I guess they will in the end but I don't see huge success selling other games than their own there. And if it's only late ports, I don't see much success at all.
I agree that late ports won't amount to much, in terms of extra revenue generated or building an ecosystem beyond only consoles. The fact that they're doing this at all must be indicative of something larger in terms of the overall direction of the company. Otherwise why bother to do this port at all?
I agree that late ports won't amount to much, in terms of extra revenue generated or building an ecosystem beyond only consoles. The fact that they're doing this at all must be indicative of something larger in terms of the overall direction of the company. Otherwise why bother to do this port at all?
I also see something larger happening. Decima has to run on PC because of Death Stranding so HZD is quite obvious to port but it's still work for the devs and they have to go back to code that's three years old while they should focus on the ps5 exclusive games.
I guess they will in the end but I don't see huge success selling other games than their own there. And if it's only late ports, I don't see much success at all.
Man that's atrocious. I mean, I guess it doesn't matter that the Middle East and Malaysia have variable interrnet when the service doesn't even exist in those places.
I mean, it's irrelevant because the service isn't available there, but when we lived in Jordan we had 300KBps maximum, which dropped to about 80KBps from 9:30am to 7pm. And it often cut-out entirely. Malaysia (where we are now) can be better, but it costs a lot.
So? How does that affect your enjoyment of the game? It won't be an issue on the forum since there are rules for that sort of thing. Other people on different hardware will be able to play the same game. This does nothing to affect your own experience with it.
So? How does that affect your enjoyment of the game? It won't be an issue on the forum since there are rules for that sort of thing. Other people on different hardware will be able to play the same game. This does nothing to affect your own experience with it.
This is so cringey. Of course there's a reason to buy any system. He seems upset that he might not have to buy a PS5. Like that would be his preference.
The following has been stewing in my mind for quite some time now and it's a big topic but I'm gonna go crazy so I'm just going to sit down and talk about how otherwise perfectly rational, normal people reach this silliness.
Okay so, I want to start this on the right tone. This is not meant to lambast or demean anyone, but rather analyze. So, first of all I'm gonna admit. I understand it. I'm not going to defend it. I think it's dumb as hell. But I get it. I have that gut reaction sometimes.
Oh who am I kidding, I have that gut reaction a lot. I'm an emotional guy. I understand and identify with all of the silliness that Playstation fanboys may be feeling all the way to expressing loudly or wherever on that spectrum they may fall.
Gonna break it down one point at a time. Originally when I wrote this I'd said simple. Uh...this isn't going to be "simple" as in "short." But hey yeah maybe someone who actually is seriously doing this will read this and get it about themselves.
And I don't think I'm a genius for explaining any of this; I just don't see any other break down posts that aren't just reductive or insulting. So I want to explore this.
In the end, and I promise this is not a slight or meant to demean anyone, but surprise, I know, none of the behavior or concern in this thread is purely logical, but instead at its heart, sheer sentimentality. Though I think this particular brand of it is worth exploring. Like, Shocker! I know, I know, wow Chettlar so insightful it's just feelings. But whatever I want to explore this.
Video games are emotional experiences for us as human beings. But emotion is not as simple as the present feeling someone is experiencing. Emotion is a vast sea of experience. It is informed very much by headspaces we inhabit. Video games are incredibly good at creating those headspaces, and when you get consoles associated with those emotional recipes and the unique flavors they produce, the emotional attachment gets really, really strong. Really strong.
Video games are so good at creating these headspaces because they affect so many things that other art mediums do at one time. I mean, a song alone can create this wonderful emotional landscape that can move people to tears, cause them anguish, turn their day around, give them resolve, change their minds on unrelated topics, and in some rare cases literally turn their entire lives around. Even wordless songs can do all this. It's kinda crazy. And this is just ONE aspect of what games do. Games are so total in how experiential they have the potential to be. They are engaging, engrossing, and immersive, if not in one respect, like suspension of disbelief of an immersive world, than in another, like the total engagement in a competitive online match for example. A lot of idiots (I was one of these idiots at one point) want to argue that some games are just pure logic and appeal to them because they are just logical people. Mostly these people are self impressed adolescent nerds (like me hi). Some of these self impressed "adolescent" nerds are in their 30s and 40s. But really, while they may indeed enjoy the logic they are engaging with, them enjoying it is already a bunch of emotional trails running at once. You can't separate out emotion form any part of human experience.
Everything you experience serves to create that emotional landscape which then informs the context from which all emotions experienced within are formed. UI Designers are no less important than any other designers for this very reason. The Gestalt of the experience you have in a game is, well, Gestalt. It is everything that exists to creates that experience for you. The sound of pressing your console's power button, the sound of the hard drive engaging, the start of a chime or melody or chord, the bleeps and bloops of the menus — these all serve to create an emotional reference point for everything that happens after. And this itself always has a point of origin inspired by whatever your impression of what a video game console and what it can provide you might be. When a console is new, our brains, with the expectation of fun and excitement however we got that expectation, usually as kids and/or absorbed in some way from society around us, lap up every bit of it, even if consciously we do or don't pay direct attention ourselves.
This is easier when we are young too, hence nostalgia. I've seen it observed that when I miss an old game, I am not missing the game alone, but really what I miss is being a child. I think this is close to the truth but not quite. Being a child was way different and kinda sucky in a lot of ways. Really this is just trading one simple misconception for another. What we miss is our abstract idea of being a kid, and that idea is often the left over remains of those headspaces we remember most. Oregon Trail is, for me for example, an emblem, or a mental icon of that entire headspace I was in while a kid. That head space was so powerful because as a kid it was more relevant to me than it ever could be now as an adult. There was little else to compete with it. I was a kid soaking up everything around me. Of course every emotional landscape I created would be so visceral, so potent.
As an adult, it isn't so potent. Not the headspaces my mind continually creates, and not the headspaces I remember and sometimes try to relive. I know that I still create these emotional experience schema type things because they are what replace the old ones. Every time I've gone back and played an old game, the experience I had with a kid is briefly remembered more strongly than my memory, and then often snuffed out by my new, present experience, and yet not totally. That experience still is a part of me, and has informed who I am and the experiences I can have that have come after.
For some of us, as those experiences become less visceral and our adult brains become less plastic and less prone to soaking up experiences and creating new powerful emotional landscapes to exist in (which again crazily, we some how often seem to just, not realize are there), we begin to miss being children, when the world was so much bigger and brighter, and our emotions were so much stronger and less bogged down by real life and our more set thoughts that come from being a big old boring grownup. And yet, we continue to have these associations. Maybe they aren't as strong, but they exist. It's just that often they are more strongly informed by their ability to appeal to those we most fondly remember.
I have no overwhelming preference to Xbox or Playstation or Nintendo, or whatever other games, because growing up for me personally, I only had some point and click games and a lot of educational games all on an old office computer. Some hunting games too, which I enjoyed exploring nature in. So for me, exploring in a game for example remains a lot of fun. That said I know for me that the experience of playing on an xbox 360 is a bit stronger than playing on a PS3 because that was the beginning of my experiencing all of modern gaming. It was where I experienced games that changed who I am as a person to this day. Anything that references those feelings will continue to be compelling for me, because it will help remind me of those headspaces I most heavily associate with playing and being emotionally invested in a video game. Or at least it's a major part of that for me. Humans are complex. (That said, PS3 was also the place I experienced Journey and Demon's Souls for the first time, and is the more recent place I played NieR, all in my later teens, so, say, that beginning orchestral tuning when you turn one on will continue to be powerful for me as well).
To sum this up as well as I can, experiential context is an inextricable part of what creates the emotional landscapes through which we "enjoy" video games, or even more accurately, what that enjoyment basically is.
(And to add. The people designing these things know this. Why do you think they design those beeps and boops? Why do companies so strongly contest their rights to their branding and imagery? They only control part of that puzzle, it is important to keep in mind, but it still is a part.)
Alright, so how is this stuff that all probably seems like stuff you generally sorta know maybe didn't really think about but kinda noticed relevant?
Well, so think about how powerful all that is. Like I really hope I've communicated how important this stuff is. Everyone experiences it differently, but everyone, to some degree, has SOMETHING that affects how they experience video games, a lot of it honestly probably too difficult to really accurately totally and completely enumerate. And for so so so many of them, understandably the thing they most powerfully identify with enjoying a video game is the console upon which they play. There's always many many more aspects — like for me the computer room in which our couple little office computers were housed on the side of our basement's big room — but I'd wager it's a huge component for a lot of people. It's a bit silly, but everyone has something that sort of engages their gamer brain and all the emotional ..."baggage" has too much negative...baggage associated with it, but you get what I mean. My point is that everyone has various things that to them create that emotional landscape context, and for many people to some degree, the console is a major component. This is true for PC gamers too. Again, it's a universal human trait. I mean, as a curiosity to observe at very least, why do people adorn their gaming PC's with "gamer" aesthetic? If you are not one such person, you are not "above" needing some sort of physical or aural or luminous or in some other way emotional trappings of experiential context. It's just that you associate that garish aesthetic with adolescence or obnoxious "gamer" behavior, so they are not a part of what creates a headspace you enjoy. For others, they just might. All sorts of things could be for a PC gamer. Maybe clicking on the discord icon is a little sparkle of flavor as part of the ritual the begins your gaming session. Again, not something you consciously think about unless you happen to notice, but nevertheless a part of your experience. Heck, while I'll be the first to criticize Epic and the EGS, it is impossible for me to deny that there absolutely is some sentimentality in one's preference for a Steam only experience. That is not ALL of it, but that is a discussion for another time. Suffice to say it is impossible to ignore that that experience does exist to flavor any perhaps logically sound or petty discussion on the subject.
So how does this apply here?
Well, when a lifelong playstation gamer moves away from playstation to PC for example, that is all gone. It's just gone. Worse than gone. PC might already have its own associations in their heads that are decidedly negative for that person.
It isn't as if they can't enjoy video games any more. It isn't as if this isn't something that can't be adjusted. Like I said earlier it absolutely can and is continually adjusted. All your memories are just memories of the last time you remembered something anyway. People are plastic. Maybe in some ways less as we grow older, but still essentially plastic. But we can't deny the fact that context and headspace for which people enjoy a given thing, especially if that is an emotional thing, like, oh I don't know, a video game, are not always easy to let go of.
This manifests itself in different ways. It's why you will never convince, with logic, sound as it may be, a person to change their mind on something that was not born of logic in the first place. The fact is if Joe Gamer associates gaming with his Xbox, and his PC with the office, then an Xbox game being on PC, even if the experience is so much better on a PC, and he could make a cheap gaming PC with more options if he wanted to, you aren't going to change his mind. Heck, even Self Aware Joe Gamer may not change his mind, because you can't just fix a deeply rooted emotional association with logic. Not that easily and never completely. Now, part of just allowing yourself to grow as a human being is recognizing those limitations and realizing you can change them and experience new and different things. But also part of being understanding and emotionally intelligent on the other hand is recognizing that emotional association and this specific concept I've referred to with the shorthand of "headspace" and "emotional landscape" so far, are all part of what make us human beings. It's okay to let them be how they are, and learn to both expand them while also taking advantage of how powerful they are if indulged. If you truly love video games as a medium, both are valuable skills to develop.
The trouble we get into then here is when people attempt to rationalize their emotional experiences down to very simple point of interest. They associate mentally a noticeable thing with a noticeable emotion, and here's where it gets kind of funny but interesting, then create an emotional attachment to the idea of that noticeable thing ex post facto. So maybe a given sequence in a game was subconsciously extremely immersive for someone, but also there was a thing that happened in that sequence that they associate with that feeling. They will then try to convey that that thing they associated with the feeling was really really good and definitely was the source of that feeling they got, even if someone else who was not immersed in that experience can point to all the flaws in the thing that happened and how that thing isn't so great because it didn't affect them in the same way. You can say "well it's all subjective," but that is rather lazy.
Sorry if that was a bit confusing. Maybe for example, all sorts of things you do but probably mostly don't notice leading up to and including a given sequence in a game create a feeling of great pathos for you, and so then you are more receptive and ready to accept something as sad or moving. So a scene happens that you find really sad and moving. Then someone else points out to you how crappy and poor the writing was and how silly it sounds. That person didn't experience the same things as you to create that experience. You did, but didn't realize it. So for you, you point out an awkwardly and unrealistically written but earnest scene as something that created a moving experience, when really it was the whole of that gestalt leading up to that moment that enabled you to be receptive to that scene and not notice that ordinarily you'd find it silly. So when someone points out to you that the dialogue is silly and not realistic at all, you are incensed. How could they see that dialogue as silly? Well, it's pretty simple. Essential aspects that lead up to that experience didn't work for them. Just as equally they have probably experienced and enjoyed something you found silly because various things did not work for you. Heck, even if you both enjoyed the scene, different things may have been what did it for each of you, even if in English you'd list the same basic reason you enjoyed it, ANDDDDD, you could both be wrong in whatever simple thing you are ascribing the experience to. Most of what makes a game well beloved then is, I feel like it's pretty logical to conclude, is when it is so effective at nailing everything that everyone is able to experience what it sets out to experience for them.
(Heck, this failure is exactly what causes that really awkward moment when a teenage boy tries to show some girl a cool fight scene from this anime episode #2489 where goku uses his 9.38 million power chi to suplex the pokemon demon master Doki Baka Kun. The fight scene, I hate to break it to you 16 year old m- uh you, but that fight scene wasn't that cool. But that doesn't make it bad either! And it doesn't make you silly for experiencing the power conveyed by that scene. It's more complex than that. The scene itself isn't the thing that made you feel that way on its own. In this case it's the entire 2,488 — oh okay we all know episode #1433 is not canon any more I GET IT CHETTLA- I mean you, okay fine the entire 2,487 — episodes that preceded this glorious fight are the source of your emotion.
And there is no way this cute girl who is pretending she doesn't know you should have showered like at least one this week because she likes your dorky enthusiasm can ever, ever feel the thing you want to share with her, because nothing you explain will convey the full power of what you have experienced. At best it could encourage her to go experience that herself if that sounds exciting to experience. Sure the episode was an emotional release for you, but you are ignoring a lot of flaws in it and how badly animated it is and how actively it takes some people out of the experience by how very average it is, because for you personally that wasn't enough to override the emotional experience you had).
My point is, that often we can mistake the things that really create experience for us for silly oversimplifications. That thing we ascribe it to might not even have anything to do with the true source of that experience. Even those of us who scorn intellectual analysis as boring and ruining the fun and magic of art and video games do this. Because all of us want to feel justified in feeling the way we do.
That's really what it comes down to. Our self image is threatened when the things we most deeply experience are trivialized. We have to justify our experiences because anything we deeply enjoy is reflective of who we are as people. I am not Chettlar because I find Viva Pinata delightful, and me being Chettlar isn't really accurately the reason I enjoy it; neither really totally begets the other. The fact is me being Chettlar is now for the past 7 years or so me being the guy who enjoys Viva Pinata, at least to a small degree. That's...kinda what people mean when they say art is a part of who they are, in my opinion. When I write music I show the world a part of me I can't express any other way. When I enjoy someone else's music, that is me responding to that person, and creating something else. An experience. A..me..unit sorta. That which I call my identity is amended whether I like it or not. Why else do people even lightly interested in a various piece of media adorn themselves either with avatars or memorabilia? Part of our identity is what we enjoy. When I justify why I enjoy a thing, I am justifying ME. And at some point somewhere with some thing, you reading this do that too. If you've read this, I've affected you whether you like it or not, whether you think I'm onto something or just an over-intellectual sycophant (I mean, I just used the word sycophant). As I talked about earlier, video games are some of the most involving of all mediums. Sure this combines with video games being enjoyed and created in huge part by anti-social nerds, a lot of whom never had to grow past being children and so reflect this reality in unfortunate and sometimes horrendous ways. But video games were always going to have such a strong effect on the people who play them, because by their nature they touch so many parts of us at once.
Alright.
Sooooo
..
Let's plug this all in then. I get the previous part may have been a little boring, but I gotta make sure I establish some common ground here so I can get to the juicy bit. Hopefully the emotional headspace I created for you, lol, wasn't just "who is Chettlar and why has he assaulted me with this skyscraper of text?" I'm trying okay? It's a large topic.
Alright, well.
A lot of Playstation fans, whether they want to admit it or not, and not all of them, but many of them to varying levels, have used exclusives as their preferred means of justifying their being fans of the brand. Not just their purchase, but of the brand. Playstation. What that means for them. What emotional sparks that might gently but maybe imperceptibly begin to flare. I think for some of them, they view themselves as intelligent, discerning and logical people. To support this, they have to believe that the games they play are the best games ever made, or at least top notch in general. A few crappy games they dislike can serve as the sacrificial lambs to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are not mindless fanboys, of course. (Psst, this is not me implying that Sony games are all trash. But the emotional need some may posses more than others to place these exclusives at the very top of the medium is very much related to this. If you find yourself starting to feel defensive right now at that very implication, uh...maybe think about that for a minute. Because I've not even said whether I like Sony games. Actually that's not true, I already have. I mentioned Journey earlier as a hugely impactful game for me, because it truly was for me.) And this isn't to diminish the fact that these games, on their own, have created emotional experiences. Sony makes some quality titles. What I am saying that there is an emotional need to elevate them into the stratosphere that you might not be as immune from as you might think, even if you don't even like Playstation games and you're interests lie elsewhere.
This is why you have a number of journalists comment that they receive a lot of their death threats (if not due to them being anything other than cis male because of that whole big thing gamers™ have a problem with, but that's another topic) most often in relation to, you guessed it, their views on exclusive games. Not just Playstation games. This happens with Nintendo fans and xbox fans. But right now the topic is Playstation, so I've been using that specifically. Plus, let's not pretend that Sony's marketers are totally oblivious to their identity as a brand that builds major impressive cinematic experiences. They're pretty vocal about it honestly. So if you are profoundly affected by that marketing because all marketing in all of the world of branding of any kind is designed with the intent of validating that identity you've created, well, it's working.
Again this is not to specifically attack Playstation fans. Every person has this happen to them, because we are emotional creatures like I discussed before. I'm not even attacking capitalist marketing. Cults do this, states do this, small clubs do this, movements do this — anything and everything that has an interest in existing as an institution in your life does this. And it always will.
But the er, unsavory side of it is Playstation fans being ugly up to and including sending death threats to websites who didn't give Uncharted 3 10/10 reviews before they had even played the game themselves. That behavior didn't come out of the blue. It didn't just come from some aggressively mislead slaves to the marketing of Uncharted 3 who just believed foolishly that the game was great before it was on store shelves. It didn't just come from the black magic power of branding alone. It came from fans whose identity relied on Playstation being a brand of prestigious perfect video games. I will point out, meekly, but frankly, that the forum that was the precursor to this forum, was home to a lot of that senseless ugliness. Maybe not the worst of it, but some of it. But again, it's not senseless really. It's not reasonless most certainly. It's just a result of a lack of self-awareness of how deeply and profoundly the experience and identity of being a Playstation fan, even among those who didn't specifically identify as Playstation fans per se affected these people's views. Again, we all are affected by our emotions even in what we feel are our most rational moments. This is an example of how that applies here. Marketing was part of it, but not even close to all of it. It cannot create this out of nothing.
I feel strongly that trying to dismiss these people as corporate slaves is foolish, I need to note. It is an oversimplification that tries to distance the one making it from their behavior, trying to shift the blame to a system rather than acknowledge the human source of, and life factors leading up to, that behavior, be it as it may that that marketing did play its part in accentuating or accelerating that behavior. I really feel that much of what begat that behavior was something universal to us all. That maybe you reading this aren't so immature as to act in that way, but you are nevertheless affected by your favorite brand of video game, or your favorite happy video game place. It compels you to act the way you do, whether you've taken the time to see it or not.
Hopefully I've kind of shown some of the beautiful and ugly sides of what emotional identity and the headspaces we inhabit, that are so intimately tied to that identity, can be.
When you take away a Sony fan's rationale for defending his identity as a rational, logical, intelligent human being who enjoys Playstation because he is such, you lay bare and naked the fact that his love of Playstation was never truly rational, logical, or intelligent.
Certainly there were rational, logical, and intelligent reasons that may have got him there, but his love in the end comes from a humiliating and simple human reality. He loves his beeps and boops, his whirrs and start-up tune, his click of a face button and clack of an analogue stick. He loves the feeling of the couch under is butt. He loves the dim lamp light. He loves the logo that pops up and tells his lizard brain, "Game time! Fun time! Relax! The physical place you are in only serves along with the lights and sounds and trinkets to create the mental place you so enjoy. We all exist to simultaneously create a sanctuary and catalyst for what you love most." To explain to him his rationale is not, at least entirely, rational despite the part logic may play in it, the reason he loves Playstation, is humiliating, because it eats at, even if he doesn't realize it, the idea that he isn't who he thinks he is. He's a silly, lizard brained animal just like anyone and anything else. And his love for these experiences is inspired in huge part by silly things. And he wants to feel that it comes from intelligence and superiority. It's banal and boring insecurity, regardless of whether he's even ever been conscious of it.
He doesn't want to admit that at the heart of it, the reason he's a Playstation fan is for reasons he probably has already subconsciously written off as humiliating or silly. (He may have, in an ironic lack of self awareness used such an explanation to humiliate someone else and diminish their experience specifically to prop himself up. That isn't necessary at all, but if he's a jerk maybe it's happened. You don't have to be a jerk to have blind spots. We all do.) And he doesn't even have to have gone through ANY of these thoughts either. It probably just manifests in a vague fear of being threatened, his subconscious warning him that this person pushing him to recognize the very banal source of his identity is actually just an asshole, and he shouldn't think about it, but instead be mad at the asshole, or the person responsible. He tries to come up with all kinds of badly thought out rational reasons to defend his position and why his essentially selfish desires shouldn't be exposed as the petty things they are.
And you, the reader, probably do this with something, somewhere, in your life too. Maybe it's more serious, maybe it's more tiny. But that's your business to examine what silly things your pride doesn't let you accept. My point is that this is a human thing. Not something playstation fans do because they're dumb dumbs for some reason.
And the funny thing is? The cure to this is not that complicated. It's like, really simple. Accept that your lizard brain likes the beeps and boops and that the idea of what playstation is to you is in the end, just an emotion. Accept that you aren't any smarter than anyone else because of the games you enjoy. That your reasons for the way you game the way you do aren't super intelligent because at the center of it all, you are playing games to have fun, which is nothing if not the definition of emotional experience. You are going to do what you are going to do to engender that experience. I mean, really games are deeper than fun. Some of our favorite games we love because they were very seriously emotional, and not really the typical colloquial definition of fun, now that I really think about it. The fact is you are going to, subconsciously or not, do what you need to do in order to create those experiences for yourself. And that's okay. It's definitely good to explore the reasons why this happens. But analyzing your reasons for enjoying something is an intellectual pursuit of curiosity, not an appropriate avenue for justifying your identity, and certainly not an appropriate thing to use to deprive others of enjoying more things in the way most effective for them. If analyzing why something happens is not allowed to humiliate you or if it makes you feel threatened in anyway, well sucks to be you buddy because fact is you are a mortal imperfect human being and analyzing the reasons you are the way you are are going to be compromising in some fashion. I really don't know what to tell you other than to move past it, because you are seriously limiting yourself to some awesome opportunities to learn and grow as a person. I don't care if you're 15 or 50 or 31½.
The fact is, humiliating as it may be, you fancy the things you fancy is because they tickle your lizard brain and help create an emotional cocktail you enjoy.
If you don't recognize that, you won't realize how utterly silly it is that you are essentially arguing that someone should compell you to spend more money. Like, really at the end of it, it's an extremely illogical, silly fear of missing out. You've created a really silly idea, dress it up however you like, that you are missing out on something. If a game comes to more platforms, well clearly an exclusive has been deprived of you. You've got a silly animalistic instinct of valuing scarcity. You feel that if a game comes to more platforms, it's not special any more. So then it's not as special. But you've not lost anything, other's have gained something. But the FEELING of it being special is gone, so you feel that objectively something is missing. Well buddy sorry to break it to you but there is nothing logical about that, no matter how you want to dress it up. So much for being rational. Yes, games are created to sell consoles, but if a company moves to making those games for more platforms, you have not lost anything. You just feel like you have because the emotional puzzle piece that has disappeared from the equation if the feeling of scarcity and exclusivity everyone finds at least a teeny tiny bit alluring on some level.
More related to the general point of this entire post, you also fear missing out in a way that really is actually, funny enough, self imposed, and leads you to do silly things like, as I said above, imply that you WANT to be compelled to spend extra money. The fact is you want a rational reason to get a video game console and have the whole experience it provides you. If you don't have an exclusive game to justify that experience, then you are left facing that horrible, humiliating fact we talked about.
You don't want the console for rational reasons. You want the console because you want the emotional idea of that console. You want the console because of the emotional landscape it creates within you. Because you are a human being who needs things you don't want to recognize to exist in order to facilitate the fullest enjoyment of a video game possible. Exclusives helped justify that for you in a way that seems tangible and rational.
Your silly emotional and not-well-justifiable reasons for spending hundreds of dollars on a console aren't enough for you. You need to feel reasonable, rational, and intelligent for wanting what you want, even if you don't personally think you care. If you really didn't care, you wouldn't be asking someone to make you spend hundreds of dollars on electronics that in all essential ways do all the same things as the electronics you already own. You want stuff, and now you can't justify it, and that's humiliating to recognize how silly you are.
Thing is though...like, really the way to make peace with this, like I kind of covered, isn't that hard. Like, okay, I like silly things. Why care? Are video games not just a bunch of bleep and boops? They still create amazing experiences for you. If you want to spend $400 to feel better about yourself, spend $400 if it makes you happy. It was just as silly an expenditure when it had exclusives, because at the heart of it you are just indulging your emotions, and that's what these big toys are for. It is no less and no more a silly expenditure in a way that really, truly matters now that it doesn't. If all your games come to PC, you are still someone who enjoys themselves on your playstation or your xbox or switch. Go play your playstation or xbox or switch and be happy. You are a silly, irrational human being. Don't take yourself so seriously. Don't be an idiot with your money, but if what makes you happy is owning a box with a big X or a big P or lopsided face looking thing on it to play your games on, then that's what makes you happy. You're wasting so much energy trying to preserve your ego, and honestly in the end hurting yourself most of all by limiting your ability to grow as a human being.
Yeah, you are still a child. You like big toys. You like car go vroom. You like head blow off. You like sparkles shiny wow. You are depriving yourself and others of joy by insisting you are so superior to that. You're not intelligent by trying to make yourself appear intelligent or rationalize and justify your self-image. Ironically you're...kinda bein' stupid. So what. We're all stupid. Quit taking yourself so seriously. Go play video games you big dummy.
EDIT: Gonna include this as I bolded a TL;DR for the whole topic.
Well yeah, but the post is already extremely long, and I kinda hoped at that point people can kinda infer that with all this stuff going on, because it's complicated and I literally would need to write a book about it, that how people react to these things and where their attachments lie at their deepest make a big difference.
In the post part of what I relate to this specific example is exclusives mattering to a sony fanboy. Not every sony fan, but specifically the type of person who is having an emotional breakdown over this, or even feeling a bit jealous and isn't quite sure why. You can just choose to see it as bizarre and dismiss it as only something Sony fans do, or you can sit down and try to understand it. My point wasn't that everyone who likes exclusive games is going to have a break down if someone else gets to play them; it's that if your self image relates to your identity as a playstation gamer, which isn't always really a consciously pursued thing as it is informed by emotional context you may not even be aware of, and if that identity is justified by things you find reasonable and worthwhile, such as exclusive games or whatever other rational reasons you come up with to justify your emotional attachment, then removing those rational reasons that helped prop you up as an intelligent person, and revealing that really you just like what you like because you're a silly human being, well that's going to not feel very comfortable. It's a compromising realization.
If you are already secure enough as a person to have gotten over this in some other area in your life and just do not take yourself seriously as a person, it's likely you're not really going to struggle with this all that much. It's never that black and white, but yeah.
For me the reason I said I understand what this is like and want to explore it is because I know I'm pretty susceptible to FOMO, so things that touch on that affect me a lot. That's how it directly affects ME.
Point is everyone's cocktail of emotional context for experiences heavily plays into their identity, even if a lot of it is under the hood kinda. Probably if you feel worried about this it's just irrational fears and insecurities you may not even consciously stoke bubbling up to the surface, and my post was an attempt to examine that from the ground up. Why does this only manifest in some people but not others at least in the same way? Did my best to examine the underlying reasons so people can take their conclusions from there.
Now that I've slept on the issue, I think I'm just gonna quote this as my TL;DR, and then my even shorter TL;DR because sorry guys it's a big topic. Emotions are complicated.
I've said it countless times in the thread, so let me repeat myself again: I don't think these consoles deserve to exist if they are not providing truly unique experiences. If every game Microsoft makes goes to PC as well, Xbox does not need to exist. There is no reason for a $500+ Microsoft console to be on shelves. Its "features" are not a selling point. They never have been. The last time a Sony or Microsoft console really justified its existence with a hardware feature was the PS2 being an easy DVD player. Similarly, the PS4 doesn't do anything special on a hardware level that justifies its existence - you buy it because of the games that you can only get there. Without a slate of exclusive games you can't get anywhere else, there is no argument to get it either. It's just a mediocre plastic box that plays the exact same third party games as its competitor.
Exclusives are the reason you buy one console over another (or in some cases, buy both). If neither console has any, then neither console has any reason to be purchased, thus having no reason to exist on an individual level. If Sony and Microsoft just want to become service providers, they should go all in on that and stop wasting everyone's time with proprietary boxes that offer no actual value on their own merits.
That's my point. These particular consoles are pointless if Sony and Microsoft's only argument for buying them is "because we made a new console!" The console war between them needs to end. I don't want to spend a thousand dollars building a PC and I don't want to pay a thousand dollars for two virtually identical consoles with tiny slates of fake exclusive first party games. There is no good option right now.
If this was true Xbox would've been dead now but it isn't. There are many other reasons to buy a console, in fact looking at the latest NPD report i can say not many people buy consoles only for exclusive software.
- Consoles are much, much more affordable than pc, you are buying a single product instead of paying profit margin for every piece of hardware like pc.
- You don't have to worry about any settings, you just play the game.
- You don't have to worry about any compatibility issues.
- You don't even need to worry about hardware upgrades, you can use the same machine to entertain you for 6-7 years, this is a great value.
The following has been stewing in my mind for quite some time now and it's a big topic but I'm gonna go crazy so I'm just going to sit down and talk about how otherwise perfectly rational, normal people reach this silliness.
Okay so, I want to start this on the right tone. This is not meant to lambast or demean anyone, but rather analyze. So, first of all I'm gonna admit. I understand it. I'm not going to defend it. I think it's dumb as hell. But I get it. I have that gut reaction sometimes.
Oh who am I kidding, I have that gut reaction a lot. I'm an emotional guy. I understand and identify with all of the silliness that Playstation fanboys may be feeling all the way to expressing loudly or wherever on that spectrum they may fall.
Gonna break it down one point at a time. Originally when I wrote this I'd said simple. Uh...this isn't going to be "simple" as in "short." But hey yeah maybe someone who actually is seriously doing this will read this and get it about themselves.
And I don't think I'm a genius for explaining any of this; I just don't see any other break down posts that aren't just reductive or insulting. So I want to explore this.
In the end, and I promise this is not a slight or meant to demean anyone, but surprise, I know, none of the behavior or concern in this thread is purely logical, but instead at its heart, sheer sentimentality. Though I think this particular brand of it is worth exploring. Like, Shocker! I know, I know, wow Chettlar so insightful it's just feelings. But whatever I want to explore this.
Video games are emotional experiences for us as human beings. But emotion is not as simple as the present feeling someone is experiencing. Emotion is a vast sea of experience. It is informed very much by headspaces we inhabit. Video games are incredibly good at creating those headspaces, and when you get consoles associated with those emotional recipes and the unique flavors they produce, the emotional attachment gets really, really strong. Really strong.
Video games are so good at creating these headspaces because they affect so many things that other art mediums do at one time. I mean, a song alone can create this wonderful emotional landscape that can move people to tears, cause them anguish, turn their day around, give them resolve, change their minds on unrelated topics, and in some rare cases literally turn their entire lives around. Even wordless songs can do all this. It's kinda crazy. And this is just ONE aspect of what games do. Games are so total in how experiential they have the potential to be. They are engaging, engrossing, and immersive, if not in one respect, like suspension of disbelief of an immersive world, than in another, like the total engagement in a competitive online match for example. A lot of idiots (I was one of these idiots at one point) want to argue that some games are just pure logic and appeal to them because they are just logical people. Mostly these people are self impressed adolescent nerds (like me hi). Some of these self impressed "adolescent" nerds are in their 30s and 40s. But really, while they may indeed enjoy the logic they are engaging with, them enjoying it is already a bunch of emotional trails running at once. You can't separate out emotion form any part of human experience.
Everything you experience serves to create that emotional landscape which then informs the context from which all emotions experienced within are formed. UI Designers are no less important than any other designers for this very reason. The Gestalt of the experience you have in a game is, well, Gestalt. It is everything that exists to creates that experience for you. The sound of pressing your console's power button, the sound of the hard drive engaging, the start of a chime or melody or chord, the bleeps and bloops of the menus — these all serve to create an emotional reference point for everything that happens after. And this itself always has a point of origin inspired by whatever your impression of what a video game console and what it can provide you might be. When a console is new, our brains, with the expectation of fun and excitement however we got that expectation, usually as kids and/or absorbed in some way from society around us, lap up every bit of it, even if consciously we do or don't pay direct attention ourselves.
This is easier when we are young too, hence nostalgia. I've seen it observed that when I miss an old game, I am not missing the game alone, but really what I miss is being a child. I think this is close to the truth but not quite. Being a child was way different and kinda sucky in a lot of ways. Really this is just trading one simple misconception for another. What we miss is our abstract idea of being a kid, and that idea is often the left over remains of those headspaces we remember most. Oregon Trail is, for me for example, an emblem, or a mental icon of that entire headspace I was in while a kid. That head space was so powerful because as a kid it was more relevant to me than it ever could be now as an adult. There was little else to compete with it. I was a kid soaking up everything around me. Of course every emotional landscape I created would be so visceral, so potent.
As an adult, it isn't so potent. Not the headspaces my mind continually creates, and not the headspaces I remember and sometimes try to relive. I know that I still create these emotional experience schema type things because they are what replace the old ones. Every time I've gone back and played an old game, the experience I had with a kid is briefly remembered more strongly than my memory, and then often snuffed out by my new, present experience, and yet not totally. That experience still is a part of me, and has informed who I am and the experiences I can have that have come after.
For some of us, as those experiences become less visceral and our adult brains become less plastic and less prone to soaking up experiences and creating new powerful emotional landscapes to exist in (which again crazily, we some how often seem to just, not realize are there), we begin to miss being children, when the world was so much bigger and brighter, and our emotions were so much stronger and less bogged down by real life and our more set thoughts that come from being a big old boring grownup. And yet, we continue to have these associations. Maybe they aren't as strong, but they exist. It's just that often they are more strongly informed by their ability to appeal to those we most fondly remember.
I have no preference to Xbox or Playstation or Nintendo, or whatever other games, because growing up for me personally, I only had some point and click games and a lot of educational games all on an old office computer. Some hunting games too, which I enjoyed exploring nature in. So for me, exploring in a game for example remains a lot of fun. That said I know for me that the experience of playing on an xbox 360 is a bit stronger than playing on a PS3 because that was the beginning of my experiencing all of modern gaming. It was where I experienced games that changed who I am as a person to this day. Anything that references those feelings will continue to be compelling for me, because it will help remind me of those headspaces I most heavily associate with playing and being emotionally invested in a video game. Or at least it's a major part of that for me. Humans are complex. (That said, PS3 was also the place I experienced Journey and Demon's Souls for the first time, and is the more recent place I played NieR, all in my later teens, so, say, that beginning orchestral tuning when you turn one on will continue to be powerful for me as well).
To sum this up as well as I can, experiential context is an inextricable part of what creates the emotional landscapes through which we "enjoy" video games, or even more accurately, what that enjoyment basically is.
(And to add. The people designing these things know this. Why do you think they design those beeps and boops? Why do companies so strongly contest their rights to their branding and imagery? They only control part of that puzzle, it is important to keep in mind, but it still is a part.)
Alright, so how is this stuff that all probably seems like stuff you generally sorta know maybe didn't really think about but kinda noticed relevant?
Well, so think about how powerful all that is. Like I really hope I've communicated how important this stuff is. Everyone experiences it differently, but everyone, to some degree, has SOMETHING that affects how they experience video games, a lot of it honestly probably too difficult to really accurately totally and completely enumerate. And for so so so many of them, understandably the thing they most powerfully identify with enjoying a video game is the console upon which they play. There's always many many more aspects — like for me the computer room in which our couple little office computers were housed on the side of our basement's big room — but I'd wager it's a huge component for a lot of people. It's a bit silly, but everyone has something that sort of engages their gamer brain and all the emotional ..."baggage" has too much negative...baggage associated with it, but you get what I mean. My point is that everyone has various things that to them create that emotional landscape context, and for many people to some degree, the console is a major component. This is true for PC gamers too. Again, it's a universal human trait. I mean, as a curiosity to observe at very least, why do people adorn their gaming PC's with "gamer" aesthetic? If you are not one such person, you are not "above" needing some sort of physical or aural or luminous or in some other way emotional trappings of experiential context. It's just that you associate that garish aesthetic with adolescence or obnoxious "gamer" behavior, so they are not a part of what creates a headspace you enjoy. For others, they just might. All sorts of things could be for a PC gamer. Maybe clicking on the discord icon is a little sparkle of flavor as part of the ritual the begins your gaming session. Again, not something you consciously think about unless you happen to notice, but nevertheless a part of your experience. Heck, while I'll be the first to criticize Epic and the EGS, it is impossible for me to deny that there absolutely is some sentimentality in one's preference for a Steam only experience. That is not ALL of it, but that is a discussion for another time. Suffice to say it is impossible to ignore that that experience does exist to flavor any perhaps logically sound or petty discussion on the subject.
So how does this apply here?
Well, when a lifelong playstation gamer moves away from playstation to PC for example, that is all gone. It's just gone. Worse than gone. PC might already have its own associations in their heads that are decidedly negative for that person.
It isn't as if they can't enjoy video games any more. It isn't as if this isn't something that can't be adjusted. Like I said earlier it absolutely can and is continually adjusted. All your memories are just memories of the last time you remembered something anyway. People are plastic. Maybe in some ways less as we grow older, but still essentially plastic. But we can't deny the fact that context and headspace for which people enjoy a given thing, especially if that is an emotional thing, like, oh I don't know, a video game, are not always easy to let go of.
This manifests itself in different ways. It's why you will never convince, with logic, sound as it may be, a person to change their mind on something that was not born of logic in the first place. The fact is if Joe Gamer associates gaming with his Xbox, and his PC with the office, then an Xbox game being on PC, even if the experience is so much better on a PC, and he could make a cheap gaming PC with more options if he wanted to, you aren't going to change his mind. Heck, even Self Aware Joe Gamer may not change his mind, because you can't just fix a deeply rooted emotional association with logic. Not that easily and never completely. Now, part of just allowing yourself to grow as a human being is recognizing those limitations and realizing you can change them and experience new and different things. But also part of being understanding and emotionally intelligent on the other hand is recognizing that emotional association and this specific concept I've referred to with the shorthand of "headspace" and "emotional landscape" so far, are all part of what make us human beings. It's okay to let them be how they are, and learn to both expand them while also taking advantage of how powerful they are if indulged. If you truly love video games as a medium, both are valuable skills to develop.
The trouble we get into then here is when people attempt to rationalize their emotional experiences down to very simple point of interest. They associate mentally a noticeable thing with a noticeable emotion, and here's where it gets kind of funny but interesting, then create an emotional attachment to the idea of that noticeable thing ex post facto. So maybe a given sequence in a game was subconsciously extremely immersive for someone, but also there was a thing that happened in that sequence that they associate with that feeling. They will then try to convey that that thing they associated with the feeling was really really good and definitely was the source of that feeling they got, even if someone else who was not immersed in that experience can point to all the flaws in the thing that happened and how that thing isn't so great because it didn't affect them in the same way. You can say "well it's all subjective," but that is rather lazy.
Sorry if that was a bit confusing. Maybe for example, all sorts of things you do but probably mostly don't notice leading up to and including a given sequence in a game create a feeling of great pathos for you, and so then you are more receptive and ready to accept something as sad or moving. So a scene happens that you find really sad and moving. Then someone else points out to you how crappy and poor the writing was and how silly it sounds. That person didn't experience the same things as you to create that experience. You did, but didn't realize it. So for you, you point out an awkwardly and unrealistically written but earnest scene as something that created a moving experience, when really it was the whole of that gestalt leading up to that moment that enabled you to be receptive to that scene and not notice that ordinarily you'd find it silly. So when someone points out to you that the dialogue is silly and not realistic at all, you are incensed. How could they see that dialogue as silly? Well, it's pretty simple. Essential aspects that lead up to that experience didn't work for them. Just as equally they have probably experienced and enjoyed something you found silly because various things did not work for you. Heck, even if you both enjoyed the scene, different things may have been what did it for each of you, even if in English you'd list the same basic reason you enjoyed it, ANDDDDD, you could both be wrong in whatever simple thing you are ascribing the experience to. Most of what makes a game well beloved then is, I feel like it's pretty logical to conclude, is when it is so effective at nailing everything that everyone is able to experience what it sets out to experience for them.
(Heck, this failure is exactly what causes that really awkward moment when a teenage boy tries to show some girl a cool fight scene from this anime episode #2489 where goku uses his 9.38 million power chi to suplex the pokemon demon master Doki Baka Kun. The fight scene, I hate to break it to you 16 year old m- uh you, but that fight scene wasn't that cool. But that doesn't make it bad either! And it doesn't make you silly for experiencing the power conveyed by that scene. It's more complex than that. The scene itself isn't the thing that made you feel that way on its own. In this case it's the entire 2,488 — oh okay we all know episode #1433 is not canon any more I GET IT CHETTLA- I mean you, okay fine the entire 2,487 — episodes that preceded this glorious fight are the source of your emotion.
And there is no way this cute girl who is pretending she doesn't know you should have showered like at least one this week because she likes your dorky enthusiasm can ever, ever feel the thing you want to share with her, because nothing you explain will convey the full power of what you have experienced. At best it could encourage her to go experience that herself if that sounds exciting to experience. Sure the episode was an emotional release for you, but you are ignoring a lot of flaws in it and how badly animated it is and how actively it takes some people out of the experience by how very average it is, because for you personally that wasn't enough to override the emotional experience you had).
My point is, that often we can mistake the things that really create experience for us for silly oversimplifications. That thing we ascribe it to might not even have anything to do with the true source of that experience. Even those of us who scorn intellectual analysis as boring and ruining the fun and magic of art and video games do this. Because all of us want to feel justified in feeling the way we do.
That's really what it comes down to. Our self image is threatened when the things we most deeply experience are trivialized. We have to justify our experiences because anything we deeply enjoy is reflective of who we are as people. I am not Chettlar because I find Viva Pinata delightful, and me being Chettlar isn't really accurately the reason I enjoy it; neither really totally begets the other. The fact is me being Chettlar is now for the past 7 years or so me being the guy who enjoys Viva Pinata, at least to a small degree. That's...kinda what people mean when they say art is a part of who they are, in my opinion. When I write music I show the world a part of me I can't express any other way. When I enjoy someone else's music, that is me responding to that person, and creating something else. An experience. A..me..unit sorta. That which I call my identity is amended whether I like it or not. Why else do people even lightly interested in a various piece of media adorn themselves either with avatars or memorabilia? Part of our identity is what we enjoy. When I justify why I enjoy a thing, I am justifying ME. And at some point somewhere with some thing, you reading this do that too. If you've read this, I've affected you whether you like it or not, whether you think I'm onto something or just an over-intellectual sycophant (I mean, I just used the word sycophant). As I talked about earlier, video games are some of the most involving of all mediums. Sure this combines with video games being enjoyed and created in huge part by anti-social nerds, a lot of whom never had to grow past being children and so reflect this reality in unfortunate and sometimes horrendous ways. But video games were always going to have such a strong effect on the people who play them, because by their nature they touch so many parts of us at once.
Alright.
Sooooo
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Let's plug this all in then. I get the previous part may have been a little boring, but I gotta make sure I establish some common ground here so I can get to the juicy bit. Hopefully the emotional headspace I created for you, lol, wasn't just "who is Chettlar and why has he assaulted me with this skyscraper of text?" I'm trying okay? It's a large topic.
Alright, well.
A lot of Playstation fans, whether they want to admit it or not, and not all of them, but many of them to varying levels, have used exclusives as their preferred means of justifying their being fans of the brand. Not just their purchase, but of the brand. Playstation. What that means for them. What emotional sparks that might gently but maybe imperceptibly begin to flare. I think for some of them, they view themselves as intelligent, discerning and logical people. To support this, they have to believe that the games they play are the best games ever made, or at least top notch in general. A few crappy games they dislike can serve as the sacrificial lambs to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are not mindless fanboys, of course. (Psst, this is not me implying that Sony games are all trash. But the emotional need some may posses more than others to place these exclusives at the very top of the medium is very much related to this. If you find yourself starting to feel defensive right now at that very implication, uh...maybe think about that for a minute. Because I've not even said whether I like Sony games. Actually that's not true, I already have. I mentioned Journey earlier as a hugely impactful game for me, because it truly was for me.) And this isn't to diminish the fact that these games, on their own, have created emotional experiences. Sony makes some quality titles. What I am saying that there is an emotional need to elevate them into the stratosphere that you might not be as immune from as you might think, even if you don't even like Playstation games and you're interests lie elsewhere.
This is why you have a number of journalists comment that they receive a lot of their death threats (if not due to them being anything other than cis male because of that whole big thing gamers™ have a problem with, but that's another topic) most often in relation to, you guessed it, their views on exclusive games. Not just Playstation games. This happens with Nintendo fans and xbox fans. But right now the topic is Playstation, so I've been using that specifically. Plus, let's not pretend that Sony's marketers are totally oblivious to their identity as a brand that builds major impressive cinematic experiences. They're pretty vocal about it honestly. So if you are profoundly affected by that marketing because all marketing in all of the world of branding of any kind is designed with the intent of validating that identity you've created, well, it's working.
Again this is not to specifically attack Playstation fans. Every person has this happen to them, because we are emotional creatures like I discussed before. I'm not even attacking capitalist marketing. Cults do this, states do this, small clubs do this, movements do this — anything and everything that has an interest in existing as an institution in your life does this. And it always will.
But the er, unsavory side of it is Playstation fans being ugly up to and including sending death threats to websites who didn't give Uncharted 3 10/10 reviews before they had even played the game themselves. That behavior didn't come out of the blue. It didn't just come from some aggressively mislead slaves to the marketing of Uncharted 3 who just believed foolishly that the game was great before it was on store shelves. It didn't just come from the black magic power of branding alone. It came from fans whose identity relied on Playstation being a brand of prestigious perfect video games. I will point out, meekly, but frankly, that the forum that was the precursor to this forum, was home to a lot of that senseless ugliness. Maybe not the worst of it, but some of it. But again, it's not senseless really. It's not reasonless most certainly. It's just a result of a lack of self-awareness of how deeply and profoundly the experience and identity of being a Playstation fan, even among those who didn't specifically identify as Playstation fans per se affected these people's views. Again, we all are affected by our emotions even in what we feel are our most rational moments. This is an example of how that applies here. Marketing was part of it, but not even close to all of it. It cannot create this out of nothing.
I feel strongly that trying to dismiss these people as corporate slaves is foolish, I need to note. It is an oversimplification that tries to distance the one making it from their behavior, trying to shift the blame to a system rather than acknowledge the human source of, and life factors leading up to, that behavior, be it as it may that that marketing did play its part in accentuating or accelerating that behavior. I really feel that much of what begat that behavior was something universal to us all. That maybe you reading this aren't so immature as to act in that way, but you are nevertheless affected by your favorite brand of video game, or your favorite happy video game place. It compels you to act the way you do, whether you've taken the time to see it or not.
Hopefully I've kind of shown some of the beautiful and ugly sides of what emotional identity and the headspaces we inhabit, that are so intimately tied to that identity, can be.
When you take away a Sony fan's rationale for defending his identity as a rational, logical, intelligent human being who enjoys Playstation because he is such, you lay bare and naked the fact that his love of Playstation was never truly rational, logical, or intelligent.
Certainly there were rational, logical, and intelligent reasons that may have got him there, but his love in the end comes from a humiliating and simple human reality. He loves his beeps and boops, his whirrs and start-up tune, his click of a face button and clack of an analogue stick. He loves the feeling of the couch under is butt. He loves the dim lamp light. He loves the logo that pops up and tells his lizard brain, "Game time! Fun time! Relax! The physical place you are in only serves along with the lights and sounds and trinkets to create the mental place you so enjoy. We all exist to simultaneously create a sanctuary and catalyst for what you love most." To explain to him his rationale is not, at least entirely, rational despite the part logic may play in it, the reason he loves Playstation, is humiliating, because it eats at, even if he doesn't realize it, the idea that he isn't who he thinks he is. He's a silly, lizard brained animal just like anyone and anything else. And his love for these experiences is inspired in huge part by silly things. And he wants to feel that it comes from intelligence and superiority. It's banal and boring insecurity, regardless of whether he's even ever been conscious of it.
He doesn't want to admit that at the heart of it, the reason he's a Playstation fan is for reasons he probably has already subconsciously written off as humiliating or silly. (He may have, in an ironic lack of self awareness used such an explanation to humiliate someone else and diminish their experience specifically to prop himself up. That isn't necessary at all, but if he's a jerk maybe it's happened. You don't have to be a jerk to have blind spots. We all do.) And he doesn't even have to have gone through ANY of these thoughts either. It probably just manifests in a vague fear of being threatened, his subconscious warning him that this person pushing him to recognize the very banal source of his identity is actually just an asshole, and he shouldn't think about it, but instead be mad at the asshole, or the person responsible. He tries to come up with all kinds of badly thought out rational reasons to defend his position and why his essentially selfish desires shouldn't be exposed as the petty things they are.
And you, the reader, probably do this with something, somewhere, in your life too. Maybe it's more serious, maybe it's more tiny. But that's your business to examine what silly things your pride doesn't let you accept. My point is that this is a human thing. Not something playstation fans do because they're dumb dumbs for some reason.
And the funny thing is? The cure to this is not that complicated. It's like, really simple. Accept that your lizard brain likes the beeps and boops and that the idea of what playstation is to you is in the end, just an emotion. Accept that you aren't any smarter than anyone else because of the games you enjoy. That your reasons for the way you game the way you do aren't super intelligent because at the center of it all, you are playing games to have fun, which is nothing if not the definition of emotional experience. You are going to do what you are going to do to engender that experience. I mean, really games are deeper than fun. Some of our favorite games we love because they were very seriously emotional, and not really the typical colloquial definition of fun, now that I really think about it. The fact is you are going to, subconsciously or not, do what you need to do in order to create those experiences for yourself. And that's okay. It's definitely good to explore the reasons why this happens. But analyzing your reasons for enjoying something is an intellectual pursuit of curiosity, not an appropriate avenue for justifying your identity, and certainly not an appropriate thing to use to deprive others of enjoying more things in the way most effective for them. If analyzing why something happens is not allowed to humiliate you or if it makes you feel threatened in anyway, well sucks to be you buddy because fact is you are a mortal imperfect human being and analyzing the reasons you are the way you are are going to be compromising in some fashion. I really don't know what to tell you other than to move past it, because you are seriously limiting yourself to some awesome opportunities to learn and grow as a person. I don't care if you're 15 or 50 or 31½.
The fact is, humiliating as it may be, you fancy the things you fancy is because they tickle your lizard brain and help create an emotional cocktail you enjoy.
If you don't recognize that, you won't realize how utterly silly it is that you are essentially arguing that someone should compell you to spend more money. Like, really at the end of it, it's an extremely illogical, silly fear of missing out. You've created a really silly idea, dress it up however you like, that you are missing out on something. If a game comes to more platforms, well clearly an exclusive has been deprived of you. You've got a silly animalistic instinct of valuing scarcity. You feel that if a game comes to more platforms, it's not special any more. So then it's not as special. But you've not lost anything, other's have gained something. But the FEELING of it being special is gone, so you feel that objectively something is missing. Well buddy sorry to break it to you but there is nothing logical about that, no matter how you want to dress it up. So much for being rational. Yes, games are created to sell consoles, but if a company moves to making those games for more platforms, you have not lost anything. You just feel like you have because the emotional puzzle piece that has disappeared from the equation if the feeling of scarcity and exclusivity everyone finds at least a teeny tiny bit alluring on some level.
More related to the general point of this entire post, you also fear missing out in a way that really is actually, funny enough, self imposed, and leads you to do silly things like, as I said above, imply that you WANT to be compelled to spend extra money. The fact is you want a rational reason to get a video game console and have the whole experience it provides you. If you don't have an exclusive game to justify that experience, then you are left facing that horrible, humiliating fact we talked about.
You don't want the console for rational reasons. You want the console because you want the emotional idea of that console. You want the console because of the emotional landscape it creates within you. Because you are a human being who needs things you don't want to recognize to exist in order to facilitate the fullest enjoyment of a video game possible. Exclusives helped justify that for you in a way that seems tangible and rational.
Your silly emotional and not-well-justifiable reasons for spending hundreds of dollars on a console aren't enough for you. You need to feel reasonable, rational, and intelligent for wanting what you want, even if you don't personally think you care. If you really didn't care, you wouldn't be asking someone to make you spend hundreds of dollars on electronics that in all essential ways do all the same things as the electronics you already own. You want stuff, and now you can't justify it, and that's humiliating to recognize how silly you are.
Thing is though...like, really the way to make peace with this, like I kind of covered, isn't that hard. Like, okay, I like silly things. Why care? Are video games not just a bunch of bleep and boops? They still create amazing experiences for you. If you want to spend $400 to feel better about yourself, spend $400 if it makes you happy. It was just as silly an expenditure when it had exclusives, because at the heart of it you are just indulging your emotions, and that's what these big toys are for. It is no less and no more a silly expenditure in a way that really, truly matters now that it doesn't. If all your games come to PC, you are still someone who enjoys themselves on your playstation or your xbox or switch. Go play your playstation or xbox or switch and be happy. You are a silly, irrational human being. Don't take yourself so seriously. Don't be an idiot with your money, but if what makes you happy is owning a box with a big X or a big P or lopsided face looking thing on it to play your games on, then that's what makes you happy. You're wasting so much energy trying to preserve your ego, and honestly in the end hurting yourself most of all by limiting your ability to grow as a human being.
Yeah, you are still a child. You like big toys. You like car go vroom. You like head blow off. You like sparkles shiny wow. You are depriving yourself and others of joy by insisting you are so superior to that. You're not intelligent by trying to make yourself appear intelligent or rationalize and justify your self-image. Ironically you're...kinda bein' stupid. So what. We're all stupid. Quit taking yourself so seriously. Go play video games you big dummy.
The Master Chief Collection and Red Dead collection were both late ports and Did well on PC. I have no doubt Horizon will do well and can easily hit #1 on the Steam best seller list if it's released on PC.
Reach was because it was part of MCC and thus part of Halo, a game that existed on PC before and that has online multiplayer. It also was not a full price game.
I probably should have just like, made a medium post but I've not really ever used it. I just think the conversation is going to continue to go in circles so for my own sense of sanity I had to analyze it from the ground up and try and get at what I think are the essential reasons we are actually having this conversation in the first place.
The following has been stewing in my mind for quite some time now and it's a big topic but I'm gonna go crazy so I'm just going to sit down and talk about how otherwise perfectly rational, normal people reach this silliness.
Okay so, I want to start this on the right tone. This is not meant to lambast or demean anyone, but rather analyze. So, first of all I'm gonna admit. I understand it. I'm not going to defend it. I think it's dumb as hell. But I get it. I have that gut reaction sometimes.
Oh who am I kidding, I have that gut reaction a lot. I'm an emotional guy. I understand and identify with all of the silliness that Playstation fanboys may be feeling all the way to expressing loudly or wherever on that spectrum they may fall.
Gonna break it down one point at a time. Originally when I wrote this I'd said simple. Uh...this isn't going to be "simple" as in "short." But hey yeah maybe someone who actually is seriously doing this will read this and get it about themselves.
And I don't think I'm a genius for explaining any of this; I just don't see any other break down posts that aren't just reductive or insulting. So I want to explore this.
In the end, and I promise this is not a slight or meant to demean anyone, but surprise, I know, none of the behavior or concern in this thread is purely logical, but instead at its heart, sheer sentimentality. Though I think this particular brand of it is worth exploring. Like, Shocker! I know, I know, wow Chettlar so insightful it's just feelings. But whatever I want to explore this.
Video games are emotional experiences for us as human beings. But emotion is not as simple as the present feeling someone is experiencing. Emotion is a vast sea of experience. It is informed very much by headspaces we inhabit. Video games are incredibly good at creating those headspaces, and when you get consoles associated with those emotional recipes and the unique flavors they produce, the emotional attachment gets really, really strong. Really strong.
Video games are so good at creating these headspaces because they affect so many things that other art mediums do at one time. I mean, a song alone can create this wonderful emotional landscape that can move people to tears, cause them anguish, turn their day around, give them resolve, change their minds on unrelated topics, and in some rare cases literally turn their entire lives around. Even wordless songs can do all this. It's kinda crazy. And this is just ONE aspect of what games do. Games are so total in how experiential they have the potential to be. They are engaging, engrossing, and immersive, if not in one respect, like suspension of disbelief of an immersive world, than in another, like the total engagement in a competitive online match for example. A lot of idiots (I was one of these idiots at one point) want to argue that some games are just pure logic and appeal to them because they are just logical people. Mostly these people are self impressed adolescent nerds (like me hi). Some of these self impressed "adolescent" nerds are in their 30s and 40s. But really, while they may indeed enjoy the logic they are engaging with, them enjoying it is already a bunch of emotional trails running at once. You can't separate out emotion form any part of human experience.
Everything you experience serves to create that emotional landscape which then informs the context from which all emotions experienced within are formed. UI Designers are no less important than any other designers for this very reason. The Gestalt of the experience you have in a game is, well, Gestalt. It is everything that exists to creates that experience for you. The sound of pressing your console's power button, the sound of the hard drive engaging, the start of a chime or melody or chord, the bleeps and bloops of the menus — these all serve to create an emotional reference point for everything that happens after. And this itself always has a point of origin inspired by whatever your impression of what a video game console and what it can provide you might be. When a console is new, our brains, with the expectation of fun and excitement however we got that expectation, usually as kids and/or absorbed in some way from society around us, lap up every bit of it, even if consciously we do or don't pay direct attention ourselves.
This is easier when we are young too, hence nostalgia. I've seen it observed that when I miss an old game, I am not missing the game alone, but really what I miss is being a child. I think this is close to the truth but not quite. Being a child was way different and kinda sucky in a lot of ways. Really this is just trading one simple misconception for another. What we miss is our abstract idea of being a kid, and that idea is often the left over remains of those headspaces we remember most. Oregon Trail is, for me for example, an emblem, or a mental icon of that entire headspace I was in while a kid. That head space was so powerful because as a kid it was more relevant to me than it ever could be now as an adult. There was little else to compete with it. I was a kid soaking up everything around me. Of course every emotional landscape I created would be so visceral, so potent.
As an adult, it isn't so potent. Not the headspaces my mind continually creates, and not the headspaces I remember and sometimes try to relive. I know that I still create these emotional experience schema type things because they are what replace the old ones. Every time I've gone back and played an old game, the experience I had with a kid is briefly remembered more strongly than my memory, and then often snuffed out by my new, present experience, and yet not totally. That experience still is a part of me, and has informed who I am and the experiences I can have that have come after.
For some of us, as those experiences become less visceral and our adult brains become less plastic and less prone to soaking up experiences and creating new powerful emotional landscapes to exist in (which again crazily, we some how often seem to just, not realize are there), we begin to miss being children, when the world was so much bigger and brighter, and our emotions were so much stronger and less bogged down by real life and our more set thoughts that come from being a big old boring grownup. And yet, we continue to have these associations. Maybe they aren't as strong, but they exist. It's just that often they are more strongly informed by their ability to appeal to those we most fondly remember.
I have no overwhelming preference to Xbox or Playstation or Nintendo, or whatever other games, because growing up for me personally, I only had some point and click games and a lot of educational games all on an old office computer. Some hunting games too, which I enjoyed exploring nature in. So for me, exploring in a game for example remains a lot of fun. That said I know for me that the experience of playing on an xbox 360 is a bit stronger than playing on a PS3 because that was the beginning of my experiencing all of modern gaming. It was where I experienced games that changed who I am as a person to this day. Anything that references those feelings will continue to be compelling for me, because it will help remind me of those headspaces I most heavily associate with playing and being emotionally invested in a video game. Or at least it's a major part of that for me. Humans are complex. (That said, PS3 was also the place I experienced Journey and Demon's Souls for the first time, and is the more recent place I played NieR, all in my later teens, so, say, that beginning orchestral tuning when you turn one on will continue to be powerful for me as well).
To sum this up as well as I can, experiential context is an inextricable part of what creates the emotional landscapes through which we "enjoy" video games, or even more accurately, what that enjoyment basically is.
(And to add. The people designing these things know this. Why do you think they design those beeps and boops? Why do companies so strongly contest their rights to their branding and imagery? They only control part of that puzzle, it is important to keep in mind, but it still is a part.)
Alright, so how is this stuff that all probably seems like stuff you generally sorta know maybe didn't really think about but kinda noticed relevant?
Well, so think about how powerful all that is. Like I really hope I've communicated how important this stuff is. Everyone experiences it differently, but everyone, to some degree, has SOMETHING that affects how they experience video games, a lot of it honestly probably too difficult to really accurately totally and completely enumerate. And for so so so many of them, understandably the thing they most powerfully identify with enjoying a video game is the console upon which they play. There's always many many more aspects — like for me the computer room in which our couple little office computers were housed on the side of our basement's big room — but I'd wager it's a huge component for a lot of people. It's a bit silly, but everyone has something that sort of engages their gamer brain and all the emotional ..."baggage" has too much negative...baggage associated with it, but you get what I mean. My point is that everyone has various things that to them create that emotional landscape context, and for many people to some degree, the console is a major component. This is true for PC gamers too. Again, it's a universal human trait. I mean, as a curiosity to observe at very least, why do people adorn their gaming PC's with "gamer" aesthetic? If you are not one such person, you are not "above" needing some sort of physical or aural or luminous or in some other way emotional trappings of experiential context. It's just that you associate that garish aesthetic with adolescence or obnoxious "gamer" behavior, so they are not a part of what creates a headspace you enjoy. For others, they just might. All sorts of things could be for a PC gamer. Maybe clicking on the discord icon is a little sparkle of flavor as part of the ritual the begins your gaming session. Again, not something you consciously think about unless you happen to notice, but nevertheless a part of your experience. Heck, while I'll be the first to criticize Epic and the EGS, it is impossible for me to deny that there absolutely is some sentimentality in one's preference for a Steam only experience. That is not ALL of it, but that is a discussion for another time. Suffice to say it is impossible to ignore that that experience does exist to flavor any perhaps logically sound or petty discussion on the subject.
So how does this apply here?
Well, when a lifelong playstation gamer moves away from playstation to PC for example, that is all gone. It's just gone. Worse than gone. PC might already have its own associations in their heads that are decidedly negative for that person.
It isn't as if they can't enjoy video games any more. It isn't as if this isn't something that can't be adjusted. Like I said earlier it absolutely can and is continually adjusted. All your memories are just memories of the last time you remembered something anyway. People are plastic. Maybe in some ways less as we grow older, but still essentially plastic. But we can't deny the fact that context and headspace for which people enjoy a given thing, especially if that is an emotional thing, like, oh I don't know, a video game, are not always easy to let go of.
This manifests itself in different ways. It's why you will never convince, with logic, sound as it may be, a person to change their mind on something that was not born of logic in the first place. The fact is if Joe Gamer associates gaming with his Xbox, and his PC with the office, then an Xbox game being on PC, even if the experience is so much better on a PC, and he could make a cheap gaming PC with more options if he wanted to, you aren't going to change his mind. Heck, even Self Aware Joe Gamer may not change his mind, because you can't just fix a deeply rooted emotional association with logic. Not that easily and never completely. Now, part of just allowing yourself to grow as a human being is recognizing those limitations and realizing you can change them and experience new and different things. But also part of being understanding and emotionally intelligent on the other hand is recognizing that emotional association and this specific concept I've referred to with the shorthand of "headspace" and "emotional landscape" so far, are all part of what make us human beings. It's okay to let them be how they are, and learn to both expand them while also taking advantage of how powerful they are if indulged. If you truly love video games as a medium, both are valuable skills to develop.
The trouble we get into then here is when people attempt to rationalize their emotional experiences down to very simple point of interest. They associate mentally a noticeable thing with a noticeable emotion, and here's where it gets kind of funny but interesting, then create an emotional attachment to the idea of that noticeable thing ex post facto. So maybe a given sequence in a game was subconsciously extremely immersive for someone, but also there was a thing that happened in that sequence that they associate with that feeling. They will then try to convey that that thing they associated with the feeling was really really good and definitely was the source of that feeling they got, even if someone else who was not immersed in that experience can point to all the flaws in the thing that happened and how that thing isn't so great because it didn't affect them in the same way. You can say "well it's all subjective," but that is rather lazy.
Sorry if that was a bit confusing. Maybe for example, all sorts of things you do but probably mostly don't notice leading up to and including a given sequence in a game create a feeling of great pathos for you, and so then you are more receptive and ready to accept something as sad or moving. So a scene happens that you find really sad and moving. Then someone else points out to you how crappy and poor the writing was and how silly it sounds. That person didn't experience the same things as you to create that experience. You did, but didn't realize it. So for you, you point out an awkwardly and unrealistically written but earnest scene as something that created a moving experience, when really it was the whole of that gestalt leading up to that moment that enabled you to be receptive to that scene and not notice that ordinarily you'd find it silly. So when someone points out to you that the dialogue is silly and not realistic at all, you are incensed. How could they see that dialogue as silly? Well, it's pretty simple. Essential aspects that lead up to that experience didn't work for them. Just as equally they have probably experienced and enjoyed something you found silly because various things did not work for you. Heck, even if you both enjoyed the scene, different things may have been what did it for each of you, even if in English you'd list the same basic reason you enjoyed it, ANDDDDD, you could both be wrong in whatever simple thing you are ascribing the experience to. Most of what makes a game well beloved then is, I feel like it's pretty logical to conclude, is when it is so effective at nailing everything that everyone is able to experience what it sets out to experience for them.
(Heck, this failure is exactly what causes that really awkward moment when a teenage boy tries to show some girl a cool fight scene from this anime episode #2489 where goku uses his 9.38 million power chi to suplex the pokemon demon master Doki Baka Kun. The fight scene, I hate to break it to you 16 year old m- uh you, but that fight scene wasn't that cool. But that doesn't make it bad either! And it doesn't make you silly for experiencing the power conveyed by that scene. It's more complex than that. The scene itself isn't the thing that made you feel that way on its own. In this case it's the entire 2,488 — oh okay we all know episode #1433 is not canon any more I GET IT CHETTLA- I mean you, okay fine the entire 2,487 — episodes that preceded this glorious fight are the source of your emotion.
And there is no way this cute girl who is pretending she doesn't know you should have showered like at least one this week because she likes your dorky enthusiasm can ever, ever feel the thing you want to share with her, because nothing you explain will convey the full power of what you have experienced. At best it could encourage her to go experience that herself if that sounds exciting to experience. Sure the episode was an emotional release for you, but you are ignoring a lot of flaws in it and how badly animated it is and how actively it takes some people out of the experience by how very average it is, because for you personally that wasn't enough to override the emotional experience you had).
My point is, that often we can mistake the things that really create experience for us for silly oversimplifications. That thing we ascribe it to might not even have anything to do with the true source of that experience. Even those of us who scorn intellectual analysis as boring and ruining the fun and magic of art and video games do this. Because all of us want to feel justified in feeling the way we do.
That's really what it comes down to. Our self image is threatened when the things we most deeply experience are trivialized. We have to justify our experiences because anything we deeply enjoy is reflective of who we are as people. I am not Chettlar because I find Viva Pinata delightful, and me being Chettlar isn't really accurately the reason I enjoy it; neither really totally begets the other. The fact is me being Chettlar is now for the past 7 years or so me being the guy who enjoys Viva Pinata, at least to a small degree. That's...kinda what people mean when they say art is a part of who they are, in my opinion. When I write music I show the world a part of me I can't express any other way. When I enjoy someone else's music, that is me responding to that person, and creating something else. An experience. A..me..unit sorta. That which I call my identity is amended whether I like it or not. Why else do people even lightly interested in a various piece of media adorn themselves either with avatars or memorabilia? Part of our identity is what we enjoy. When I justify why I enjoy a thing, I am justifying ME. And at some point somewhere with some thing, you reading this do that too. If you've read this, I've affected you whether you like it or not, whether you think I'm onto something or just an over-intellectual sycophant (I mean, I just used the word sycophant). As I talked about earlier, video games are some of the most involving of all mediums. Sure this combines with video games being enjoyed and created in huge part by anti-social nerds, a lot of whom never had to grow past being children and so reflect this reality in unfortunate and sometimes horrendous ways. But video games were always going to have such a strong effect on the people who play them, because by their nature they touch so many parts of us at once.
Alright.
Sooooo
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Let's plug this all in then. I get the previous part may have been a little boring, but I gotta make sure I establish some common ground here so I can get to the juicy bit. Hopefully the emotional headspace I created for you, lol, wasn't just "who is Chettlar and why has he assaulted me with this skyscraper of text?" I'm trying okay? It's a large topic.
Alright, well.
A lot of Playstation fans, whether they want to admit it or not, and not all of them, but many of them to varying levels, have used exclusives as their preferred means of justifying their being fans of the brand. Not just their purchase, but of the brand. Playstation. What that means for them. What emotional sparks that might gently but maybe imperceptibly begin to flare. I think for some of them, they view themselves as intelligent, discerning and logical people. To support this, they have to believe that the games they play are the best games ever made, or at least top notch in general. A few crappy games they dislike can serve as the sacrificial lambs to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are not mindless fanboys, of course. (Psst, this is not me implying that Sony games are all trash. But the emotional need some may posses more than others to place these exclusives at the very top of the medium is very much related to this. If you find yourself starting to feel defensive right now at that very implication, uh...maybe think about that for a minute. Because I've not even said whether I like Sony games. Actually that's not true, I already have. I mentioned Journey earlier as a hugely impactful game for me, because it truly was for me.) And this isn't to diminish the fact that these games, on their own, have created emotional experiences. Sony makes some quality titles. What I am saying that there is an emotional need to elevate them into the stratosphere that you might not be as immune from as you might think, even if you don't even like Playstation games and you're interests lie elsewhere.
This is why you have a number of journalists comment that they receive a lot of their death threats (if not due to them being anything other than cis male because of that whole big thing gamers™ have a problem with, but that's another topic) most often in relation to, you guessed it, their views on exclusive games. Not just Playstation games. This happens with Nintendo fans and xbox fans. But right now the topic is Playstation, so I've been using that specifically. Plus, let's not pretend that Sony's marketers are totally oblivious to their identity as a brand that builds major impressive cinematic experiences. They're pretty vocal about it honestly. So if you are profoundly affected by that marketing because all marketing in all of the world of branding of any kind is designed with the intent of validating that identity you've created, well, it's working.
Again this is not to specifically attack Playstation fans. Every person has this happen to them, because we are emotional creatures like I discussed before. I'm not even attacking capitalist marketing. Cults do this, states do this, small clubs do this, movements do this — anything and everything that has an interest in existing as an institution in your life does this. And it always will.
But the er, unsavory side of it is Playstation fans being ugly up to and including sending death threats to websites who didn't give Uncharted 3 10/10 reviews before they had even played the game themselves. That behavior didn't come out of the blue. It didn't just come from some aggressively mislead slaves to the marketing of Uncharted 3 who just believed foolishly that the game was great before it was on store shelves. It didn't just come from the black magic power of branding alone. It came from fans whose identity relied on Playstation being a brand of prestigious perfect video games. I will point out, meekly, but frankly, that the forum that was the precursor to this forum, was home to a lot of that senseless ugliness. Maybe not the worst of it, but some of it. But again, it's not senseless really. It's not reasonless most certainly. It's just a result of a lack of self-awareness of how deeply and profoundly the experience and identity of being a Playstation fan, even among those who didn't specifically identify as Playstation fans per se affected these people's views. Again, we all are affected by our emotions even in what we feel are our most rational moments. This is an example of how that applies here. Marketing was part of it, but not even close to all of it. It cannot create this out of nothing.
I feel strongly that trying to dismiss these people as corporate slaves is foolish, I need to note. It is an oversimplification that tries to distance the one making it from their behavior, trying to shift the blame to a system rather than acknowledge the human source of, and life factors leading up to, that behavior, be it as it may that that marketing did play its part in accentuating or accelerating that behavior. I really feel that much of what begat that behavior was something universal to us all. That maybe you reading this aren't so immature as to act in that way, but you are nevertheless affected by your favorite brand of video game, or your favorite happy video game place. It compels you to act the way you do, whether you've taken the time to see it or not.
Hopefully I've kind of shown some of the beautiful and ugly sides of what emotional identity and the headspaces we inhabit, that are so intimately tied to that identity, can be.
When you take away a Sony fan's rationale for defending his identity as a rational, logical, intelligent human being who enjoys Playstation because he is such, you lay bare and naked the fact that his love of Playstation was never truly rational, logical, or intelligent.
Certainly there were rational, logical, and intelligent reasons that may have got him there, but his love in the end comes from a humiliating and simple human reality. He loves his beeps and boops, his whirrs and start-up tune, his click of a face button and clack of an analogue stick. He loves the feeling of the couch under is butt. He loves the dim lamp light. He loves the logo that pops up and tells his lizard brain, "Game time! Fun time! Relax! The physical place you are in only serves along with the lights and sounds and trinkets to create the mental place you so enjoy. We all exist to simultaneously create a sanctuary and catalyst for what you love most." To explain to him his rationale is not, at least entirely, rational despite the part logic may play in it, the reason he loves Playstation, is humiliating, because it eats at, even if he doesn't realize it, the idea that he isn't who he thinks he is. He's a silly, lizard brained animal just like anyone and anything else. And his love for these experiences is inspired in huge part by silly things. And he wants to feel that it comes from intelligence and superiority. It's banal and boring insecurity, regardless of whether he's even ever been conscious of it.
He doesn't want to admit that at the heart of it, the reason he's a Playstation fan is for reasons he probably has already subconsciously written off as humiliating or silly. (He may have, in an ironic lack of self awareness used such an explanation to humiliate someone else and diminish their experience specifically to prop himself up. That isn't necessary at all, but if he's a jerk maybe it's happened. You don't have to be a jerk to have blind spots. We all do.) And he doesn't even have to have gone through ANY of these thoughts either. It probably just manifests in a vague fear of being threatened, his subconscious warning him that this person pushing him to recognize the very banal source of his identity is actually just an asshole, and he shouldn't think about it, but instead be mad at the asshole, or the person responsible. He tries to come up with all kinds of badly thought out rational reasons to defend his position and why his essentially selfish desires shouldn't be exposed as the petty things they are.
And you, the reader, probably do this with something, somewhere, in your life too. Maybe it's more serious, maybe it's more tiny. But that's your business to examine what silly things your pride doesn't let you accept. My point is that this is a human thing. Not something playstation fans do because they're dumb dumbs for some reason.
And the funny thing is? The cure to this is not that complicated. It's like, really simple. Accept that your lizard brain likes the beeps and boops and that the idea of what playstation is to you is in the end, just an emotion. Accept that you aren't any smarter than anyone else because of the games you enjoy. That your reasons for the way you game the way you do aren't super intelligent because at the center of it all, you are playing games to have fun, which is nothing if not the definition of emotional experience. You are going to do what you are going to do to engender that experience. I mean, really games are deeper than fun. Some of our favorite games we love because they were very seriously emotional, and not really the typical colloquial definition of fun, now that I really think about it. The fact is you are going to, subconsciously or not, do what you need to do in order to create those experiences for yourself. And that's okay. It's definitely good to explore the reasons why this happens. But analyzing your reasons for enjoying something is an intellectual pursuit of curiosity, not an appropriate avenue for justifying your identity, and certainly not an appropriate thing to use to deprive others of enjoying more things in the way most effective for them. If analyzing why something happens is not allowed to humiliate you or if it makes you feel threatened in anyway, well sucks to be you buddy because fact is you are a mortal imperfect human being and analyzing the reasons you are the way you are are going to be compromising in some fashion. I really don't know what to tell you other than to move past it, because you are seriously limiting yourself to some awesome opportunities to learn and grow as a person. I don't care if you're 15 or 50 or 31½.
The fact is, humiliating as it may be, you fancy the things you fancy is because they tickle your lizard brain and help create an emotional cocktail you enjoy.
If you don't recognize that, you won't realize how utterly silly it is that you are essentially arguing that someone should compell you to spend more money. Like, really at the end of it, it's an extremely illogical, silly fear of missing out. You've created a really silly idea, dress it up however you like, that you are missing out on something. If a game comes to more platforms, well clearly an exclusive has been deprived of you. You've got a silly animalistic instinct of valuing scarcity. You feel that if a game comes to more platforms, it's not special any more. So then it's not as special. But you've not lost anything, other's have gained something. But the FEELING of it being special is gone, so you feel that objectively something is missing. Well buddy sorry to break it to you but there is nothing logical about that, no matter how you want to dress it up. So much for being rational. Yes, games are created to sell consoles, but if a company moves to making those games for more platforms, you have not lost anything. You just feel like you have because the emotional puzzle piece that has disappeared from the equation if the feeling of scarcity and exclusivity everyone finds at least a teeny tiny bit alluring on some level.
More related to the general point of this entire post, you also fear missing out in a way that really is actually, funny enough, self imposed, and leads you to do silly things like, as I said above, imply that you WANT to be compelled to spend extra money. The fact is you want a rational reason to get a video game console and have the whole experience it provides you. If you don't have an exclusive game to justify that experience, then you are left facing that horrible, humiliating fact we talked about.
You don't want the console for rational reasons. You want the console because you want the emotional idea of that console. You want the console because of the emotional landscape it creates within you. Because you are a human being who needs things you don't want to recognize to exist in order to facilitate the fullest enjoyment of a video game possible. Exclusives helped justify that for you in a way that seems tangible and rational.
Your silly emotional and not-well-justifiable reasons for spending hundreds of dollars on a console aren't enough for you. You need to feel reasonable, rational, and intelligent for wanting what you want, even if you don't personally think you care. If you really didn't care, you wouldn't be asking someone to make you spend hundreds of dollars on electronics that in all essential ways do all the same things as the electronics you already own. You want stuff, and now you can't justify it, and that's humiliating to recognize how silly you are.
Thing is though...like, really the way to make peace with this, like I kind of covered, isn't that hard. Like, okay, I like silly things. Why care? Are video games not just a bunch of bleep and boops? They still create amazing experiences for you. If you want to spend $400 to feel better about yourself, spend $400 if it makes you happy. It was just as silly an expenditure when it had exclusives, because at the heart of it you are just indulging your emotions, and that's what these big toys are for. It is no less and no more a silly expenditure in a way that really, truly matters now that it doesn't. If all your games come to PC, you are still someone who enjoys themselves on your playstation or your xbox or switch. Go play your playstation or xbox or switch and be happy. You are a silly, irrational human being. Don't take yourself so seriously. Don't be an idiot with your money, but if what makes you happy is owning a box with a big X or a big P or lopsided face looking thing on it to play your games on, then that's what makes you happy. You're wasting so much energy trying to preserve your ego, and honestly in the end hurting yourself most of all by limiting your ability to grow as a human being.
Yeah, you are still a child. You like big toys. You like car go vroom. You like head blow off. You like sparkles shiny wow. You are depriving yourself and others of joy by insisting you are so superior to that. You're not intelligent by trying to make yourself appear intelligent or rationalize and justify your self-image. Ironically you're...kinda bein' stupid. So what. We're all stupid. Quit taking yourself so seriously. Go play video games you big dummy.
After this whole thing blows over I think it might be time to have a serious discussion on how the gaming community could work towards the goal of discouraging similar behaviors in the future.
Reach was because it was part of MCC and thus part of Halo, a game that existed on PC before and that has online multiplayer. It also was not a full price game.
Bloodborne would be a hit on PC being a From Software game. TLOU can't be priced as a full game now so it will sell well too. There is a good audience for those games on PC.
Ha, never. I've never spent that much effort on a joke. It's been a long, long time since I made anything that long. Actually I don't think I ever have. It's exhausting. Took me idk 4 hours to make the first draft before I cut, rewrote, and clarified it which took another idk hour and a half. But what can I say it's been in my head for a few days now. And that's after having the beginnings of it stir in my brain way back when Play Anywhere became a thing for xbox and xbox fans did the same thing, although this one is tailored a tad bit more inline with this instance.
Reach was because it was part of MCC and thus part of Halo, a game that existed on PC before and that has online multiplayer. It also was not a full price game.
Your argument was Sony wouldn't make money with late ports. These weird segues you're making for Halo Reach don't change the fact that MS is making bank with a late port.
If you really don't think that Sony would make tens of millions by selling on Steam some of the best games of this generation in Bloodborne - a From game on a platform their games have sold gangbusters on - and God of War - the PC debut of one of the biggest franchises ever - as well as high profile games like Horizon and Spider-Man, then I really don't know what to tell you. Every precedent shows these games would sell like crazy.
It's going to make no sense if you haven't read what comes before, but it was too much of a tangent to bog down everything else. It's still an idea I've played with in my head for a bit now but wasn't really idk a point worth discussing on it's own. Just a silly thing I've seen happen....totally....totally not because I've done anything like it or anything...
I agree that late ports won't amount to much, in terms of extra revenue generated or building an ecosystem beyond only consoles. The fact that they're doing this at all must be indicative of something larger in terms of the overall direction of the company. Otherwise why bother to do this port at all?
It's going to make no sense if you haven't read what comes before, but it was too much of a tangent to bog down everything else. It's still an idea I've played with in my head for a bit now but wasn't really idk a point worth discussing on it's own. Just a silly thing I've seen happen....totally....totally not because I've done anything like it or anything...
I wasn't worried if it was gonna make sense or not, more so I didn't know what it was gonna reveal... a few more sentences? OR 10 more long paragraphs!!!!
I wasn't worried if it was gonna make sense or not, more so I didn't know what it was gonna reveal... a few more sentences? OR 10 more long paragraphs!!!!
Your argument was Sony wouldn't make money with late ports. These weird segues you're making for Halo Reach don't change the fact that MS is making bank with a late port.
If you really don't think that Sony would make tens of millions by selling on Steam some of the best games of this generation in Bloodborne - a From game on a platform their games have sold gangbusters on - and God of War - the PC debut of one of the biggest franchises ever - as well as high profile games like Horizon and Spider-Man, then I really don't know what to tell you. Every precedent shows these games would sell like crazy.
I don't know if bloodborne is a valid option in this case but HZD I just don't see selling millions on PC, without any marketing behind it. Same goes to God of War. Spiderman is a whole different thing of course because that's a name everybody knows out there.
I don't buy that in the slightest. Putting the development money towards the marketing budget of the sequel would make more sense than to port the entire first game to PC, which is unprecedented and casts a whole lot of confusion on how Sony is going to move forward with the PlayStation brand going into the future.
The amount of PC gamers that are interested in Horizon and don't have an issue with throwing $600 down for a sequel to a game they've ignored for 3+ years is insanely small for such an unprecedented decision.
The following has been stewing in my mind for quite some time now and it's a big topic but I'm gonna go crazy so I'm just going to sit down and talk about how otherwise perfectly rational, normal people reach this silliness.
Okay so, I want to start this on the right tone. This is not meant to lambast or demean anyone, but rather analyze. So, first of all I'm gonna admit. I understand it. I'm not going to defend it. I think it's dumb as hell. But I get it. I have that gut reaction sometimes.
Oh who am I kidding, I have that gut reaction a lot. I'm an emotional guy. I understand and identify with all of the silliness that Playstation fanboys may be feeling all the way to expressing loudly or wherever on that spectrum they may fall.
Gonna break it down one point at a time. Originally when I wrote this I'd said simple. Uh...this isn't going to be "simple" as in "short." But hey yeah maybe someone who actually is seriously doing this will read this and get it about themselves.
And I don't think I'm a genius for explaining any of this; I just don't see any other break down posts that aren't just reductive or insulting. So I want to explore this.
In the end, and I promise this is not a slight or meant to demean anyone, but surprise, I know, none of the behavior or concern in this thread is purely logical, but instead at its heart, sheer sentimentality. Though I think this particular brand of it is worth exploring. Like, Shocker! I know, I know, wow Chettlar so insightful it's just feelings. But whatever I want to explore this.
Video games are emotional experiences for us as human beings. But emotion is not as simple as the present feeling someone is experiencing. Emotion is a vast sea of experience. It is informed very much by headspaces we inhabit. Video games are incredibly good at creating those headspaces, and when you get consoles associated with those emotional recipes and the unique flavors they produce, the emotional attachment gets really, really strong. Really strong.
Video games are so good at creating these headspaces because they affect so many things that other art mediums do at one time. I mean, a song alone can create this wonderful emotional landscape that can move people to tears, cause them anguish, turn their day around, give them resolve, change their minds on unrelated topics, and in some rare cases literally turn their entire lives around. Even wordless songs can do all this. It's kinda crazy. And this is just ONE aspect of what games do. Games are so total in how experiential they have the potential to be. They are engaging, engrossing, and immersive, if not in one respect, like suspension of disbelief of an immersive world, than in another, like the total engagement in a competitive online match for example. A lot of idiots (I was one of these idiots at one point) want to argue that some games are just pure logic and appeal to them because they are just logical people. Mostly these people are self impressed adolescent nerds (like me hi). Some of these self impressed "adolescent" nerds are in their 30s and 40s. But really, while they may indeed enjoy the logic they are engaging with, them enjoying it is already a bunch of emotional trails running at once. You can't separate out emotion form any part of human experience.
Everything you experience serves to create that emotional landscape which then informs the context from which all emotions experienced within are formed. UI Designers are no less important than any other designers for this very reason. The Gestalt of the experience you have in a game is, well, Gestalt. It is everything that exists to creates that experience for you. The sound of pressing your console's power button, the sound of the hard drive engaging, the start of a chime or melody or chord, the bleeps and bloops of the menus — these all serve to create an emotional reference point for everything that happens after. And this itself always has a point of origin inspired by whatever your impression of what a video game console and what it can provide you might be. When a console is new, our brains, with the expectation of fun and excitement however we got that expectation, usually as kids and/or absorbed in some way from society around us, lap up every bit of it, even if consciously we do or don't pay direct attention ourselves.
This is easier when we are young too, hence nostalgia. I've seen it observed that when I miss an old game, I am not missing the game alone, but really what I miss is being a child. I think this is close to the truth but not quite. Being a child was way different and kinda sucky in a lot of ways. Really this is just trading one simple misconception for another. What we miss is our abstract idea of being a kid, and that idea is often the left over remains of those headspaces we remember most. Oregon Trail is, for me for example, an emblem, or a mental icon of that entire headspace I was in while a kid. That head space was so powerful because as a kid it was more relevant to me than it ever could be now as an adult. There was little else to compete with it. I was a kid soaking up everything around me. Of course every emotional landscape I created would be so visceral, so potent.
As an adult, it isn't so potent. Not the headspaces my mind continually creates, and not the headspaces I remember and sometimes try to relive. I know that I still create these emotional experience schema type things because they are what replace the old ones. Every time I've gone back and played an old game, the experience I had with a kid is briefly remembered more strongly than my memory, and then often snuffed out by my new, present experience, and yet not totally. That experience still is a part of me, and has informed who I am and the experiences I can have that have come after.
For some of us, as those experiences become less visceral and our adult brains become less plastic and less prone to soaking up experiences and creating new powerful emotional landscapes to exist in (which again crazily, we some how often seem to just, not realize are there), we begin to miss being children, when the world was so much bigger and brighter, and our emotions were so much stronger and less bogged down by real life and our more set thoughts that come from being a big old boring grownup. And yet, we continue to have these associations. Maybe they aren't as strong, but they exist. It's just that often they are more strongly informed by their ability to appeal to those we most fondly remember.
I have no overwhelming preference to Xbox or Playstation or Nintendo, or whatever other games, because growing up for me personally, I only had some point and click games and a lot of educational games all on an old office computer. Some hunting games too, which I enjoyed exploring nature in. So for me, exploring in a game for example remains a lot of fun. That said I know for me that the experience of playing on an xbox 360 is a bit stronger than playing on a PS3 because that was the beginning of my experiencing all of modern gaming. It was where I experienced games that changed who I am as a person to this day. Anything that references those feelings will continue to be compelling for me, because it will help remind me of those headspaces I most heavily associate with playing and being emotionally invested in a video game. Or at least it's a major part of that for me. Humans are complex. (That said, PS3 was also the place I experienced Journey and Demon's Souls for the first time, and is the more recent place I played NieR, all in my later teens, so, say, that beginning orchestral tuning when you turn one on will continue to be powerful for me as well).
To sum this up as well as I can, experiential context is an inextricable part of what creates the emotional landscapes through which we "enjoy" video games, or even more accurately, what that enjoyment basically is.
(And to add. The people designing these things know this. Why do you think they design those beeps and boops? Why do companies so strongly contest their rights to their branding and imagery? They only control part of that puzzle, it is important to keep in mind, but it still is a part.)
Alright, so how is this stuff that all probably seems like stuff you generally sorta know maybe didn't really think about but kinda noticed relevant?
Well, so think about how powerful all that is. Like I really hope I've communicated how important this stuff is. Everyone experiences it differently, but everyone, to some degree, has SOMETHING that affects how they experience video games, a lot of it honestly probably too difficult to really accurately totally and completely enumerate. And for so so so many of them, understandably the thing they most powerfully identify with enjoying a video game is the console upon which they play. There's always many many more aspects — like for me the computer room in which our couple little office computers were housed on the side of our basement's big room — but I'd wager it's a huge component for a lot of people. It's a bit silly, but everyone has something that sort of engages their gamer brain and all the emotional ..."baggage" has too much negative...baggage associated with it, but you get what I mean. My point is that everyone has various things that to them create that emotional landscape context, and for many people to some degree, the console is a major component. This is true for PC gamers too. Again, it's a universal human trait. I mean, as a curiosity to observe at very least, why do people adorn their gaming PC's with "gamer" aesthetic? If you are not one such person, you are not "above" needing some sort of physical or aural or luminous or in some other way emotional trappings of experiential context. It's just that you associate that garish aesthetic with adolescence or obnoxious "gamer" behavior, so they are not a part of what creates a headspace you enjoy. For others, they just might. All sorts of things could be for a PC gamer. Maybe clicking on the discord icon is a little sparkle of flavor as part of the ritual the begins your gaming session. Again, not something you consciously think about unless you happen to notice, but nevertheless a part of your experience. Heck, while I'll be the first to criticize Epic and the EGS, it is impossible for me to deny that there absolutely is some sentimentality in one's preference for a Steam only experience. That is not ALL of it, but that is a discussion for another time. Suffice to say it is impossible to ignore that that experience does exist to flavor any perhaps logically sound or petty discussion on the subject.
So how does this apply here?
Well, when a lifelong playstation gamer moves away from playstation to PC for example, that is all gone. It's just gone. Worse than gone. PC might already have its own associations in their heads that are decidedly negative for that person.
It isn't as if they can't enjoy video games any more. It isn't as if this isn't something that can't be adjusted. Like I said earlier it absolutely can and is continually adjusted. All your memories are just memories of the last time you remembered something anyway. People are plastic. Maybe in some ways less as we grow older, but still essentially plastic. But we can't deny the fact that context and headspace for which people enjoy a given thing, especially if that is an emotional thing, like, oh I don't know, a video game, are not always easy to let go of.
This manifests itself in different ways. It's why you will never convince, with logic, sound as it may be, a person to change their mind on something that was not born of logic in the first place. The fact is if Joe Gamer associates gaming with his Xbox, and his PC with the office, then an Xbox game being on PC, even if the experience is so much better on a PC, and he could make a cheap gaming PC with more options if he wanted to, you aren't going to change his mind. Heck, even Self Aware Joe Gamer may not change his mind, because you can't just fix a deeply rooted emotional association with logic. Not that easily and never completely. Now, part of just allowing yourself to grow as a human being is recognizing those limitations and realizing you can change them and experience new and different things. But also part of being understanding and emotionally intelligent on the other hand is recognizing that emotional association and this specific concept I've referred to with the shorthand of "headspace" and "emotional landscape" so far, are all part of what make us human beings. It's okay to let them be how they are, and learn to both expand them while also taking advantage of how powerful they are if indulged. If you truly love video games as a medium, both are valuable skills to develop.
The trouble we get into then here is when people attempt to rationalize their emotional experiences down to very simple point of interest. They associate mentally a noticeable thing with a noticeable emotion, and here's where it gets kind of funny but interesting, then create an emotional attachment to the idea of that noticeable thing ex post facto. So maybe a given sequence in a game was subconsciously extremely immersive for someone, but also there was a thing that happened in that sequence that they associate with that feeling. They will then try to convey that that thing they associated with the feeling was really really good and definitely was the source of that feeling they got, even if someone else who was not immersed in that experience can point to all the flaws in the thing that happened and how that thing isn't so great because it didn't affect them in the same way. You can say "well it's all subjective," but that is rather lazy.
Sorry if that was a bit confusing. Maybe for example, all sorts of things you do but probably mostly don't notice leading up to and including a given sequence in a game create a feeling of great pathos for you, and so then you are more receptive and ready to accept something as sad or moving. So a scene happens that you find really sad and moving. Then someone else points out to you how crappy and poor the writing was and how silly it sounds. That person didn't experience the same things as you to create that experience. You did, but didn't realize it. So for you, you point out an awkwardly and unrealistically written but earnest scene as something that created a moving experience, when really it was the whole of that gestalt leading up to that moment that enabled you to be receptive to that scene and not notice that ordinarily you'd find it silly. So when someone points out to you that the dialogue is silly and not realistic at all, you are incensed. How could they see that dialogue as silly? Well, it's pretty simple. Essential aspects that lead up to that experience didn't work for them. Just as equally they have probably experienced and enjoyed something you found silly because various things did not work for you. Heck, even if you both enjoyed the scene, different things may have been what did it for each of you, even if in English you'd list the same basic reason you enjoyed it, ANDDDDD, you could both be wrong in whatever simple thing you are ascribing the experience to. Most of what makes a game well beloved then is, I feel like it's pretty logical to conclude, is when it is so effective at nailing everything that everyone is able to experience what it sets out to experience for them.
(Heck, this failure is exactly what causes that really awkward moment when a teenage boy tries to show some girl a cool fight scene from this anime episode #2489 where goku uses his 9.38 million power chi to suplex the pokemon demon master Doki Baka Kun. The fight scene, I hate to break it to you 16 year old m- uh you, but that fight scene wasn't that cool. But that doesn't make it bad either! And it doesn't make you silly for experiencing the power conveyed by that scene. It's more complex than that. The scene itself isn't the thing that made you feel that way on its own. In this case it's the entire 2,488 — oh okay we all know episode #1433 is not canon any more I GET IT CHETTLA- I mean you, okay fine the entire 2,487 — episodes that preceded this glorious fight are the source of your emotion.
And there is no way this cute girl who is pretending she doesn't know you should have showered like at least one this week because she likes your dorky enthusiasm can ever, ever feel the thing you want to share with her, because nothing you explain will convey the full power of what you have experienced. At best it could encourage her to go experience that herself if that sounds exciting to experience. Sure the episode was an emotional release for you, but you are ignoring a lot of flaws in it and how badly animated it is and how actively it takes some people out of the experience by how very average it is, because for you personally that wasn't enough to override the emotional experience you had).
My point is, that often we can mistake the things that really create experience for us for silly oversimplifications. That thing we ascribe it to might not even have anything to do with the true source of that experience. Even those of us who scorn intellectual analysis as boring and ruining the fun and magic of art and video games do this. Because all of us want to feel justified in feeling the way we do.
That's really what it comes down to. Our self image is threatened when the things we most deeply experience are trivialized. We have to justify our experiences because anything we deeply enjoy is reflective of who we are as people. I am not Chettlar because I find Viva Pinata delightful, and me being Chettlar isn't really accurately the reason I enjoy it; neither really totally begets the other. The fact is me being Chettlar is now for the past 7 years or so me being the guy who enjoys Viva Pinata, at least to a small degree. That's...kinda what people mean when they say art is a part of who they are, in my opinion. When I write music I show the world a part of me I can't express any other way. When I enjoy someone else's music, that is me responding to that person, and creating something else. An experience. A..me..unit sorta. That which I call my identity is amended whether I like it or not. Why else do people even lightly interested in a various piece of media adorn themselves either with avatars or memorabilia? Part of our identity is what we enjoy. When I justify why I enjoy a thing, I am justifying ME. And at some point somewhere with some thing, you reading this do that too. If you've read this, I've affected you whether you like it or not, whether you think I'm onto something or just an over-intellectual sycophant (I mean, I just used the word sycophant). As I talked about earlier, video games are some of the most involving of all mediums. Sure this combines with video games being enjoyed and created in huge part by anti-social nerds, a lot of whom never had to grow past being children and so reflect this reality in unfortunate and sometimes horrendous ways. But video games were always going to have such a strong effect on the people who play them, because by their nature they touch so many parts of us at once.
Alright.
Sooooo
..
Let's plug this all in then. I get the previous part may have been a little boring, but I gotta make sure I establish some common ground here so I can get to the juicy bit. Hopefully the emotional headspace I created for you, lol, wasn't just "who is Chettlar and why has he assaulted me with this skyscraper of text?" I'm trying okay? It's a large topic.
Alright, well.
A lot of Playstation fans, whether they want to admit it or not, and not all of them, but many of them to varying levels, have used exclusives as their preferred means of justifying their being fans of the brand. Not just their purchase, but of the brand. Playstation. What that means for them. What emotional sparks that might gently but maybe imperceptibly begin to flare. I think for some of them, they view themselves as intelligent, discerning and logical people. To support this, they have to believe that the games they play are the best games ever made, or at least top notch in general. A few crappy games they dislike can serve as the sacrificial lambs to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are not mindless fanboys, of course. (Psst, this is not me implying that Sony games are all trash. But the emotional need some may posses more than others to place these exclusives at the very top of the medium is very much related to this. If you find yourself starting to feel defensive right now at that very implication, uh...maybe think about that for a minute. Because I've not even said whether I like Sony games. Actually that's not true, I already have. I mentioned Journey earlier as a hugely impactful game for me, because it truly was for me.) And this isn't to diminish the fact that these games, on their own, have created emotional experiences. Sony makes some quality titles. What I am saying that there is an emotional need to elevate them into the stratosphere that you might not be as immune from as you might think, even if you don't even like Playstation games and you're interests lie elsewhere.
This is why you have a number of journalists comment that they receive a lot of their death threats (if not due to them being anything other than cis male because of that whole big thing gamers™ have a problem with, but that's another topic) most often in relation to, you guessed it, their views on exclusive games. Not just Playstation games. This happens with Nintendo fans and xbox fans. But right now the topic is Playstation, so I've been using that specifically. Plus, let's not pretend that Sony's marketers are totally oblivious to their identity as a brand that builds major impressive cinematic experiences. They're pretty vocal about it honestly. So if you are profoundly affected by that marketing because all marketing in all of the world of branding of any kind is designed with the intent of validating that identity you've created, well, it's working.
Again this is not to specifically attack Playstation fans. Every person has this happen to them, because we are emotional creatures like I discussed before. I'm not even attacking capitalist marketing. Cults do this, states do this, small clubs do this, movements do this — anything and everything that has an interest in existing as an institution in your life does this. And it always will.
But the er, unsavory side of it is Playstation fans being ugly up to and including sending death threats to websites who didn't give Uncharted 3 10/10 reviews before they had even played the game themselves. That behavior didn't come out of the blue. It didn't just come from some aggressively mislead slaves to the marketing of Uncharted 3 who just believed foolishly that the game was great before it was on store shelves. It didn't just come from the black magic power of branding alone. It came from fans whose identity relied on Playstation being a brand of prestigious perfect video games. I will point out, meekly, but frankly, that the forum that was the precursor to this forum, was home to a lot of that senseless ugliness. Maybe not the worst of it, but some of it. But again, it's not senseless really. It's not reasonless most certainly. It's just a result of a lack of self-awareness of how deeply and profoundly the experience and identity of being a Playstation fan, even among those who didn't specifically identify as Playstation fans per se affected these people's views. Again, we all are affected by our emotions even in what we feel are our most rational moments. This is an example of how that applies here. Marketing was part of it, but not even close to all of it. It cannot create this out of nothing.
I feel strongly that trying to dismiss these people as corporate slaves is foolish, I need to note. It is an oversimplification that tries to distance the one making it from their behavior, trying to shift the blame to a system rather than acknowledge the human source of, and life factors leading up to, that behavior, be it as it may that that marketing did play its part in accentuating or accelerating that behavior. I really feel that much of what begat that behavior was something universal to us all. That maybe you reading this aren't so immature as to act in that way, but you are nevertheless affected by your favorite brand of video game, or your favorite happy video game place. It compels you to act the way you do, whether you've taken the time to see it or not.
Hopefully I've kind of shown some of the beautiful and ugly sides of what emotional identity and the headspaces we inhabit, that are so intimately tied to that identity, can be.
When you take away a Sony fan's rationale for defending his identity as a rational, logical, intelligent human being who enjoys Playstation because he is such, you lay bare and naked the fact that his love of Playstation was never truly rational, logical, or intelligent.
Certainly there were rational, logical, and intelligent reasons that may have got him there, but his love in the end comes from a humiliating and simple human reality. He loves his beeps and boops, his whirrs and start-up tune, his click of a face button and clack of an analogue stick. He loves the feeling of the couch under is butt. He loves the dim lamp light. He loves the logo that pops up and tells his lizard brain, "Game time! Fun time! Relax! The physical place you are in only serves along with the lights and sounds and trinkets to create the mental place you so enjoy. We all exist to simultaneously create a sanctuary and catalyst for what you love most." To explain to him his rationale is not, at least entirely, rational despite the part logic may play in it, the reason he loves Playstation, is humiliating, because it eats at, even if he doesn't realize it, the idea that he isn't who he thinks he is. He's a silly, lizard brained animal just like anyone and anything else. And his love for these experiences is inspired in huge part by silly things. And he wants to feel that it comes from intelligence and superiority. It's banal and boring insecurity, regardless of whether he's even ever been conscious of it.
He doesn't want to admit that at the heart of it, the reason he's a Playstation fan is for reasons he probably has already subconsciously written off as humiliating or silly. (He may have, in an ironic lack of self awareness used such an explanation to humiliate someone else and diminish their experience specifically to prop himself up. That isn't necessary at all, but if he's a jerk maybe it's happened. You don't have to be a jerk to have blind spots. We all do.) And he doesn't even have to have gone through ANY of these thoughts either. It probably just manifests in a vague fear of being threatened, his subconscious warning him that this person pushing him to recognize the very banal source of his identity is actually just an asshole, and he shouldn't think about it, but instead be mad at the asshole, or the person responsible. He tries to come up with all kinds of badly thought out rational reasons to defend his position and why his essentially selfish desires shouldn't be exposed as the petty things they are.
And you, the reader, probably do this with something, somewhere, in your life too. Maybe it's more serious, maybe it's more tiny. But that's your business to examine what silly things your pride doesn't let you accept. My point is that this is a human thing. Not something playstation fans do because they're dumb dumbs for some reason.
And the funny thing is? The cure to this is not that complicated. It's like, really simple. Accept that your lizard brain likes the beeps and boops and that the idea of what playstation is to you is in the end, just an emotion. Accept that you aren't any smarter than anyone else because of the games you enjoy. That your reasons for the way you game the way you do aren't super intelligent because at the center of it all, you are playing games to have fun, which is nothing if not the definition of emotional experience. You are going to do what you are going to do to engender that experience. I mean, really games are deeper than fun. Some of our favorite games we love because they were very seriously emotional, and not really the typical colloquial definition of fun, now that I really think about it. The fact is you are going to, subconsciously or not, do what you need to do in order to create those experiences for yourself. And that's okay. It's definitely good to explore the reasons why this happens. But analyzing your reasons for enjoying something is an intellectual pursuit of curiosity, not an appropriate avenue for justifying your identity, and certainly not an appropriate thing to use to deprive others of enjoying more things in the way most effective for them. If analyzing why something happens is not allowed to humiliate you or if it makes you feel threatened in anyway, well sucks to be you buddy because fact is you are a mortal imperfect human being and analyzing the reasons you are the way you are are going to be compromising in some fashion. I really don't know what to tell you other than to move past it, because you are seriously limiting yourself to some awesome opportunities to learn and grow as a person. I don't care if you're 15 or 50 or 31½.
The fact is, humiliating as it may be, you fancy the things you fancy is because they tickle your lizard brain and help create an emotional cocktail you enjoy.
If you don't recognize that, you won't realize how utterly silly it is that you are essentially arguing that someone should compell you to spend more money. Like, really at the end of it, it's an extremely illogical, silly fear of missing out. You've created a really silly idea, dress it up however you like, that you are missing out on something. If a game comes to more platforms, well clearly an exclusive has been deprived of you. You've got a silly animalistic instinct of valuing scarcity. You feel that if a game comes to more platforms, it's not special any more. So then it's not as special. But you've not lost anything, other's have gained something. But the FEELING of it being special is gone, so you feel that objectively something is missing. Well buddy sorry to break it to you but there is nothing logical about that, no matter how you want to dress it up. So much for being rational. Yes, games are created to sell consoles, but if a company moves to making those games for more platforms, you have not lost anything. You just feel like you have because the emotional puzzle piece that has disappeared from the equation if the feeling of scarcity and exclusivity everyone finds at least a teeny tiny bit alluring on some level.
More related to the general point of this entire post, you also fear missing out in a way that really is actually, funny enough, self imposed, and leads you to do silly things like, as I said above, imply that you WANT to be compelled to spend extra money. The fact is you want a rational reason to get a video game console and have the whole experience it provides you. If you don't have an exclusive game to justify that experience, then you are left facing that horrible, humiliating fact we talked about.
You don't want the console for rational reasons. You want the console because you want the emotional idea of that console. You want the console because of the emotional landscape it creates within you. Because you are a human being who needs things you don't want to recognize to exist in order to facilitate the fullest enjoyment of a video game possible. Exclusives helped justify that for you in a way that seems tangible and rational.
Your silly emotional and not-well-justifiable reasons for spending hundreds of dollars on a console aren't enough for you. You need to feel reasonable, rational, and intelligent for wanting what you want, even if you don't personally think you care. If you really didn't care, you wouldn't be asking someone to make you spend hundreds of dollars on electronics that in all essential ways do all the same things as the electronics you already own. You want stuff, and now you can't justify it, and that's humiliating to recognize how silly you are.
Thing is though...like, really the way to make peace with this, like I kind of covered, isn't that hard. Like, okay, I like silly things. Why care? Are video games not just a bunch of bleep and boops? They still create amazing experiences for you. If you want to spend $400 to feel better about yourself, spend $400 if it makes you happy. It was just as silly an expenditure when it had exclusives, because at the heart of it you are just indulging your emotions, and that's what these big toys are for. It is no less and no more a silly expenditure in a way that really, truly matters now that it doesn't. If all your games come to PC, you are still someone who enjoys themselves on your playstation or your xbox or switch. Go play your playstation or xbox or switch and be happy. You are a silly, irrational human being. Don't take yourself so seriously. Don't be an idiot with your money, but if what makes you happy is owning a box with a big X or a big P or lopsided face looking thing on it to play your games on, then that's what makes you happy. You're wasting so much energy trying to preserve your ego, and honestly in the end hurting yourself most of all by limiting your ability to grow as a human being.
Yeah, you are still a child. You like big toys. You like car go vroom. You like head blow off. You like sparkles shiny wow. You are depriving yourself and others of joy by insisting you are so superior to that. You're not intelligent by trying to make yourself appear intelligent or rationalize and justify your self-image. Ironically you're...kinda bein' stupid. So what. We're all stupid. Quit taking yourself so seriously. Go play video games you big dummy.
The interesting thing about TR is it was timed exclusive to Saturn & it was one of the first PC games to have real 3D support, none of that software mode crap. People generally remember it as a PSX exclusive however due to Sony's enormous marketing budget at the time which Sega couldn't compete witth.
It's long been interesting to me how many games that get associated with the success of the PS1 weren't actually exclusive. Just shows the power of marketing and it'll be the same now in terms of the general awareness of the average person who isn't gobbling up every tiny bit of gaming news like we do here.
If every game Microsoft makes goes to PC as well, Xbox does not need to exist. There is no reason for a $500+ Microsoft console to be on shelves. Its "features" are not a selling point. They never have been.
And yet all Microsoft's games do launch on PC day and date, and yet people still buy Xbox consoles.
You can watch Netflix on your PC, and yet smart TV boxes still exist.
Convenience is popular, comfy couch gaming is popular, and most people don't have a gaming PC hooked up to their living room TV. And that's coming from someone who has a 2080 Ti gaming PC hooked up to my living room TV, but I know I'm the 0.1%.
The following has been stewing in my mind for quite some time now and it's a big topic but I'm gonna go crazy so I'm just going to sit down and talk about how otherwise perfectly rational, normal people reach this silliness.
Okay so, I want to start this on the right tone. This is not meant to lambast or demean anyone, but rather analyze. So, first of all I'm gonna admit. I understand it. I'm not going to defend it. I think it's dumb as hell. But I get it. I have that gut reaction sometimes.
Oh who am I kidding, I have that gut reaction a lot. I'm an emotional guy. I understand and identify with all of the silliness that Playstation fanboys may be feeling all the way to expressing loudly or wherever on that spectrum they may fall.
Gonna break it down one point at a time. Originally when I wrote this I'd said simple. Uh...this isn't going to be "simple" as in "short." But hey yeah maybe someone who actually is seriously doing this will read this and get it about themselves.
And I don't think I'm a genius for explaining any of this; I just don't see any other break down posts that aren't just reductive or insulting. So I want to explore this.
In the end, and I promise this is not a slight or meant to demean anyone, but surprise, I know, none of the behavior or concern in this thread is purely logical, but instead at its heart, sheer sentimentality. Though I think this particular brand of it is worth exploring. Like, Shocker! I know, I know, wow Chettlar so insightful it's just feelings. But whatever I want to explore this.
Video games are emotional experiences for us as human beings. But emotion is not as simple as the present feeling someone is experiencing. Emotion is a vast sea of experience. It is informed very much by headspaces we inhabit. Video games are incredibly good at creating those headspaces, and when you get consoles associated with those emotional recipes and the unique flavors they produce, the emotional attachment gets really, really strong. Really strong.
Video games are so good at creating these headspaces because they affect so many things that other art mediums do at one time. I mean, a song alone can create this wonderful emotional landscape that can move people to tears, cause them anguish, turn their day around, give them resolve, change their minds on unrelated topics, and in some rare cases literally turn their entire lives around. Even wordless songs can do all this. It's kinda crazy. And this is just ONE aspect of what games do. Games are so total in how experiential they have the potential to be. They are engaging, engrossing, and immersive, if not in one respect, like suspension of disbelief of an immersive world, than in another, like the total engagement in a competitive online match for example. A lot of idiots (I was one of these idiots at one point) want to argue that some games are just pure logic and appeal to them because they are just logical people. Mostly these people are self impressed adolescent nerds (like me hi). Some of these self impressed "adolescent" nerds are in their 30s and 40s. But really, while they may indeed enjoy the logic they are engaging with, them enjoying it is already a bunch of emotional trails running at once. You can't separate out emotion form any part of human experience.
Everything you experience serves to create that emotional landscape which then informs the context from which all emotions experienced within are formed. UI Designers are no less important than any other designers for this very reason. The Gestalt of the experience you have in a game is, well, Gestalt. It is everything that exists to creates that experience for you. The sound of pressing your console's power button, the sound of the hard drive engaging, the start of a chime or melody or chord, the bleeps and bloops of the menus — these all serve to create an emotional reference point for everything that happens after. And this itself always has a point of origin inspired by whatever your impression of what a video game console and what it can provide you might be. When a console is new, our brains, with the expectation of fun and excitement however we got that expectation, usually as kids and/or absorbed in some way from society around us, lap up every bit of it, even if consciously we do or don't pay direct attention ourselves.
This is easier when we are young too, hence nostalgia. I've seen it observed that when I miss an old game, I am not missing the game alone, but really what I miss is being a child. I think this is close to the truth but not quite. Being a child was way different and kinda sucky in a lot of ways. Really this is just trading one simple misconception for another. What we miss is our abstract idea of being a kid, and that idea is often the left over remains of those headspaces we remember most. Oregon Trail is, for me for example, an emblem, or a mental icon of that entire headspace I was in while a kid. That head space was so powerful because as a kid it was more relevant to me than it ever could be now as an adult. There was little else to compete with it. I was a kid soaking up everything around me. Of course every emotional landscape I created would be so visceral, so potent.
As an adult, it isn't so potent. Not the headspaces my mind continually creates, and not the headspaces I remember and sometimes try to relive. I know that I still create these emotional experience schema type things because they are what replace the old ones. Every time I've gone back and played an old game, the experience I had with a kid is briefly remembered more strongly than my memory, and then often snuffed out by my new, present experience, and yet not totally. That experience still is a part of me, and has informed who I am and the experiences I can have that have come after.
For some of us, as those experiences become less visceral and our adult brains become less plastic and less prone to soaking up experiences and creating new powerful emotional landscapes to exist in (which again crazily, we some how often seem to just, not realize are there), we begin to miss being children, when the world was so much bigger and brighter, and our emotions were so much stronger and less bogged down by real life and our more set thoughts that come from being a big old boring grownup. And yet, we continue to have these associations. Maybe they aren't as strong, but they exist. It's just that often they are more strongly informed by their ability to appeal to those we most fondly remember.
I have no overwhelming preference to Xbox or Playstation or Nintendo, or whatever other games, because growing up for me personally, I only had some point and click games and a lot of educational games all on an old office computer. Some hunting games too, which I enjoyed exploring nature in. So for me, exploring in a game for example remains a lot of fun. That said I know for me that the experience of playing on an xbox 360 is a bit stronger than playing on a PS3 because that was the beginning of my experiencing all of modern gaming. It was where I experienced games that changed who I am as a person to this day. Anything that references those feelings will continue to be compelling for me, because it will help remind me of those headspaces I most heavily associate with playing and being emotionally invested in a video game. Or at least it's a major part of that for me. Humans are complex. (That said, PS3 was also the place I experienced Journey and Demon's Souls for the first time, and is the more recent place I played NieR, all in my later teens, so, say, that beginning orchestral tuning when you turn one on will continue to be powerful for me as well).
To sum this up as well as I can, experiential context is an inextricable part of what creates the emotional landscapes through which we "enjoy" video games, or even more accurately, what that enjoyment basically is.
(And to add. The people designing these things know this. Why do you think they design those beeps and boops? Why do companies so strongly contest their rights to their branding and imagery? They only control part of that puzzle, it is important to keep in mind, but it still is a part.)
Alright, so how is this stuff that all probably seems like stuff you generally sorta know maybe didn't really think about but kinda noticed relevant?
Well, so think about how powerful all that is. Like I really hope I've communicated how important this stuff is. Everyone experiences it differently, but everyone, to some degree, has SOMETHING that affects how they experience video games, a lot of it honestly probably too difficult to really accurately totally and completely enumerate. And for so so so many of them, understandably the thing they most powerfully identify with enjoying a video game is the console upon which they play. There's always many many more aspects — like for me the computer room in which our couple little office computers were housed on the side of our basement's big room — but I'd wager it's a huge component for a lot of people. It's a bit silly, but everyone has something that sort of engages their gamer brain and all the emotional ..."baggage" has too much negative...baggage associated with it, but you get what I mean. My point is that everyone has various things that to them create that emotional landscape context, and for many people to some degree, the console is a major component. This is true for PC gamers too. Again, it's a universal human trait. I mean, as a curiosity to observe at very least, why do people adorn their gaming PC's with "gamer" aesthetic? If you are not one such person, you are not "above" needing some sort of physical or aural or luminous or in some other way emotional trappings of experiential context. It's just that you associate that garish aesthetic with adolescence or obnoxious "gamer" behavior, so they are not a part of what creates a headspace you enjoy. For others, they just might. All sorts of things could be for a PC gamer. Maybe clicking on the discord icon is a little sparkle of flavor as part of the ritual the begins your gaming session. Again, not something you consciously think about unless you happen to notice, but nevertheless a part of your experience. Heck, while I'll be the first to criticize Epic and the EGS, it is impossible for me to deny that there absolutely is some sentimentality in one's preference for a Steam only experience. That is not ALL of it, but that is a discussion for another time. Suffice to say it is impossible to ignore that that experience does exist to flavor any perhaps logically sound or petty discussion on the subject.
So how does this apply here?
Well, when a lifelong playstation gamer moves away from playstation to PC for example, that is all gone. It's just gone. Worse than gone. PC might already have its own associations in their heads that are decidedly negative for that person.
It isn't as if they can't enjoy video games any more. It isn't as if this isn't something that can't be adjusted. Like I said earlier it absolutely can and is continually adjusted. All your memories are just memories of the last time you remembered something anyway. People are plastic. Maybe in some ways less as we grow older, but still essentially plastic. But we can't deny the fact that context and headspace for which people enjoy a given thing, especially if that is an emotional thing, like, oh I don't know, a video game, are not always easy to let go of.
This manifests itself in different ways. It's why you will never convince, with logic, sound as it may be, a person to change their mind on something that was not born of logic in the first place. The fact is if Joe Gamer associates gaming with his Xbox, and his PC with the office, then an Xbox game being on PC, even if the experience is so much better on a PC, and he could make a cheap gaming PC with more options if he wanted to, you aren't going to change his mind. Heck, even Self Aware Joe Gamer may not change his mind, because you can't just fix a deeply rooted emotional association with logic. Not that easily and never completely. Now, part of just allowing yourself to grow as a human being is recognizing those limitations and realizing you can change them and experience new and different things. But also part of being understanding and emotionally intelligent on the other hand is recognizing that emotional association and this specific concept I've referred to with the shorthand of "headspace" and "emotional landscape" so far, are all part of what make us human beings. It's okay to let them be how they are, and learn to both expand them while also taking advantage of how powerful they are if indulged. If you truly love video games as a medium, both are valuable skills to develop.
The trouble we get into then here is when people attempt to rationalize their emotional experiences down to very simple point of interest. They associate mentally a noticeable thing with a noticeable emotion, and here's where it gets kind of funny but interesting, then create an emotional attachment to the idea of that noticeable thing ex post facto. So maybe a given sequence in a game was subconsciously extremely immersive for someone, but also there was a thing that happened in that sequence that they associate with that feeling. They will then try to convey that that thing they associated with the feeling was really really good and definitely was the source of that feeling they got, even if someone else who was not immersed in that experience can point to all the flaws in the thing that happened and how that thing isn't so great because it didn't affect them in the same way. You can say "well it's all subjective," but that is rather lazy.
Sorry if that was a bit confusing. Maybe for example, all sorts of things you do but probably mostly don't notice leading up to and including a given sequence in a game create a feeling of great pathos for you, and so then you are more receptive and ready to accept something as sad or moving. So a scene happens that you find really sad and moving. Then someone else points out to you how crappy and poor the writing was and how silly it sounds. That person didn't experience the same things as you to create that experience. You did, but didn't realize it. So for you, you point out an awkwardly and unrealistically written but earnest scene as something that created a moving experience, when really it was the whole of that gestalt leading up to that moment that enabled you to be receptive to that scene and not notice that ordinarily you'd find it silly. So when someone points out to you that the dialogue is silly and not realistic at all, you are incensed. How could they see that dialogue as silly? Well, it's pretty simple. Essential aspects that lead up to that experience didn't work for them. Just as equally they have probably experienced and enjoyed something you found silly because various things did not work for you. Heck, even if you both enjoyed the scene, different things may have been what did it for each of you, even if in English you'd list the same basic reason you enjoyed it, ANDDDDD, you could both be wrong in whatever simple thing you are ascribing the experience to. Most of what makes a game well beloved then is, I feel like it's pretty logical to conclude, is when it is so effective at nailing everything that everyone is able to experience what it sets out to experience for them.
(Heck, this failure is exactly what causes that really awkward moment when a teenage boy tries to show some girl a cool fight scene from this anime episode #2489 where goku uses his 9.38 million power chi to suplex the pokemon demon master Doki Baka Kun. The fight scene, I hate to break it to you 16 year old m- uh you, but that fight scene wasn't that cool. But that doesn't make it bad either! And it doesn't make you silly for experiencing the power conveyed by that scene. It's more complex than that. The scene itself isn't the thing that made you feel that way on its own. In this case it's the entire 2,488 — oh okay we all know episode #1433 is not canon any more I GET IT CHETTLA- I mean you, okay fine the entire 2,487 — episodes that preceded this glorious fight are the source of your emotion.
And there is no way this cute girl who is pretending she doesn't know you should have showered like at least one this week because she likes your dorky enthusiasm can ever, ever feel the thing you want to share with her, because nothing you explain will convey the full power of what you have experienced. At best it could encourage her to go experience that herself if that sounds exciting to experience. Sure the episode was an emotional release for you, but you are ignoring a lot of flaws in it and how badly animated it is and how actively it takes some people out of the experience by how very average it is, because for you personally that wasn't enough to override the emotional experience you had).
My point is, that often we can mistake the things that really create experience for us for silly oversimplifications. That thing we ascribe it to might not even have anything to do with the true source of that experience. Even those of us who scorn intellectual analysis as boring and ruining the fun and magic of art and video games do this. Because all of us want to feel justified in feeling the way we do.
That's really what it comes down to. Our self image is threatened when the things we most deeply experience are trivialized. We have to justify our experiences because anything we deeply enjoy is reflective of who we are as people. I am not Chettlar because I find Viva Pinata delightful, and me being Chettlar isn't really accurately the reason I enjoy it; neither really totally begets the other. The fact is me being Chettlar is now for the past 7 years or so me being the guy who enjoys Viva Pinata, at least to a small degree. That's...kinda what people mean when they say art is a part of who they are, in my opinion. When I write music I show the world a part of me I can't express any other way. When I enjoy someone else's music, that is me responding to that person, and creating something else. An experience. A..me..unit sorta. That which I call my identity is amended whether I like it or not. Why else do people even lightly interested in a various piece of media adorn themselves either with avatars or memorabilia? Part of our identity is what we enjoy. When I justify why I enjoy a thing, I am justifying ME. And at some point somewhere with some thing, you reading this do that too. If you've read this, I've affected you whether you like it or not, whether you think I'm onto something or just an over-intellectual sycophant (I mean, I just used the word sycophant). As I talked about earlier, video games are some of the most involving of all mediums. Sure this combines with video games being enjoyed and created in huge part by anti-social nerds, a lot of whom never had to grow past being children and so reflect this reality in unfortunate and sometimes horrendous ways. But video games were always going to have such a strong effect on the people who play them, because by their nature they touch so many parts of us at once.
Alright.
Sooooo
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Let's plug this all in then. I get the previous part may have been a little boring, but I gotta make sure I establish some common ground here so I can get to the juicy bit. Hopefully the emotional headspace I created for you, lol, wasn't just "who is Chettlar and why has he assaulted me with this skyscraper of text?" I'm trying okay? It's a large topic.
Alright, well.
A lot of Playstation fans, whether they want to admit it or not, and not all of them, but many of them to varying levels, have used exclusives as their preferred means of justifying their being fans of the brand. Not just their purchase, but of the brand. Playstation. What that means for them. What emotional sparks that might gently but maybe imperceptibly begin to flare. I think for some of them, they view themselves as intelligent, discerning and logical people. To support this, they have to believe that the games they play are the best games ever made, or at least top notch in general. A few crappy games they dislike can serve as the sacrificial lambs to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are not mindless fanboys, of course. (Psst, this is not me implying that Sony games are all trash. But the emotional need some may posses more than others to place these exclusives at the very top of the medium is very much related to this. If you find yourself starting to feel defensive right now at that very implication, uh...maybe think about that for a minute. Because I've not even said whether I like Sony games. Actually that's not true, I already have. I mentioned Journey earlier as a hugely impactful game for me, because it truly was for me.) And this isn't to diminish the fact that these games, on their own, have created emotional experiences. Sony makes some quality titles. What I am saying that there is an emotional need to elevate them into the stratosphere that you might not be as immune from as you might think, even if you don't even like Playstation games and you're interests lie elsewhere.
This is why you have a number of journalists comment that they receive a lot of their death threats (if not due to them being anything other than cis male because of that whole big thing gamers™ have a problem with, but that's another topic) most often in relation to, you guessed it, their views on exclusive games. Not just Playstation games. This happens with Nintendo fans and xbox fans. But right now the topic is Playstation, so I've been using that specifically. Plus, let's not pretend that Sony's marketers are totally oblivious to their identity as a brand that builds major impressive cinematic experiences. They're pretty vocal about it honestly. So if you are profoundly affected by that marketing because all marketing in all of the world of branding of any kind is designed with the intent of validating that identity you've created, well, it's working.
Again this is not to specifically attack Playstation fans. Every person has this happen to them, because we are emotional creatures like I discussed before. I'm not even attacking capitalist marketing. Cults do this, states do this, small clubs do this, movements do this — anything and everything that has an interest in existing as an institution in your life does this. And it always will.
But the er, unsavory side of it is Playstation fans being ugly up to and including sending death threats to websites who didn't give Uncharted 3 10/10 reviews before they had even played the game themselves. That behavior didn't come out of the blue. It didn't just come from some aggressively mislead slaves to the marketing of Uncharted 3 who just believed foolishly that the game was great before it was on store shelves. It didn't just come from the black magic power of branding alone. It came from fans whose identity relied on Playstation being a brand of prestigious perfect video games. I will point out, meekly, but frankly, that the forum that was the precursor to this forum, was home to a lot of that senseless ugliness. Maybe not the worst of it, but some of it. But again, it's not senseless really. It's not reasonless most certainly. It's just a result of a lack of self-awareness of how deeply and profoundly the experience and identity of being a Playstation fan, even among those who didn't specifically identify as Playstation fans per se affected these people's views. Again, we all are affected by our emotions even in what we feel are our most rational moments. This is an example of how that applies here. Marketing was part of it, but not even close to all of it. It cannot create this out of nothing.
I feel strongly that trying to dismiss these people as corporate slaves is foolish, I need to note. It is an oversimplification that tries to distance the one making it from their behavior, trying to shift the blame to a system rather than acknowledge the human source of, and life factors leading up to, that behavior, be it as it may that that marketing did play its part in accentuating or accelerating that behavior. I really feel that much of what begat that behavior was something universal to us all. That maybe you reading this aren't so immature as to act in that way, but you are nevertheless affected by your favorite brand of video game, or your favorite happy video game place. It compels you to act the way you do, whether you've taken the time to see it or not.
Hopefully I've kind of shown some of the beautiful and ugly sides of what emotional identity and the headspaces we inhabit, that are so intimately tied to that identity, can be.
When you take away a Sony fan's rationale for defending his identity as a rational, logical, intelligent human being who enjoys Playstation because he is such, you lay bare and naked the fact that his love of Playstation was never truly rational, logical, or intelligent.
Certainly there were rational, logical, and intelligent reasons that may have got him there, but his love in the end comes from a humiliating and simple human reality. He loves his beeps and boops, his whirrs and start-up tune, his click of a face button and clack of an analogue stick. He loves the feeling of the couch under is butt. He loves the dim lamp light. He loves the logo that pops up and tells his lizard brain, "Game time! Fun time! Relax! The physical place you are in only serves along with the lights and sounds and trinkets to create the mental place you so enjoy. We all exist to simultaneously create a sanctuary and catalyst for what you love most." To explain to him his rationale is not, at least entirely, rational despite the part logic may play in it, the reason he loves Playstation, is humiliating, because it eats at, even if he doesn't realize it, the idea that he isn't who he thinks he is. He's a silly, lizard brained animal just like anyone and anything else. And his love for these experiences is inspired in huge part by silly things. And he wants to feel that it comes from intelligence and superiority. It's banal and boring insecurity, regardless of whether he's even ever been conscious of it.
He doesn't want to admit that at the heart of it, the reason he's a Playstation fan is for reasons he probably has already subconsciously written off as humiliating or silly. (He may have, in an ironic lack of self awareness used such an explanation to humiliate someone else and diminish their experience specifically to prop himself up. That isn't necessary at all, but if he's a jerk maybe it's happened. You don't have to be a jerk to have blind spots. We all do.) And he doesn't even have to have gone through ANY of these thoughts either. It probably just manifests in a vague fear of being threatened, his subconscious warning him that this person pushing him to recognize the very banal source of his identity is actually just an asshole, and he shouldn't think about it, but instead be mad at the asshole, or the person responsible. He tries to come up with all kinds of badly thought out rational reasons to defend his position and why his essentially selfish desires shouldn't be exposed as the petty things they are.
And you, the reader, probably do this with something, somewhere, in your life too. Maybe it's more serious, maybe it's more tiny. But that's your business to examine what silly things your pride doesn't let you accept. My point is that this is a human thing. Not something playstation fans do because they're dumb dumbs for some reason.
And the funny thing is? The cure to this is not that complicated. It's like, really simple. Accept that your lizard brain likes the beeps and boops and that the idea of what playstation is to you is in the end, just an emotion. Accept that you aren't any smarter than anyone else because of the games you enjoy. That your reasons for the way you game the way you do aren't super intelligent because at the center of it all, you are playing games to have fun, which is nothing if not the definition of emotional experience. You are going to do what you are going to do to engender that experience. I mean, really games are deeper than fun. Some of our favorite games we love because they were very seriously emotional, and not really the typical colloquial definition of fun, now that I really think about it. The fact is you are going to, subconsciously or not, do what you need to do in order to create those experiences for yourself. And that's okay. It's definitely good to explore the reasons why this happens. But analyzing your reasons for enjoying something is an intellectual pursuit of curiosity, not an appropriate avenue for justifying your identity, and certainly not an appropriate thing to use to deprive others of enjoying more things in the way most effective for them. If analyzing why something happens is not allowed to humiliate you or if it makes you feel threatened in anyway, well sucks to be you buddy because fact is you are a mortal imperfect human being and analyzing the reasons you are the way you are are going to be compromising in some fashion. I really don't know what to tell you other than to move past it, because you are seriously limiting yourself to some awesome opportunities to learn and grow as a person. I don't care if you're 15 or 50 or 31½.
The fact is, humiliating as it may be, you fancy the things you fancy is because they tickle your lizard brain and help create an emotional cocktail you enjoy.
If you don't recognize that, you won't realize how utterly silly it is that you are essentially arguing that someone should compell you to spend more money. Like, really at the end of it, it's an extremely illogical, silly fear of missing out. You've created a really silly idea, dress it up however you like, that you are missing out on something. If a game comes to more platforms, well clearly an exclusive has been deprived of you. You've got a silly animalistic instinct of valuing scarcity. You feel that if a game comes to more platforms, it's not special any more. So then it's not as special. But you've not lost anything, other's have gained something. But the FEELING of it being special is gone, so you feel that objectively something is missing. Well buddy sorry to break it to you but there is nothing logical about that, no matter how you want to dress it up. So much for being rational. Yes, games are created to sell consoles, but if a company moves to making those games for more platforms, you have not lost anything. You just feel like you have because the emotional puzzle piece that has disappeared from the equation if the feeling of scarcity and exclusivity everyone finds at least a teeny tiny bit alluring on some level.
More related to the general point of this entire post, you also fear missing out in a way that really is actually, funny enough, self imposed, and leads you to do silly things like, as I said above, imply that you WANT to be compelled to spend extra money. The fact is you want a rational reason to get a video game console and have the whole experience it provides you. If you don't have an exclusive game to justify that experience, then you are left facing that horrible, humiliating fact we talked about.
You don't want the console for rational reasons. You want the console because you want the emotional idea of that console. You want the console because of the emotional landscape it creates within you. Because you are a human being who needs things you don't want to recognize to exist in order to facilitate the fullest enjoyment of a video game possible. Exclusives helped justify that for you in a way that seems tangible and rational.
Your silly emotional and not-well-justifiable reasons for spending hundreds of dollars on a console aren't enough for you. You need to feel reasonable, rational, and intelligent for wanting what you want, even if you don't personally think you care. If you really didn't care, you wouldn't be asking someone to make you spend hundreds of dollars on electronics that in all essential ways do all the same things as the electronics you already own. You want stuff, and now you can't justify it, and that's humiliating to recognize how silly you are.
Thing is though...like, really the way to make peace with this, like I kind of covered, isn't that hard. Like, okay, I like silly things. Why care? Are video games not just a bunch of bleep and boops? They still create amazing experiences for you. If you want to spend $400 to feel better about yourself, spend $400 if it makes you happy. It was just as silly an expenditure when it had exclusives, because at the heart of it you are just indulging your emotions, and that's what these big toys are for. It is no less and no more a silly expenditure in a way that really, truly matters now that it doesn't. If all your games come to PC, you are still someone who enjoys themselves on your playstation or your xbox or switch. Go play your playstation or xbox or switch and be happy. You are a silly, irrational human being. Don't take yourself so seriously. Don't be an idiot with your money, but if what makes you happy is owning a box with a big X or a big P or lopsided face looking thing on it to play your games on, then that's what makes you happy. You're wasting so much energy trying to preserve your ego, and honestly in the end hurting yourself most of all by limiting your ability to grow as a human being.
Yeah, you are still a child. You like big toys. You like car go vroom. You like head blow off. You like sparkles shiny wow. You are depriving yourself and others of joy by insisting you are so superior to that. You're not intelligent by trying to make yourself appear intelligent or rationalize and justify your self-image. Ironically you're...kinda bein' stupid. So what. We're all stupid. Quit taking yourself so seriously. Go play video games you big dummy.
Dude I skimmed your post and I just want to say I appreciate you taking that much time to write all of that. I could never be bothered to on a forum like this.
Just from glancing at it I feel theres some I agree with and some I dont.
I have a huge connection with Nintendo over any other company but that is down to their sheer continuation of joy they deliver. Its wonderful having kids now and see that translate to them.
On pc, I feel the huge advantages of a high end pc outweigh a lot of those lack of connections you mentioned, and instantly increase that ability to be invested ten fold. Seeing your beloved games at ultra settings and at ridiculous framerates instantly make me drool and even happier with my choice of pc.
This runs a long my acceptance of the investment involved to hit these highs. Maybe I'm not a good example as I played pc from a younger age too - teenager. (Point and click adventure bros! :) )
I've not really been invested in this thread but I've seen some pretty embarrassing posts.
I genuinely feel,in reality these posters will get over the initial pain of Sony exclusives going to pc and they will either realise they genuinely adore the games and nothing will change after the initial upset, so to speak....or they will drop sony and claim this ruined their gaming experience where I genuinely feel those people have deeper issues that the larger enjoyment of the platform and games was the feeling that others aren't getting to enjoy these games, which makes them a part of some sort of elite club, or cult so to speak.
If it's TRUE about pc I hope Sony announces it soon so the healing process can begin for these fans, and they can ultimately realise that the more copies if these games get sold, that the higher chance Sony invests even more to make these games even better.
That's because people think like this: In game theory and economic theory, a zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which each participant's gain or loss of utility is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the utility of the other participants.
Yes, and where people here were like "lol, no, not gonna happen". It's not confirmed yet but having Jason and Kotaku who spread it into the world it seems more believable.
Personally, I already finished it on PS4 but would play it again for 60fps and better visuals.
Dude I skimmed your post and I just want to say I appreciate you taking that much time to write all of that. I could never be bothered to on a forum like this.
Just from glancing at it I feel theres some I agree with and some I dont.
I have a huge connection with Nintendo over any other company but that is down to their sheer continuation of joy they deliver. Its wonderful having kids now and see that translate to them.
On pc, I feel the huge advantages of a high end pc outweigh a lot of those lack of connections you mentioned, and instantly increase that ability to be invested ten fold. Seeing your beloved games at ultra settings and at ridiculous framerates instantly make me drool and even happier with my choice of pc.
This runs a long my acceptance of the investment involved to hit these highs. Maybe I'm not a good example as I played pc from a younger age too - teenager. (Point and click adventure bros! :) )
I've not really been invested in this thread but I've seen some pretty embarrassing posts.
I genuinely feel,in reality these posters will get over the initial pain of Sony exclusives going to pc and they will either realise they genuinely adore the games and nothing will change after the initial upset, so to speak....or they will drop sony and claim this ruined their gaming experience where I genuinely feel those people have deeper issues that the larger enjoyment of the platform and games was the feeling that others aren't getting to enjoy these games, which makes them a part of some sort of elite club, or cult so to speak.
If it's TRUE about pc I hope Sony announces it soon so the healing process can begin for these fans, and they can ultimately realise that the more copies if these games get sold, that the higher chance Sony invests even more to make these games even better.
I guess I was a bit sloppy in my point about how we continue to make these headspaces as adults too, but sort of what you're saying about PC would fit into that. If you could have the PC experience that somehow tugged at your foundational love of Nintendo without being too on those nose and direct and feeling like an imposter, wouldn't the experience be especially potent for you, you think? I mean there's a reason people will put UI skins on their desktops to remind them of Nintendo UIs. I can't find it and it's driving me insane but I remember a Wii-like skin for Windows XP someone made. That's not the end all be all example, but yeah. Like I alluded to there are so, so many things, some reproduce-able, some not, that affect why you enjoy something, and the specific flavor of enjoyment you get. Like, I fully know how silly it is that I do this thing where I will adjust PC settings to help make a game look better, and even if you convinced me those settings didn't make much difference, I'd probably still do it because the placebo makes me feel like I've gained something and the game experience is a bit sweeter because of it. I'm fully aware it's silly, but ever since I started tinkering with PCs, which is fun on its own, it's been a big part of my enjoyment of PC games.
And yeah, time will continue on, which is why Microsoft has continued on with Play Anywhere and Phil Spencer will lightly poke fun at fan boys every once in a while pointing out how silly they're being. And if Sony does pursue this the same will happen. Fact is if they are making this decision, like, it's not like companies can't make mistakes, but chances are they have evaluated the monetary risk of the move.
In the end the only, only concern I could have is that without a console to sell specifically with exclusives, the big blockbuster single player sales may abate just a tad. But at the same time, those continue to be a symbol of the playstation brand, so I don't expect them stopping making them any time soon, although maybe we will start seeing more service based games from Sony. Would not be surprised. Realistically I expect Playstation first party games to exist, especially the Big Cinematic Single-Player Experiences, as long as there are Playstation consoles. They are not as profitable as other types of games, which is why not as many of them exist and Activision and EA for example have moved on. They exist specifically as prestige. Great big branding pieces. And that will continue as long as there is a console to sell. They've probably seen what Microsoft is doing and why it works.
I've just avoided bringing up that maybe, potential, probably unlikely issue because I didn't really want to feed another justification for something that pre-existed my bringing up that point. I already brought up in my post a quick dismantling of some of the silly justifications people use, so I haven't been to keen on introducing one that's someone legitimate to hide behind because again, don't want to encourage the latching onto a post hoc justification.
I guess I was a bit sloppy in my point about how we continue to make these headspaces as adults too, but sort of what you're saying about PC would fit into that. If you could have the PC experience that somehow tugged at your foundational love of Nintendo without being too on those nose and direct and feeling like an imposter, wouldn't the experience be especially potent for you, you think? I mean there's a reason people will put UI skins on their desktops to remind them of Nintendo UIs. I can't find it and it's driving me insane but I remember a Wii-like skin for Windows XP someone made. That's not the end all be all example, but yeah. Like I alluded to there are so, so many things, some reproduce-able, some not, that affect why you enjoy something, and the specific flavor of enjoyment you get. Like, I fully know how silly it is that I do this thing where I will adjust PC settings to help make a game look better, and even if you convinced me those settings didn't make much difference, I'd probably still do it because the placebo makes me feel like I've gained something and the game experience is a bit sweeter because of it. I'm fully aware it's silly, but ever since I started tinkering with PCs, which is fun on its own, it's been a big part of my enjoyment of PC games.
And yeah, time will continue on, which is why Microsoft has continued on with Play Anywhere and Phil Spencer will lightly poke fun at fan boys every once in a while pointing out how silly they're being. And if Sony does pursue this the same will happen. Fact is if they are making this decision, like, it's not like companies can't make mistakes, but chances are they have evaluated the monetary risk of the move.
In the end the only, only concern I could have is that without a console to sell specifically with exclusives, the big blockbuster single player sales may abate just a tad. But at the same time, those continue to be a symbol of the playstation brand, so I don't expect them stopping making them any time soon, although maybe we will start seeing more service based games from Sony. Would not be surprised. Realistically I expect Playstation first party games to exist, especially the Big Cinematic Single-Player Experiences, as long as there are Playstation consoles. They are not as profitable as other types of games, which is why not as many of them exist and Activision and EA for example have moved on. They exist specifically as prestige. Great big branding pieces. And that will continue as long as there is a console to sell. They've probably seen what Microsoft is doing and why it works.
I've just avoided bringing up that maybe, potential, probably unlikely issue because I didn't really want to feed another justification for something that pre-existed my bringing up that point. I already brought up in my post a quick dismantling of some of the silly justifications people use, so I haven't been to keen on introducing one that's someone legitimate to hide behind because again, don't want to encourage the latching onto a post hoc justification.
Totally with you on the nostalgia part, I think we crave those feelings and instantly feel a connection to ....something when we follow through with such things. I dont know if it's a childhood thing though as I've had a red dead 2 splash on my pc for a while.
Personally I feel I can be wowed by something and I really look forward to such things. I'm not too in tune with psychology to know if this is a nostalgia thing.
I adored god of war 2018 and I'm not sure at what level it is due to my fandom of the series prior to that. I think control was incredible, some of that was deffo linked to my love of alan wake....I played control on PC but Alan wake on 360...I really liked the 360.
Hmmm, you make some really interesting points and now I have some amazing inspiration to mull over some thoughts with my morning coffee. Didnt expect that this sunday so thx :)
Well yeah, PC getting a game isn't really a surprise, Playstation putting a sony owned/sony funded game on PC is a big deal and signals a potential shift in their entire business model that hasn't changed in 26+ years.
That's because people think like this: In game theory and economic theory, a zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which each participant's gain or loss of utility is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the utility of the other participants.
I'm sure they will. From what i have heard, it would be a great addition to PC gaming selection. But it is also a just another game among others. Consoles have this "tent-pole" culture where prominent games are released at and relatively even phase and the community is much more homogeneous in this regard. The games overshadow everything else for a while until everything goes back to normal again. At the PC side, everything is spread out more evenly and there isn't really this one type of PC gamer. While big games can make a splash when they are released, they don't stand out as much. People get the games they are interested at and at their own pace. A long tail like this is also one reason why releasing games on PC is a very good idea.
The following has been stewing in my mind for quite some time now and it's a big topic but I'm gonna go crazy so I'm just going to sit down and talk about how otherwise perfectly rational, normal people reach this silliness.
Okay so, I want to start this on the right tone. This is not meant to lambast or demean anyone, but rather analyze. So, first of all I'm gonna admit. I understand it. I'm not going to defend it. I think it's dumb as hell. But I get it. I have that gut reaction sometimes.
Oh who am I kidding, I have that gut reaction a lot. I'm an emotional guy. I understand and identify with all of the silliness that Playstation fanboys may be feeling all the way to expressing loudly or wherever on that spectrum they may fall.
Gonna break it down one point at a time. Originally when I wrote this I'd said simple. Uh...this isn't going to be "simple" as in "short." But hey yeah maybe someone who actually is seriously doing this will read this and get it about themselves.
And I don't think I'm a genius for explaining any of this; I just don't see any other break down posts that aren't just reductive or insulting. So I want to explore this.
In the end, and I promise this is not a slight or meant to demean anyone, but surprise, I know, none of the behavior or concern in this thread is purely logical, but instead at its heart, sheer sentimentality. Though I think this particular brand of it is worth exploring. Like, Shocker! I know, I know, wow Chettlar so insightful it's just feelings. But whatever I want to explore this.
Video games are emotional experiences for us as human beings. But emotion is not as simple as the present feeling someone is experiencing. Emotion is a vast sea of experience. It is informed very much by headspaces we inhabit. Video games are incredibly good at creating those headspaces, and when you get consoles associated with those emotional recipes and the unique flavors they produce, the emotional attachment gets really, really strong. Really strong.
Video games are so good at creating these headspaces because they affect so many things that other art mediums do at one time. I mean, a song alone can create this wonderful emotional landscape that can move people to tears, cause them anguish, turn their day around, give them resolve, change their minds on unrelated topics, and in some rare cases literally turn their entire lives around. Even wordless songs can do all this. It's kinda crazy. And this is just ONE aspect of what games do. Games are so total in how experiential they have the potential to be. They are engaging, engrossing, and immersive, if not in one respect, like suspension of disbelief of an immersive world, than in another, like the total engagement in a competitive online match for example. A lot of idiots (I was one of these idiots at one point) want to argue that some games are just pure logic and appeal to them because they are just logical people. Mostly these people are self impressed adolescent nerds (like me hi). Some of these self impressed "adolescent" nerds are in their 30s and 40s. But really, while they may indeed enjoy the logic they are engaging with, them enjoying it is already a bunch of emotional trails running at once. You can't separate out emotion form any part of human experience.
Everything you experience serves to create that emotional landscape which then informs the context from which all emotions experienced within are formed. UI Designers are no less important than any other designers for this very reason. The Gestalt of the experience you have in a game is, well, Gestalt. It is everything that exists to creates that experience for you. The sound of pressing your console's power button, the sound of the hard drive engaging, the start of a chime or melody or chord, the bleeps and bloops of the menus — these all serve to create an emotional reference point for everything that happens after. And this itself always has a point of origin inspired by whatever your impression of what a video game console and what it can provide you might be. When a console is new, our brains, with the expectation of fun and excitement however we got that expectation, usually as kids and/or absorbed in some way from society around us, lap up every bit of it, even if consciously we do or don't pay direct attention ourselves.
This is easier when we are young too, hence nostalgia. I've seen it observed that when I miss an old game, I am not missing the game alone, but really what I miss is being a child. I think this is close to the truth but not quite. Being a child was way different and kinda sucky in a lot of ways. Really this is just trading one simple misconception for another. What we miss is our abstract idea of being a kid, and that idea is often the left over remains of those headspaces we remember most. Oregon Trail is, for me for example, an emblem, or a mental icon of that entire headspace I was in while a kid. That head space was so powerful because as a kid it was more relevant to me than it ever could be now as an adult. There was little else to compete with it. I was a kid soaking up everything around me. Of course every emotional landscape I created would be so visceral, so potent.
As an adult, it isn't so potent. Not the headspaces my mind continually creates, and not the headspaces I remember and sometimes try to relive. I know that I still create these emotional experience schema type things because they are what replace the old ones. Every time I've gone back and played an old game, the experience I had with a kid is briefly remembered more strongly than my memory, and then often snuffed out by my new, present experience, and yet not totally. That experience still is a part of me, and has informed who I am and the experiences I can have that have come after.
For some of us, as those experiences become less visceral and our adult brains become less plastic and less prone to soaking up experiences and creating new powerful emotional landscapes to exist in (which again crazily, we some how often seem to just, not realize are there), we begin to miss being children, when the world was so much bigger and brighter, and our emotions were so much stronger and less bogged down by real life and our more set thoughts that come from being a big old boring grownup. And yet, we continue to have these associations. Maybe they aren't as strong, but they exist. It's just that often they are more strongly informed by their ability to appeal to those we most fondly remember.
I have no overwhelming preference to Xbox or Playstation or Nintendo, or whatever other games, because growing up for me personally, I only had some point and click games and a lot of educational games all on an old office computer. Some hunting games too, which I enjoyed exploring nature in. So for me, exploring in a game for example remains a lot of fun. That said I know for me that the experience of playing on an xbox 360 is a bit stronger than playing on a PS3 because that was the beginning of my experiencing all of modern gaming. It was where I experienced games that changed who I am as a person to this day. Anything that references those feelings will continue to be compelling for me, because it will help remind me of those headspaces I most heavily associate with playing and being emotionally invested in a video game. Or at least it's a major part of that for me. Humans are complex. (That said, PS3 was also the place I experienced Journey and Demon's Souls for the first time, and is the more recent place I played NieR, all in my later teens, so, say, that beginning orchestral tuning when you turn one on will continue to be powerful for me as well).
To sum this up as well as I can, experiential context is an inextricable part of what creates the emotional landscapes through which we "enjoy" video games, or even more accurately, what that enjoyment basically is.
(And to add. The people designing these things know this. Why do you think they design those beeps and boops? Why do companies so strongly contest their rights to their branding and imagery? They only control part of that puzzle, it is important to keep in mind, but it still is a part.)
Alright, so how is this stuff that all probably seems like stuff you generally sorta know maybe didn't really think about but kinda noticed relevant?
Well, so think about how powerful all that is. Like I really hope I've communicated how important this stuff is. Everyone experiences it differently, but everyone, to some degree, has SOMETHING that affects how they experience video games, a lot of it honestly probably too difficult to really accurately totally and completely enumerate. And for so so so many of them, understandably the thing they most powerfully identify with enjoying a video game is the console upon which they play. There's always many many more aspects — like for me the computer room in which our couple little office computers were housed on the side of our basement's big room — but I'd wager it's a huge component for a lot of people. It's a bit silly, but everyone has something that sort of engages their gamer brain and all the emotional ..."baggage" has too much negative...baggage associated with it, but you get what I mean. My point is that everyone has various things that to them create that emotional landscape context, and for many people to some degree, the console is a major component. This is true for PC gamers too. Again, it's a universal human trait. I mean, as a curiosity to observe at very least, why do people adorn their gaming PC's with "gamer" aesthetic? If you are not one such person, you are not "above" needing some sort of physical or aural or luminous or in some other way emotional trappings of experiential context. It's just that you associate that garish aesthetic with adolescence or obnoxious "gamer" behavior, so they are not a part of what creates a headspace you enjoy. For others, they just might. All sorts of things could be for a PC gamer. Maybe clicking on the discord icon is a little sparkle of flavor as part of the ritual the begins your gaming session. Again, not something you consciously think about unless you happen to notice, but nevertheless a part of your experience. Heck, while I'll be the first to criticize Epic and the EGS, it is impossible for me to deny that there absolutely is some sentimentality in one's preference for a Steam only experience. That is not ALL of it, but that is a discussion for another time. Suffice to say it is impossible to ignore that that experience does exist to flavor any perhaps logically sound or petty discussion on the subject.
So how does this apply here?
Well, when a lifelong playstation gamer moves away from playstation to PC for example, that is all gone. It's just gone. Worse than gone. PC might already have its own associations in their heads that are decidedly negative for that person.
It isn't as if they can't enjoy video games any more. It isn't as if this isn't something that can't be adjusted. Like I said earlier it absolutely can and is continually adjusted. All your memories are just memories of the last time you remembered something anyway. People are plastic. Maybe in some ways less as we grow older, but still essentially plastic. But we can't deny the fact that context and headspace for which people enjoy a given thing, especially if that is an emotional thing, like, oh I don't know, a video game, are not always easy to let go of.
This manifests itself in different ways. It's why you will never convince, with logic, sound as it may be, a person to change their mind on something that was not born of logic in the first place. The fact is if Joe Gamer associates gaming with his Xbox, and his PC with the office, then an Xbox game being on PC, even if the experience is so much better on a PC, and he could make a cheap gaming PC with more options if he wanted to, you aren't going to change his mind. Heck, even Self Aware Joe Gamer may not change his mind, because you can't just fix a deeply rooted emotional association with logic. Not that easily and never completely. Now, part of just allowing yourself to grow as a human being is recognizing those limitations and realizing you can change them and experience new and different things. But also part of being understanding and emotionally intelligent on the other hand is recognizing that emotional association and this specific concept I've referred to with the shorthand of "headspace" and "emotional landscape" so far, are all part of what make us human beings. It's okay to let them be how they are, and learn to both expand them while also taking advantage of how powerful they are if indulged. If you truly love video games as a medium, both are valuable skills to develop.
The trouble we get into then here is when people attempt to rationalize their emotional experiences down to very simple point of interest. They associate mentally a noticeable thing with a noticeable emotion, and here's where it gets kind of funny but interesting, then create an emotional attachment to the idea of that noticeable thing ex post facto. So maybe a given sequence in a game was subconsciously extremely immersive for someone, but also there was a thing that happened in that sequence that they associate with that feeling. They will then try to convey that that thing they associated with the feeling was really really good and definitely was the source of that feeling they got, even if someone else who was not immersed in that experience can point to all the flaws in the thing that happened and how that thing isn't so great because it didn't affect them in the same way. You can say "well it's all subjective," but that is rather lazy.
Sorry if that was a bit confusing. Maybe for example, all sorts of things you do but probably mostly don't notice leading up to and including a given sequence in a game create a feeling of great pathos for you, and so then you are more receptive and ready to accept something as sad or moving. So a scene happens that you find really sad and moving. Then someone else points out to you how crappy and poor the writing was and how silly it sounds. That person didn't experience the same things as you to create that experience. You did, but didn't realize it. So for you, you point out an awkwardly and unrealistically written but earnest scene as something that created a moving experience, when really it was the whole of that gestalt leading up to that moment that enabled you to be receptive to that scene and not notice that ordinarily you'd find it silly. So when someone points out to you that the dialogue is silly and not realistic at all, you are incensed. How could they see that dialogue as silly? Well, it's pretty simple. Essential aspects that lead up to that experience didn't work for them. Just as equally they have probably experienced and enjoyed something you found silly because various things did not work for you. Heck, even if you both enjoyed the scene, different things may have been what did it for each of you, even if in English you'd list the same basic reason you enjoyed it, ANDDDDD, you could both be wrong in whatever simple thing you are ascribing the experience to. Most of what makes a game well beloved then is, I feel like it's pretty logical to conclude, is when it is so effective at nailing everything that everyone is able to experience what it sets out to experience for them.
(Heck, this failure is exactly what causes that really awkward moment when a teenage boy tries to show some girl a cool fight scene from this anime episode #2489 where goku uses his 9.38 million power chi to suplex the pokemon demon master Doki Baka Kun. The fight scene, I hate to break it to you 16 year old m- uh you, but that fight scene wasn't that cool. But that doesn't make it bad either! And it doesn't make you silly for experiencing the power conveyed by that scene. It's more complex than that. The scene itself isn't the thing that made you feel that way on its own. In this case it's the entire 2,488 — oh okay we all know episode #1433 is not canon any more I GET IT CHETTLA- I mean you, okay fine the entire 2,487 — episodes that preceded this glorious fight are the source of your emotion.
And there is no way this cute girl who is pretending she doesn't know you should have showered like at least one this week because she likes your dorky enthusiasm can ever, ever feel the thing you want to share with her, because nothing you explain will convey the full power of what you have experienced. At best it could encourage her to go experience that herself if that sounds exciting to experience. Sure the episode was an emotional release for you, but you are ignoring a lot of flaws in it and how badly animated it is and how actively it takes some people out of the experience by how very average it is, because for you personally that wasn't enough to override the emotional experience you had).
My point is, that often we can mistake the things that really create experience for us for silly oversimplifications. That thing we ascribe it to might not even have anything to do with the true source of that experience. Even those of us who scorn intellectual analysis as boring and ruining the fun and magic of art and video games do this. Because all of us want to feel justified in feeling the way we do.
That's really what it comes down to. Our self image is threatened when the things we most deeply experience are trivialized. We have to justify our experiences because anything we deeply enjoy is reflective of who we are as people. I am not Chettlar because I find Viva Pinata delightful, and me being Chettlar isn't really accurately the reason I enjoy it; neither really totally begets the other. The fact is me being Chettlar is now for the past 7 years or so me being the guy who enjoys Viva Pinata, at least to a small degree. That's...kinda what people mean when they say art is a part of who they are, in my opinion. When I write music I show the world a part of me I can't express any other way. When I enjoy someone else's music, that is me responding to that person, and creating something else. An experience. A..me..unit sorta. That which I call my identity is amended whether I like it or not. Why else do people even lightly interested in a various piece of media adorn themselves either with avatars or memorabilia? Part of our identity is what we enjoy. When I justify why I enjoy a thing, I am justifying ME. And at some point somewhere with some thing, you reading this do that too. If you've read this, I've affected you whether you like it or not, whether you think I'm onto something or just an over-intellectual sycophant (I mean, I just used the word sycophant). As I talked about earlier, video games are some of the most involving of all mediums. Sure this combines with video games being enjoyed and created in huge part by anti-social nerds, a lot of whom never had to grow past being children and so reflect this reality in unfortunate and sometimes horrendous ways. But video games were always going to have such a strong effect on the people who play them, because by their nature they touch so many parts of us at once.
Alright.
Sooooo
..
Let's plug this all in then. I get the previous part may have been a little boring, but I gotta make sure I establish some common ground here so I can get to the juicy bit. Hopefully the emotional headspace I created for you, lol, wasn't just "who is Chettlar and why has he assaulted me with this skyscraper of text?" I'm trying okay? It's a large topic.
Alright, well.
A lot of Playstation fans, whether they want to admit it or not, and not all of them, but many of them to varying levels, have used exclusives as their preferred means of justifying their being fans of the brand. Not just their purchase, but of the brand. Playstation. What that means for them. What emotional sparks that might gently but maybe imperceptibly begin to flare. I think for some of them, they view themselves as intelligent, discerning and logical people. To support this, they have to believe that the games they play are the best games ever made, or at least top notch in general. A few crappy games they dislike can serve as the sacrificial lambs to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are not mindless fanboys, of course. (Psst, this is not me implying that Sony games are all trash. But the emotional need some may posses more than others to place these exclusives at the very top of the medium is very much related to this. If you find yourself starting to feel defensive right now at that very implication, uh...maybe think about that for a minute. Because I've not even said whether I like Sony games. Actually that's not true, I already have. I mentioned Journey earlier as a hugely impactful game for me, because it truly was for me.) And this isn't to diminish the fact that these games, on their own, have created emotional experiences. Sony makes some quality titles. What I am saying that there is an emotional need to elevate them into the stratosphere that you might not be as immune from as you might think, even if you don't even like Playstation games and you're interests lie elsewhere.
This is why you have a number of journalists comment that they receive a lot of their death threats (if not due to them being anything other than cis male because of that whole big thing gamers™ have a problem with, but that's another topic) most often in relation to, you guessed it, their views on exclusive games. Not just Playstation games. This happens with Nintendo fans and xbox fans. But right now the topic is Playstation, so I've been using that specifically. Plus, let's not pretend that Sony's marketers are totally oblivious to their identity as a brand that builds major impressive cinematic experiences. They're pretty vocal about it honestly. So if you are profoundly affected by that marketing because all marketing in all of the world of branding of any kind is designed with the intent of validating that identity you've created, well, it's working.
Again this is not to specifically attack Playstation fans. Every person has this happen to them, because we are emotional creatures like I discussed before. I'm not even attacking capitalist marketing. Cults do this, states do this, small clubs do this, movements do this — anything and everything that has an interest in existing as an institution in your life does this. And it always will.
But the er, unsavory side of it is Playstation fans being ugly up to and including sending death threats to websites who didn't give Uncharted 3 10/10 reviews before they had even played the game themselves. That behavior didn't come out of the blue. It didn't just come from some aggressively mislead slaves to the marketing of Uncharted 3 who just believed foolishly that the game was great before it was on store shelves. It didn't just come from the black magic power of branding alone. It came from fans whose identity relied on Playstation being a brand of prestigious perfect video games. I will point out, meekly, but frankly, that the forum that was the precursor to this forum, was home to a lot of that senseless ugliness. Maybe not the worst of it, but some of it. But again, it's not senseless really. It's not reasonless most certainly. It's just a result of a lack of self-awareness of how deeply and profoundly the experience and identity of being a Playstation fan, even among those who didn't specifically identify as Playstation fans per se affected these people's views. Again, we all are affected by our emotions even in what we feel are our most rational moments. This is an example of how that applies here. Marketing was part of it, but not even close to all of it. It cannot create this out of nothing.
I feel strongly that trying to dismiss these people as corporate slaves is foolish, I need to note. It is an oversimplification that tries to distance the one making it from their behavior, trying to shift the blame to a system rather than acknowledge the human source of, and life factors leading up to, that behavior, be it as it may that that marketing did play its part in accentuating or accelerating that behavior. I really feel that much of what begat that behavior was something universal to us all. That maybe you reading this aren't so immature as to act in that way, but you are nevertheless affected by your favorite brand of video game, or your favorite happy video game place. It compels you to act the way you do, whether you've taken the time to see it or not.
Hopefully I've kind of shown some of the beautiful and ugly sides of what emotional identity and the headspaces we inhabit, that are so intimately tied to that identity, can be.
When you take away a Sony fan's rationale for defending his identity as a rational, logical, intelligent human being who enjoys Playstation because he is such, you lay bare and naked the fact that his love of Playstation was never truly rational, logical, or intelligent.
Certainly there were rational, logical, and intelligent reasons that may have got him there, but his love in the end comes from a humiliating and simple human reality. He loves his beeps and boops, his whirrs and start-up tune, his click of a face button and clack of an analogue stick. He loves the feeling of the couch under is butt. He loves the dim lamp light. He loves the logo that pops up and tells his lizard brain, "Game time! Fun time! Relax! The physical place you are in only serves along with the lights and sounds and trinkets to create the mental place you so enjoy. We all exist to simultaneously create a sanctuary and catalyst for what you love most." To explain to him his rationale is not, at least entirely, rational despite the part logic may play in it, the reason he loves Playstation, is humiliating, because it eats at, even if he doesn't realize it, the idea that he isn't who he thinks he is. He's a silly, lizard brained animal just like anyone and anything else. And his love for these experiences is inspired in huge part by silly things. And he wants to feel that it comes from intelligence and superiority. It's banal and boring insecurity, regardless of whether he's even ever been conscious of it.
He doesn't want to admit that at the heart of it, the reason he's a Playstation fan is for reasons he probably has already subconsciously written off as humiliating or silly. (He may have, in an ironic lack of self awareness used such an explanation to humiliate someone else and diminish their experience specifically to prop himself up. That isn't necessary at all, but if he's a jerk maybe it's happened. You don't have to be a jerk to have blind spots. We all do.) And he doesn't even have to have gone through ANY of these thoughts either. It probably just manifests in a vague fear of being threatened, his subconscious warning him that this person pushing him to recognize the very banal source of his identity is actually just an asshole, and he shouldn't think about it, but instead be mad at the asshole, or the person responsible. He tries to come up with all kinds of badly thought out rational reasons to defend his position and why his essentially selfish desires shouldn't be exposed as the petty things they are.
And you, the reader, probably do this with something, somewhere, in your life too. Maybe it's more serious, maybe it's more tiny. But that's your business to examine what silly things your pride doesn't let you accept. My point is that this is a human thing. Not something playstation fans do because they're dumb dumbs for some reason.
And the funny thing is? The cure to this is not that complicated. It's like, really simple. Accept that your lizard brain likes the beeps and boops and that the idea of what playstation is to you is in the end, just an emotion. Accept that you aren't any smarter than anyone else because of the games you enjoy. That your reasons for the way you game the way you do aren't super intelligent because at the center of it all, you are playing games to have fun, which is nothing if not the definition of emotional experience. You are going to do what you are going to do to engender that experience. I mean, really games are deeper than fun. Some of our favorite games we love because they were very seriously emotional, and not really the typical colloquial definition of fun, now that I really think about it. The fact is you are going to, subconsciously or not, do what you need to do in order to create those experiences for yourself. And that's okay. It's definitely good to explore the reasons why this happens. But analyzing your reasons for enjoying something is an intellectual pursuit of curiosity, not an appropriate avenue for justifying your identity, and certainly not an appropriate thing to use to deprive others of enjoying more things in the way most effective for them. If analyzing why something happens is not allowed to humiliate you or if it makes you feel threatened in anyway, well sucks to be you buddy because fact is you are a mortal imperfect human being and analyzing the reasons you are the way you are are going to be compromising in some fashion. I really don't know what to tell you other than to move past it, because you are seriously limiting yourself to some awesome opportunities to learn and grow as a person. I don't care if you're 15 or 50 or 31½.
The fact is, humiliating as it may be, you fancy the things you fancy is because they tickle your lizard brain and help create an emotional cocktail you enjoy.
If you don't recognize that, you won't realize how utterly silly it is that you are essentially arguing that someone should compell you to spend more money. Like, really at the end of it, it's an extremely illogical, silly fear of missing out. You've created a really silly idea, dress it up however you like, that you are missing out on something. If a game comes to more platforms, well clearly an exclusive has been deprived of you. You've got a silly animalistic instinct of valuing scarcity. You feel that if a game comes to more platforms, it's not special any more. So then it's not as special. But you've not lost anything, other's have gained something. But the FEELING of it being special is gone, so you feel that objectively something is missing. Well buddy sorry to break it to you but there is nothing logical about that, no matter how you want to dress it up. So much for being rational. Yes, games are created to sell consoles, but if a company moves to making those games for more platforms, you have not lost anything. You just feel like you have because the emotional puzzle piece that has disappeared from the equation if the feeling of scarcity and exclusivity everyone finds at least a teeny tiny bit alluring on some level.
More related to the general point of this entire post, you also fear missing out in a way that really is actually, funny enough, self imposed, and leads you to do silly things like, as I said above, imply that you WANT to be compelled to spend extra money. The fact is you want a rational reason to get a video game console and have the whole experience it provides you. If you don't have an exclusive game to justify that experience, then you are left facing that horrible, humiliating fact we talked about.
You don't want the console for rational reasons. You want the console because you want the emotional idea of that console. You want the console because of the emotional landscape it creates within you. Because you are a human being who needs things you don't want to recognize to exist in order to facilitate the fullest enjoyment of a video game possible. Exclusives helped justify that for you in a way that seems tangible and rational.
Your silly emotional and not-well-justifiable reasons for spending hundreds of dollars on a console aren't enough for you. You need to feel reasonable, rational, and intelligent for wanting what you want, even if you don't personally think you care. If you really didn't care, you wouldn't be asking someone to make you spend hundreds of dollars on electronics that in all essential ways do all the same things as the electronics you already own. You want stuff, and now you can't justify it, and that's humiliating to recognize how silly you are.
Thing is though...like, really the way to make peace with this, like I kind of covered, isn't that hard. Like, okay, I like silly things. Why care? Are video games not just a bunch of bleep and boops? They still create amazing experiences for you. If you want to spend $400 to feel better about yourself, spend $400 if it makes you happy. It was just as silly an expenditure when it had exclusives, because at the heart of it you are just indulging your emotions, and that's what these big toys are for. It is no less and no more a silly expenditure in a way that really, truly matters now that it doesn't. If all your games come to PC, you are still someone who enjoys themselves on your playstation or your xbox or switch. Go play your playstation or xbox or switch and be happy. You are a silly, irrational human being. Don't take yourself so seriously. Don't be an idiot with your money, but if what makes you happy is owning a box with a big X or a big P or lopsided face looking thing on it to play your games on, then that's what makes you happy. You're wasting so much energy trying to preserve your ego, and honestly in the end hurting yourself most of all by limiting your ability to grow as a human being.
Yeah, you are still a child. You like big toys. You like car go vroom. You like head blow off. You like sparkles shiny wow. You are depriving yourself and others of joy by insisting you are so superior to that. You're not intelligent by trying to make yourself appear intelligent or rationalize and justify your self-image. Ironically you're...kinda bein' stupid. So what. We're all stupid. Quit taking yourself so seriously. Go play video games you big dummy.
Holy crap this is the longest and most thoughtout forum post I've ever read on the whole internet. Mad respect.
And I can honestly relate to it, I used to be a huge Commodore fanboy, first C64 and then Amiga 500, and it was a really difficult period to move over to consoles and took me a long time until I had finally accepted that SNES was quite okay too and that it was actually humanly possible to control games without a joystick. :s
But I still love my Commodore computers! ❤️ And even of it's weird and completely irrational I'll proudly list The Last Ninja as one of the best games of all time any time I can, with possibly the best games soundtrack ever, and will go *lalala I can't hear you!* if someone tries to say that I'm wrong. ;)
I like your closing words, we should all take that to heart. Don't be so serious. In the end it's just games. Entertainment. Toys. And as with other things in life it's perfectly okay to prefer one thing over another for no logic reason and just focus on what makes you happy and ignore everything else. :)
Totally with you on the nostalgia part, I think we crave those feelings and instantly feel a connection to ....something when we follow through with such things. I dont know if it's a childhood thing though as I've had a red dead 2 splash on my pc for a while.
Personally I feel I can be wowed by something and I really look forward to such things. I'm not too in tune with psychology to know if this is a nostalgia thing.
I adored god of war 2018 and I'm not sure at what level it is due to my fandom of the series prior to that. I think control was incredible, some of that was deffo linked to my love of alan wake....I played control on PC but Alan wake on 360...I really liked the 360.
Hmmm, you make some really interesting points and now I have some amazing inspiration to mull over some thoughts with my morning coffee. Didnt expect that this sunday so thx :)
Ha no problem. Inspiring some thoughts was my goal.
But yeah even with a post that long it's impossible to go into all the minutae of what makes people tick. There's a ton to it.
Nostalgia is always being created, but while we grow up and get a bit more set in our ways the more recent past is closer to us and maybe stronger in that way, but the distant past when we were kids is going to be more foundational. But people remain plastic their whole lives regardless. Hence the bit about art affecting us. We always change, but that doesn't erase the effect of things in our past. That interact between the past and present is what makes the concoction that is you. And on a more micro scale, all experiences you have inform all other experiences you have. And some of those get coded to mean different things to you. Sort of like buttons that when press turn on the gaming preset in your mind, or the driving preset, or the talk to the in-law preset, or the going to a concert preset, or the I'm going to enjoy this warm coffee in a great big hoodie on my couch and watch crappy TV shows. Some of those mindsets are so pleasant they are remembered on their own. Some of them exist to facilitate others. So in the case I'm specifically talking about, then web of experiences and emotional relationships and associations that form our fandom for a given video game platform. It's just so complicated that I can't just limit it to video games specifically. I'm more interested in letting the concept be messy and lead me into other totally unrelated areas of thought.
I'm definitely rambling at this point. It's way late for me. Or early. Whoops.
Holy crap this is the longest and most thoughtout forum post I've ever read on the whole internet. Mad respect.
And I can honestly relate to it, I used to be a huge Commodore fanboy, first C64 and then Amiga 500, and it was a really difficult period to move over to consoles and took me a long time until I had finally accepted that SNES was quite okay too and that it was actually humanly possible to control games without a joystick. :s
But I still love my Commodore computers! ❤ And even of it's weird and completely irrational I'll proudly list The Last Ninja as one of the best games of all time any time I can, with possibly the best games soundtrack ever, and will go *lalala I can't hear you!* if someone tries to say that I'm wrong. ;)
I like your closing words, we should all take that to heart. Don't be so serious. In the end it's just games. Entertainment. Toys. And as with other things in life it's perfectly okay to prefer one thing over another for no logic reason and just focus on what makes you happy and ignore everything else. :)
This is great news. As time goes on there are fewer and fewer reasons to not just stick to PC, the catalogue is just too huge. I have games from the 90's I can still install and play without any hassle. Meanwhile I have games tied to my brick of a PS3 from little more than a decade ago that are completely unavailable to me. Not to mention PS2 and PS1 titles. I can of course still play most of the on a PC. In a perfect world I'd just sink all my gaming related investments into PC because I'll always be able to replicate or improve my experience. I have tons of regrets tied to my PS4 already where superior and futureproof releases have replaced software that's just stuck on a machine that'll brick in time.
If it wasn't for a few exclusives I'd have all that money sunk into hardware to instead put towards games and developers. I hope Sony and Microsoft can lead the way on this front.
I'm sure they will. From what i have heard, it would be a great addition to PC gaming selection. But it is also a just another game among others. Consoles have this "tent-pole" culture where prominent games are released at and relatively even phase and the community is much more homogeneous in this regard. The games overshadow everything else for a while until everything goes back to normal again. At the PC side, everything is spread out more evenly and there isn't really this one type of PC gamer. While big games can make a splash when they are released, they don't stand out as much. People get the games they are interested at and at their own pace. A long tail like this is also one reason why releasing games on PC is a very good idea.
The console space is just as varied as the PC space with the exception of a few genres that don't work as well (RTS, MOBA) for obvious reasons. There are plenty of PC players that just play one game, just like a console player playing Destiny 2 until the end of time. Whether that's League or DOTA 2 or whatever. You think when Cyberpunk comes out that PC players won't drop their current game to play it for a week or two before going back to the latest Path of Exile League or whatever? The only difference is largely the manufacturers or storefront owners don't make 'big' games regularly. That isn't always the case though, especially this year with CD Projekt and Valve both releasing big games.
