing exactly what connotation the original phraseology had, it’s obvious with any context at all that what he meant was not “playing games is splendid”, but something closer to “here is the funny thing about gambling”. To even joke about taking this phrase as any kind of definitive statement said intentionally by a person with whatever meaning it appears to have on its own, these three words already passing through what could constitute a game of telephone, is it any worse a churning sausage-making of the past than the ongoing cynical “revivals” of such intellectual properties as Pac-Man, which indeed predates this work’s original language publication? Is anything I write here any better a butchering than what has been done to Demon’s Souls (2009) by its PS5 version? So many others of these books I read were also English translations of volumes written in other languages, so many of the articles from which I found information for this review from have since disappeared, so many pieces of information that I absorbed through social osmosis and took for facts have on further investigation melted away into unproven sub-anecdotal speculation. So much information, and its meaning less and less clear.

	“There is already too much truth in the world – an overproduction which apparently cannot be consumed!” - Otto Rank

	“Where we think that information produces meaning, the opposite occurs. Information devours its own content.” - Jean Baudrillard

	“It’s almost like the more you talk about something, the less anyone can possibly understand it.” - Tim Rogers

	And here we reach, especially in combination with this absurdity, perhaps the greatest folly of my newly found bookworm-ism: I have been reading in search of answers, of knowledge, meaning. As much as I don’t think it’s actually a particularly good video, it smacks of the typical overlong bloat and pretension of many video essays (I at least have the decency not to speak these words into a microphone and give them a set temporal cost), I find Ceave’s video on the “death” of the 3D platforming genre very interesting in that he concludes the genre has fallen out of favor because most disposable income-having game-purchasing adults don’t play games for fun. Adults play games for meaning, and he asserts that meaning is found in games centering on a cooperative competition with a goal (for example, a team of players battle another team of players, and the winning team gets a piece of equipment or points that will assist them in future matches or a cosmetic that will allow them to express themselves). Phrased another way, a person has to genuinely believe or want something, they need to be around people or an environment which echoes this back at them, and they need to act on their outside environment or against some other in a way which enforces this belief, and this will allow them to feel a sense of purpose, put death out of their mind, maintain ego integrity. One day at work someone asked me if I actually liked reading, and I had no real answer. I wasn’t reading because I liked it, I was reading because I was looking for something; come back to me when I either find that something, or confirm that it isn’t there.

	I continue to sift in fifteen minute sessions through the deposits of twentieth century thought in search of the gold dust of quips to shoehorn into my own already ossified philosophy. I go for a run down the most far reaches of the park trails to find at their most remote end a small parking lot, I realize this lot connects to the road I take when I drive to Walmart, I think to myself “it’s like I just found a Dark Souls shortcut.” The quadruple object is the id, super-ego, ego, and the whole soul; the father, son, holy spirit, and the whole trinity; the world, the self, the other, the meaning; the matter, mind, spirit, and essence; mommy, daddy, me, and Oedipus. Around the time I finished Escape from Evil and started Dialectic of Enlightenment I was beginning to feel a sort of suspicion that I had accidentally begun to read the same book over and over again. I now wonder if I have truly been reading anything at all, if I’ve been inserting myself into these books much more than I’ve allowed them into me.

	As said Rank, “psychology is self-affirmation or self-assertion, and psychology as self-knowledge is self-deception…” It’s not useful to say “so this is what I am”, or “so this is what I want”, it’s not something that a person will find, it’s something you have to make. Information is perhaps an effective tool for deterritorializing thought, but at a certain point one starts looking for connections and patterns between what came before more than actually considering new possibilities.

	None of this makes any sense, none of this will ever make any sense, because it’s all completely inseparable from second or third-hand accounts. I only ever engage with most if not all of this through translation, I only ever hear of or find books to read because they already have some kind of notoriety, discussion, discourse. I already have some imploded memetic version of the book’s ideas before I ever see a page. The same is true for all art. I have doubtlessly spent much more time watching film reviews than watching film, I have likely spend more time watching television reviews than watching television though of this I’m less certain. I have probably spent more time playing video games than absorbing reviews, but I have still probably spent a roughly equivalent amount of time “engaging” with video games in a way other than playing or making them.

	Bluepoint of course has a role in this, as the rough equivalent of “translator” in the implosion of Shadow of the Colossus, but the audience, the critics, media, fans, have just as much blood on their hands. Shadow of the Colossus will never speak for itself, I cannot hear it. The very first time I heard of Shadow of the Colossus it was already in the form of a scene from the game remade in the Panda3D engine. I play the game and I think of the Folding Ideas video which relays the same point I’ve heard so many people make, that the game is making some kind of moral statement, that the killing of these creatures is tragic. I realize now that I don’t just think this is shallow even by the standards of storytelling in games a decade or more older, I don’t even really know if this is part of the text! I can’t engage with the text of Shadow of the Colossus at all because everything about it has bottomed out from the weight of the world outside of it! Tim Rogers said on a recent stream that he suspects any negative reception to the Bluepoint remaster of Shadow of the Colossus has less to do with the quality of their work, and more to do with the game being a worse experience on a repeat play-through; so much ink has been spilled and so many words have telephoned their way into my ears that prior to first boot I had effectively already had Shadow of the Colossus played for me. Whatever the original game was is now as impossible to understand and take at face value as Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties in a world that has already seen the AVGN review, that has already witnessed its bizarre self-aggrandizing remaster. Demon’s Souls (2020) is at least slightly more legible having initially played the original with relatively little expectation beyond “I want another game like Dark Souls”, but it is just as gauche.

	But have we really answered the question (insofar as we assume such a thing is possible, which has more or less been refuted, except in the sense that I define the answer myself), I was reading to search for meaning, but why search for meaning?

	Last Winter was the third I spent working for one of Sony Interactive Entertainment America’s warranty service providers; last Spring I was going through a months-long interview process for a job at a major tech company, which didn’t end up going well; last Summer I was training three people to replace me, all of whom said they could not live off of what I made, and looking for a new job knowing my current position was being cut and that I was not fit for the new role they wanted me in, that if I’m going to work a job I have no passion for I might as well make decent money doing so. There are a number of phases you can go through in the process of figuring out what your job actually is: the description on the job listing, the things you get trained on, the tasks you actually need to do every day, and the role that doing those tasks ultimately play in the economy are often all entirely different. Sure, I got a 50% pay increase by switching jobs, but I have never felt so fleeting, inhuman and disposable, and I’m genuinely not sure if I can find a better job that won’t in some way make me a worse person.

	People will say that “you aren’t your work”18 but how can you accept the utter meaninglessness of work? How can you think it’s fine that the material aspect of how society actually functions, the circulation of goods and services which everyone depends on, are completely separate from anything one should hope to find meaning in? How do you deal with the fact that someone out there probably has your dream job, and hates it? How do you deal with the possibility that you could have your dream job fall into your lap one day, and it wouldn’t pay enough for you to support yourself independently, and you would actually be so good at it that it would be disruptive, that you would instead get shuffled around to different departments that needed more help until you eventually get stuck doing something totally removed from what you originally showed any aptitude for? How can you accept that approximately a quarter of the hours of your adult life and nearly half of your waking hours, assuming a relatively sober schedule for both work and sleep, are going to be an accident, a blaring cacophony of gibberish. Are we all really content with living in a world where the people who make the food we eat, repair the vehicles we drive, and create our entertainment… don’t really care about it?

	Or maybe my problem is precisely that I do care, that I’m actually too “normal”, that I have too much integrity, or at least I’m too capable of simulating it. That I’m too good at making myself care about things that I ultimately know don’t matter. That I force myself to stress, to be urgent, to stay busy. Who knows, who cares, what a joke. At every single job I have ever had, my boss has told me some variation of the phrase “I wish I had [number] more of you.” I’d just like a job where one of me was enough. I’ve had older coworkers tell me they wish their kids were more like me, and I knew that if they knew what I was like outside of work that they’d be a bit more content with the hand they were dealt.

	I guess what I’m saying is that as embarrassing as it is, it’s honest to say that “video games” are my ideology, my immortality project, raison d'être, and for a shorter while than is easy to admit my life had a kind of integrity that I’m just not sure it will ever have again. It was simply literally true for a short while a few years ago to say that I did “eat, sleep, and breathe” video games, and now I’m doing all three of those things a bit worse. Even back then, how well was I really doing if my parents still paid my phone bill?

	The first time I saw a PlayStation 5 I saw hundreds of PlayStation 5’s. The first time I touched a PlayStation 5 I completely disassembled it. The first time I played a PlayStation 5 I wondered if I was doing something I shouldn’t be. The first time I saw a VR headset in person I made a promise to myself that I was fortunate enough to not only keep but to never need to utter aloud to another person: that I absolutely would not allow my first experience with virtual reality to be putting on a headset while at work. The first time I played Demon’s Souls (2020) I did so on the third screen on my desk, a screen with a big black mark in the middle of it, at 1080i. I played through the journey to the Nexus with one hand, pretending I didn’t really know what I was doing, pretending not to care, trying my absolute damnedest to avoid the possibility that my coworkers might think that I was having fun.

	And now, somehow years have passed, and I don’t really know whether I’m still pretending or not. For a little while instead of reading I did play one video game during my breaks: Balatro, after all it’s just Poker, nothing embarrassing about that. If I couldn’t be honest to others about video games when video games were literally actually my job, how could I possibly know if I’m being honest any other time?

	There’s an odd sort of feeling I started to get, I’m not sure if it’s impostor syndrome or something else, that I think I first felt the chill of watching Dan Olson’s This is Financial Advice, where he quotes a Reddit user from a meme stock page which contained the phrase “They picked a fight with the gaming industry.” This bizarre phrasing, talking as if gamers, customers, were a part of the games industry, internal to it. More recently I’ve seen people talk as if influencers were part of the industry. Both of these seem equally ludicrous to me. Established, major publication journalism is probably the most distant career that I could still see any legitimate argument for being within the industry that said journalism covers. Is it even really accurate to say that I worked “in the games industry”, how many steps away from actually programming games or designing hardware does one need to be within for it to count? Are Foxconn factory workers “part of the games industry”, and what does that mean if they are?

	If you go to my YouTube channel, Itch profile, or Bandcamp page, and maybe some of my other web presences, you might notice a header of some kind featuring simple white text on a black background. The typeface in use there is Avenir, I selected it because it is close to or possibly a flat out match for the font that Nintendo used on their buttons during the 3DS and Wii U generation of their hardware. I tried to find out what font that was specifically because these were letters whose shape I had never once thought of. I, for some reason, sought out explicitly to scrub any discernible personality from the “branding” I continue to associate with my “art”. Even the works I’ve made that I would consider to be the cream of the crop have what to me reads as a totally obvious vaguery or emotional guardedness.

	“Performance” is a word that carries a lot of meanings. The quantitative idea of performance, how well one does. The qualitative idea of performance, what one does. The connotation of performance, that it is untrue, simulated or dissimulated. If there is anything I am, it is a performer. I may perform good, and I may perform it well, but still I only perform. I want to produce, but I’m not sure if I’ve done it before, I’m not sure if it’s possible anymore, if it ever was or if it’s just an illusion, and I’m not sure if it’s the right thing to do. Performance, processes, flows, are real; if the object is only something we assert, but that is ultimately even in its hypostatic pseudo-death in just as constant a state of slow decay as life, is this an illusion worth keeping intact?

	“We have seen this in the case of the painter Turner, and his most accomplished paintings that are sometimes termed “incomplete”… art as a process without goal, but that attains completion as such.” say Deleuze and Guattari, and they call me out right at the end for thinking that maybe they do believe to much in art. Maybe I do think this is a kind of overly optimistic cop-out. But maybe also like so many things I already knew the answer and only through an overexposure to new information did I lose focus and doubt myself. That I already know, in a world of ravenous self, the crushing rock and grinding teeth of the natural world, the infinite debt of the socius, there are multiple real gods and they are all evil. This is the problem of the American civil religion: they believe their god is real, but what this truly means is they restrict their belief to a real god. The real gods of world, self, other; father, son, holy spirit; the Oedipal triangle, these ready-made gods stifle life. What must be done is within the chaos of the world of matter, only through a unity of individual and social development, self-reflection and shared symbols, can a person triangulate and begin to approach the real essence of the soul. What has to be done is to find the direction of the many-dimensional vector which points to an unreal god, to absolutely know this god as unreal, and believe in it anyway. The knowing belief in the unreal is the only way a better real will ever be made manifest, and that, I think, is the revolutionary potential of art, and the schizophrenizing artwork is one which provokes further grappling with the unreal, the paranoiac artwork one which truncates the sound of failure, terminates thought, manages and mediates the relationship between the aesthete and the real, and the tragedy of Demon’s Souls (2020), keeping in mind what Demon’s Souls (2009) meant to so many people, is that it is the final product of the successful crossing of Demon’s Souls from the former to the latter category.
	
The Bottom Line – Demon’s Souls (2020) Gives Us Everything

	It gives us everything, and “everything means too much.” Every aspect of Demon’s Souls for the PlayStation 5 has been cranked to 11, and in areas which were purely numerical in the first place this is an improvement. The game has a higher frame-rate, higher resolution, and they should have stopped there. It has a “better” character creator, it has “better” audio engineering. Its art style has thrown away the somber honor and pitiable decay seen in From Software’s work in favor of corny, bulky, lavish, and worst of all, bog standard fantasy aesthetic; you can tell from a mile away that they put a former Blizzard guy in an art direction role. It’s more than itself, but bigger isn’t better. It’s a great game by default, only because the original already proved itself. It speaks for itself, a self-amplified feedback loop of short-circuited hyper-real culture. It came a long away from itself, in the sense of an act of abandonment. But it absolutely does not objectify love.

	A popular critique of “AI” art generated by machine learning algorithms is that there is a lack of what could be described as focal contrast. That is, because every individual aspect or object contained within the image is generated via a predictive model of how that object must be constructed visually on a per-pixel basis, no individual part of it seems to be emphasized. Parts of the image which are unimportant to its message, which would be downplayed in human-made illustrations or composite images, are instead still maximally accentuated to the point where every AI image exudes an aura of gross fetishization with no actual subjective target. Demon’s Souls (2020) feels as though every single element of it was taken apart into the smallest possible constituent piece, that each of these discrete fragments were given to the most suitable professional, and each of these talented persons were asked to make it somehow more, while still the same. The 2009 release did not have animated windows into the surroundings of each arch-stone on the level select screens because they were unnecessary, the 2009 release and nearly every From game since did not have facial animations because they were unnecessary. Demon’s Souls for the PlayStation 5 is an image of a woman whose feet were photographed or drawn by a foot fetishist, whose calves were photo-shopped by a calf fetishist, whose thighs were airbrushed by a thigh fetishist, a seemingly endless crowd of pornographers somehow continuing their way up and contorting her posture so that every single part of the body is in frame and given to the next pervert. Demon’s Souls (2009) has had each of its quanta picked clean and scrubbed of its qualia, and it is regurgitated in Demon’s Souls (2020) in a completely artless form.

	Every so often an acquaintance will disarm me with what is from their perspective completely innocuous speculation, but to me reads almost as an insult: “you seem like the kind of person who plays strategy games” or “you strike me as an Xbox fan”. In order to keep the conversation alive with some degree of honesty I find myself meekly replying with some variation of the phrase “I kind of play everything”. Last year, when I purchased a PlayStation 5 almost solely in order to play Final Fantasy XVI slightly earlier than all the rubes who have been unable to play it until its imminent (at time of writing) release for PC, a friend of mine asked what it felt like to own every current major video game hardware platform. I probably gave him some halfhearted answer like “well, at least I know if something cool gets announced, it doesn’t matter what it’s for, I know I’ll be able to play it”, but it was probably too soon for me to really know how I felt about it at all, but now I know.

	I feel embarrassed and stupid.

	I don’t know if I’ve said anything here that is actually valuable, important, good, or even accurate or coherent.

	In some ways this isn’t a review of Demon’s Souls at all, if you couldn’t tell. This is a reflection on what it even means to review a video game. This is, at its end, a refutation of the idea that critique is art, or at the very least it is not art-as-form, it does not produce art-objects as a result. This is me coming to terms not only with, as I’ve said before, that artistic creation itself would cut out the middle-man and reduce dependency on unpredictable social elements, but that critique itself does not even produce that which I thought it did. That the parasocial discourse of the internet only inflates what already exists, and is not therapeutic except in the sense where the therapeutic situation fails. That I need only to expel and relieve this tense thought for myself, that this will just be another string on a server to collect notifications on a site where any other is the same. That the only object I have contributed to in writing this is the object of discourse itself. That in every sense the contributions I have tried to give in every apparatus whether the word-cloud of the internet or the one industry in which I could attempt to identify myself, I have lived a false life instead of dying a false death.

	This review is a dumpster, a landfill, this is a time sewer.

	In my comparison in the introduction of this text to Dan Olson’s I Don’t Know James Rolfe I hoped to get across that I don’t know Tim Rogers, and anything that could seem as some kind of personal issue (for example some of the admittedly loaded language in part 3) is, when examined with any degree of clarity, obvious projection of personal insecurities onto a complete stranger. I will admit though that there is exactly one issue that I do genuinely take with his reviews: as he says, the more you talk about something, the less anyone can understand it, and thus the more he talks about what he thinks of a game, the less I understand about those thoughts. I feel like the Tokimeki Memorial and Boku no Natsuyasumi reviews, the reviews of games which he “played for us”, the games which don’t have and may never have a proper English language release, are the only ones that I really felt like I walked away from with a clear picture of his thoughts on the subject matter (notice, “objectifies love” was the only Bottom Line that I couldn’t easily repurpose for a cheap gag a few paragraphs ago).

	But who the hell am I to have these concerns? Would you believe, despite the whole idea of these reviews supposedly being to give myself a kind of blueprint for criteria that I think my ideal games should meet, that I have no personal guidelines for what these reviews should be? I have genuinely given serious thought to what boundaries I should give myself or potential collaborators in the event that I were to start doing let’s plays again. Limits and rules on everything from “what kinds of games should we play?” to “what conversation topics should we avoid?” Don’t play games that take place mostly in dark environments, like many horror games, it’s visually uninteresting. Don’t play games that you don’t have interesting thoughts on, don’t play universally acclaimed games if you have the same straightforwardly positive opinions on the game as everyone else, don’t play high profile classics unless you can keep the episode count in the low single digits. Don’t reference other let’s players, definitely don’t repeat their jokes. Avoid talking about production details as much as possible, obviously this is sort of impossible to completely avoid in a live setting but it should be edited out when possible. I have never given myself a similar rubric for what I post on Backloggd and I think it is absolutely imperative that I do so going forward having gotten whatever this is out of my system.

1. No ethos appeals, no Rogers-isms or reference to other popular critics or essayists, no pseudo-intellectual quotation especially without proper context or of works not originally in English. That is not the point of writing these.

2. Stop buying, playing, or reviewing games that you know you won’t like and why you won’t like them for the sole purpose of developing through experience a supposedly more justified negative attitude towards them.

3. Avoid narrativization, avoid the impulse to situate a game in history, whether that is the history of games or your personal history. How much of the documented history of games is complete, or reliable? How much of your own history is actually useful for critique? And again, think about the actual point of writing these.

	God, I kind of want to become a “no numeric/star ratings” kind of person but I just don’t think I have the discipline. I want to at least try and avoid the essay format, the ideal game review is a list of bullet points, even if each bullet is followed by a full paragraph or more. I think the most important thing is like, dude, don’t think too much about it. Don’t write a review of a game you haven’t even touched in months. Don’t let yourself ever write this much again. If a review takes more than an hour you’ve done something wrong. Spend that time actually making something instead of shuffling things around on your desk.

	Alright, this is the end of the “real” part of the review, everything past here is unincorporated notes, if there’s a number in front of it that means that’s the section where I wanted to talk about that thing.

5. There are so many fantastic video games to play already that a new video game cannot be sold as a commodity and priced according to supply, demand, manufacturing or development costs. Major AAA release video games have a fixed price, and the thing that is actually marketed and sold is confidence. There are so many old games to wade through, how do you know your won’t waste your money on bad games?

Something I always find alarming is how often I crawl through MobyGames to see what the team members who made one of my favorite games are up to now, and find that the answer for most of those people is “nothing”. The actual work is done by people, but the confidence is given to the company, or the IP. Platinum used to be infallible, people used to trust Bethesda, Bioware, and Blizzard. One of the primary reason I was excited for the release of Astro Bot was just to see its credits and get a better picture of how much of Japan Studio is left.

The works that Bluepoint Games are most known for are both face-lifted versions of old games which had been subject to years of critical praise. They are both games that I first played on a PS3 in Spring 2015 during one of the worst times of my life. They’re both games that I played in a state where I was predisposed to have a bad time, got about a quarter of the way through, and stopped playing assuming that I had gotten to gist of it, and did not play again for at least 3 years. Demon’s Souls is now a game I’ve never really felt finished with, but have seen in disparate chunks each individual part of at some point.

4. I think a great deal of the appeal of Form Software comes from the fact that they have no qualms with releasing new games that follow in the footsteps of old RPG’s. Unfortunately sometimes they retrace some of the same old missteps. Sometimes the game doesn’t give you enough visual information to discern how you should approach a situation. The Dragon God fight seems in concept like a stealth section (not helped by the existence of actual stealth-based fights like the Old Hero), but it’s better to think of it like the frenzy brain in the final area of Bloodborne: under the hood, you’re just letting a meter build when you’re out in the open, letting it deplete when you hide behind a pillar, and taking heavy damage when the meter is filled. The dragon’s eyes turn red as a warning that the meter is nearing full, but common sense would tell you that the dragon has seen you, that its course of action is already in motion, so you may as well run and hope to either outpace his next attack or reach cover and be “forgotten”, but that simply isn’t what this visual signal is indicating.

The minimalist UI is a terrible downgrade, and not just because it has found its way here in a trade for the original game’s more characteristic skeuomorphism. The original game, and virtually every From game, will tell you with on-screen text how to navigate the relatively complex menus that these games have. This version was made by people who think that I need onscreen instructions to remember which buttons confirm and cancel, but a monochrome icon around the edge of a menu widget, so small and plain that it just looks like ornamentation for the panel’s border, should be enough for me to tell how to cycle through pages of statistics.

5. Modern realism in both rendering and in design and structure reproduces the adumbrations of experience at the expense of reproduction of symbols, flattening of experience, nullifying truth for the sake of reproduction (or new production) of the real.

5. “There’s these amazing… graphic designers I knew… who did some really great title sequences for movies… One of them went to see Attack of the Clones on acid… Halfway through the movie, like, he was like, “is this a dud? Like, nothing is happening. Nothing!” and then he went into the bathroom… he realized he was tripping balls… and then he goes back into the theater, no effect.”

“Attack of the Clones is so in focus, and everything is so sharp, and there’s so much stuff in every shot… that it doesn’t leave any room in your imagination to complete the illusion.” - Aaron Stewart-Ahn19

In the Freudian conception the mind wants to minimize tension, Rank talk of the conflict of the counter-will. Performance is a denial of consciousness, submission to the consensus force, a falsified return to the base will. Creation, development of the creative will, objectification of essence, is in a sense a denial of life. If in the Freudian sense the conscious is driven by a desire to return to previous states, from consciousness to unconsciousness to unliving, then art is an immortality through false death.

The video game gives an artistic canvas of the screen, which in the age of “quantum dots”, “retina” display, high enough pixels-per-inch for each of them to be individually imperceptible, and powerful enough graphics processing to actually individually calculate the color value of each one based on thousands of bytes of data, and the matter of time, context, persistence. What do we do with this?

Dracula’s eyes, horizontal resolution of the CRT, if a pixel is individually seen at all anymore it’s probably because it’s defective. Hit-boxes in old sprite games versus hand-drawn art. We don’t seem to be able to drive 4K screens well enough to even find their limit, let alone push against it.

The term “consumer” holds meaning beyond mere customer: what is consumed passed through and is burned up and its remains are discarded. The consumer lets media in one ear and out the other.

What is the image, what is the intent, what is the relation? What is the purported objective of a business (their product, for example), what do they actually do to make money, and what role do they serve in the economy? The same for individual laborers, what does a job listing bring to mind, what are the on-paper responsibilities of the position, and what actually needs done? What is Final Fantasy? Knights and dragons, maps and menus, or world-spanning mythologies?

Primitive, disparate emergence of meaning. Classicist/classicist/modern, exclusive unity of meaning (for example, language becomes common both within and across civilizations, but only merchants or clergy have significant literacy). Post-modern or short-circuited romantic, ubiquity of ready-made symbols destroys meaning (everyone can read and write and speak fluently, but communicate solely through thought-terminating cliché and connotation).

For every Super Kiwi 64 or Corn Kidz 64, genuinely fantastic and charming games which cost less than most fast food combo meals, there are at least a hundred asset flips with the same price tag. For every Toree 3D or Superflight, tiny but enjoyable games that cost less than a lot of drinks at the convenience store, there are a hundred clicker games that exist solely to farm “gamer score” or trophies. For every Elden Ring, a genuinely exceptional piece of art that a corporation was by some accident tricked into manifesting in the form of a big budget third party multi-platform video game, there are a hundred games demanding that I use their publisher’s proprietary launcher or pay for some extra service or make another account to keep track of.

Anti-Oedipus pages 231 and 232. Capitalism’s internal peripheries, development of underdevelopment, primitive accumulation continually reproduces itself. “...as capitalist deterritorialization is developing from the center to the periphery, the decoding of flows on the periphery develops by means of a “disarticulation” that ensures the ruin of traditional sectors, the development of extraverted economic circuits, a specific hypertrophy of the tertiary sector, and an extreme inequality in the different areas of productivity and in incomes.”

Failure needs not only to be an option, but a joy.