#artistic value | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

secretgamergirl · 3 months

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Ever think about how weird it is that we've sort of collectively agreed games devalue over time?

This is one of those subjects where I just know people are going to start reading this and think I have some sort of weird vested interest in the price of some particular game or the profits of some publisher or whatever, so let me just get right out front here and say no, this really is me just waxing philosophic in a vacuum.

You like movies? You like actually owning copies of movies? Right now, taking a look around, it seems like if you want to buy a movie on bluray, that costs you about $25. Maybe more like $30 if it's some big fancy release with a lot of pack-in material, like the Criterion Collection stuff, but basically you're looking at $25. You like music, want to buy a new album? On CD, that's going to cost you $15. Or at the point we're currently at where there's this odd revival of vinyl records, you're looking at maybe double that? Little harder for me to work out the basic going rate since I think we're at a point where people are doing limited printings and stuff isn't going to stay at the sticker price long, but there's SOME pretty consistent price point everyone goes with, I'm pretty sure. Books? $20 hardcover, maybe half that for a paperback. You want to buy a video game that just came out though? Well, if it's new-new, and this is the first time it's ever been made available, that'll be about $60. If it's a rerelease though? You damn well better not ask for more than $5 for that or people are going to be furious. And that's super weird!

I've tried discussing with people just how weird this is, and it doesn't really seem to properly register with anyone. One big hangup is that (and this may be because the target audience for games skews really young and the industry has been really pushing to obliterate the concept of owning a game for like a decade or two) is that the people I'm talking to are completely conflating the concept of the work and the publication of a work. Like, yeah, if a store orders a stock of 50 copies of something, and it doesn't end up selling all that well, then yes they are eventually going to mark down the ones that don't sell or toss them into a bargain bin or whatever. That's true for everything, but that is also not at all what we are talking about here. This is specifically about the actual suggested retail price on the package when it leaves the manufacturer. When I'm saying "a movie on bluray costs $25" that's true for a movie that is only just being released on home video for the first time after premiering in theaters two months ago, but that is also true for a movie from like the 1980s that someone's only just now getting around to putting out on the format, or they just got the rights to distribute in a given country (and yeah yeah, super America-centric numbers I'm using here, I know), or it came out like 4 years ago but there's a sequel out soon so we want to make it available again. Doesn't matter how old it is. We're selling it now, we're selling it for $25. It does not work this way for video games. If I port some game from the mid-'80s to whatever hardware is current, and I try to charge the standard price of a game for it, people would be outraged. I can charge $5 or I can bundle it together with a dozen other games and MAYBE get away with that. But I better be throwing in some extras, or make it like 30 games or whatever.

The next thing I hear people say is "well no, see, because with games, budgets for graphics keep going way way up! And you know, hey, that's why the average price of a game keeps going up! Hell games on the PS5 are like, $70!" and... OK so nothing about this argument has any basis in reality, at all. Games for whatever weird reason have always been just kind of immune to inflation. Like, in the 80s a videogame would typically cost about $50, and $50 in 1980 is about $200 adjusted for inflation. That number basically has not budged. Didn't come down when actual production costs dropped to practically nothing, didn't shoot up when budgets kinda ballooned either. You do sometimes see people make "budget games" for maybe half the typical price, but that's kind of just a marketing decision when you're going to release something you know critics are immediately going to pounce on for "looking cheap" or being shallow or whatever. By and large, whether a game is churned out really quickly on the cheap or has some bloated budget in the hundreds of millions, it's getting sold for that same $60. Movies work the same way. The movie that cost $400,000,000 to shoot and the movie that cost $35,000 to shoot both cost you $25 to pick up a copy of at a store... and they also cost a bit under half of a what a game typically costs despite the fact that that they cost roughly twice as much to make (the math is kinda fuzzy, but that seems roughly true for the record-setters and the median, at least for big budget major studio stuff). Capitalism is weird like that, basically no connection between cost and price.

Those are honestly the two main points I see people toss out, at least out loud and in public. The next logical thing to assume though is that there have been profound qualitative gains in the field of video games across the board over the years. That they just keep getting better and better and better. And like, hell no to that. I will grant you that early on in the history of the medium, like, late 1970s to mid-80s, where we went from kinda basic arcade games where you've got maybe 2 minutes worth of game play and then you loop it at a higher speed, then this flurry of new technology and priorities and emerging concepts, and if you want to make a lesser value case against the former there, there's a case you could maybe argue. But you can't look me in the eye and sincerely tell me you'd rather play the worst game released this year than the best game from 30 years ago... actually holy crap there's a bunch of absolute gems turning 30 this year, look at this random wad of search results you know I didn't cherry pick because Earthworm Jim's in here:

Point is, yeah, video games are relatively young as an art form but not so much so that we don't have some immaculate classics older than half the people reading this. And again, hey, movies that predate any modern understanding of direction or editing, shot on cameras too old to record sound or color, and where all existing copies are pretty heavily degraded still get reissued at the same sticker price as anything else. Classic albums that were terribly mastered still sell for the same as stuff recorded on bleeding edge gear.

Oh and just to cover all my bases on this, I was tempted to bring up paintings and how with those the oldest works, especially anything where the artist is no longer with us, shoot way up in value, but that's not really fair to bring up since there we're talking about unique original one-off works, not mass-media. There was never a time when we could all go to the mall and pick up van Gogh's The Starry Night. Unless you just want a nice reproduction print. In which case that'll be like $20 (which when you think about it is an outrageous markup for a single frame of video).

Finally though, we have that argument I alluded to that I'm pretty sure IS a lot of people's logic on this which they probably aren't saying out loud, or maybe even consciously thinking to themselves- The older a game is, the easier it is to emulate. If I'm really jonesing to play the original Castlevania right this minute, it's gonna take me like 10 seconds to type a search query, grab a zip file that's all of 65k, unpack it, maybe spend another 10 or 20 seconds double checking what emulator people recommend these days, and I'm good. Maybe even less, I'm sure there's some site I could find quicker than that just emulating it with HTML4 or something right in my browser. But if I want to play like, Wild ARMs 3, I'm grabbing a bigger file, I don't know if there's any good PC emulation of the PS2 these days, I might need to get into the MiSTer scene, or work out how to make my actual PS2 read a burned DVD (in this weird hypothetical scenario where I don't have the actual game on a shelf in my eye-line and I don't have to dust off a computer old enough to still have a DVD-burner standard issue) anyway). And if I want to play, uh... what's current and doesn't have a PC release? And isn't on the Switch which has weirdly good emulation for a current system. That new Ratchet & Clank game? I assume I'd need to do some serious research, have a much fancier computer, seems like a huge game.

But you know, if even on a subconscious level, that means you inherently consider those earlier games to be less valuable (and hell, now that I think about it, I think I actually HAVE seen people openly make the argument that cartridge-based games have literally no intrinsic value because it's so easy to just emulate them), then... you're kind of a total piece of garbage and invalidating any sort of morally defensible stance you might have on piracy and emulation? Like you want to talk to me about preservation or ease of access or outright refusing to financially support whatever company would profit off a particular purchase, those are all pretty defensible positions, but you try and tell me art only has value when there is no easy way for you to personally enjoy it that doesn't involve cutting a check to someone, I think I might actually hate you and everything you represent? Or at the very least I'd like for you to really take a moment to reflect on your principles and reevaluate some things.

And again, that final little thought on this subject in particular strikes me as something people can take in a particularly inflammatory way, so let me just again reassure you I have no issue with anyone's habits regarding piracy or emulation or whatever. I'm coming at this whole subject purely as a sort of philosophical question/exploration of the commodification of art and artists/anticapitalist sort of thing.

And yeah, to just articulate that last point a bit more, while I totally think it's the weirdest thing that the public consensus is that games inherently plummet in value over time, I feel like we got here thanks to a series of very conscious decisions from scumbags in boardrooms. People want you to give them all your money and ideally avoid giving you anything in return. Their whole deal works best when they can convince you that whatever it is they have to sell you right this minute is the most valuable thing in the world and you need to have it right now, and whatever they sold you yesterday is actually total garbage with no value and you know you should really just toss it in a dumpster and make sure you have the room for today's new thing.

Hell, this is getting a bit out of scope, but marketing people are actually really working hard these days to build up an association between how much space a game takes up on your hard drive being a direct reflection of the game's value, and people are shipping games with intentional bloat like ultra-high-resolution assets and needlessly uncompressed files, because if you can only fit like 3 games on your drive, hey, buying this new game means tossing a ton of stuff out. Less stuff for you to play and be content with, less options for what game you're just going to log into every day and have people sell you DLC, and by the time they have a new game to sell, you're going to have to throw this one out to make room for that. No deep libraries, just the current thing.

So, yeah, on the one hand we have companies asking you to buy the same games now you already bought a while ago, and screw them for that, but they're also trying to convince you that nothing you own has value or deserves preserving to always keep you hungering for something new, and WOW screw that so much. Art has value, it retains that value, it's good to build up libraries and share them and keep stuff in circulation for new audiences to discover and people to revisit and re-examine. So quit letting anyone try to convince you old games (or old art of any other kind) has no value. And if you can be bothered, hey, do your best to support artists as much as you can and creeps trying to commodify art as disposable product as little as you can.

#video games #economics #capitalism #artistic value #retro gaming #retro games #you know come to think I think I got onto this just talking about how indie developers should decide what to charge for their stuff somehow

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inkskinned · 8 months

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the thing about art is that it was always supposed to be about us, about the human-ness of us, the impossible and beautiful reality that we (for centuries) have stood still, transfixed by music. that we can close our eyes and cry about the same book passage; the events of which aren't real and never happened. theatre in shakespeare's time was as real as it is now; we all laugh at the same cue (pursued by bear), separated hundreds of years apart.

three years ago my housemates were jamming outdoors, just messing around with their instruments, mostly just making noise. our neighbors - shy, cautious, a little sheepish - sat down and started playing. i don't really know how it happened; i was somehow in charge of dancing, barefoot and laughing - but i looked up, and our yard was full of people. kids stacked on the shoulders of parents. old couples holding hands. someone had brought sidewalk chalk; our front walk became a riot of color. someone ran in with a flute and played the most astounding solo i've ever heard in my life, upright and wiggling, skipping as she did so. she only paused because the violin player was kicking his heels up and she was laughing too hard to continue.

two weeks ago my friend and i met in the basement of her apartment complex so she could work out a piece of choreography. we have a language barrier - i'm not as good at ASL as i'd like to be (i'm still learning!) so we communicate mostly through the notes app and this strange secret language of dancers - we have the same movement vocabulary. the two of us cracking jokes at each other, giggling. there were kids in the basement too, who had been playing soccer until we took up the far corner of the room. one by one they made their slow way over like feral cats - they laid down, belly-flat against the floor, just watching. my friend and i were not in tutus - we were in slouchy shirts and leggings and socks. nothing fancy. but when i asked the kids would you like to dance too? they were immediately on their feet and spinning. i love when people dance with abandon, the wild and leggy fervor of childhood. i think it is gorgeous.

their adults showed up eventually, and a few of them said hey, let's not bother the nice ladies. but they weren't bothering us, they were just having fun - so. a few of the adults started dancing awkwardly along, and then most of the adults. someone brought down a better sound system. someone opened a watermelon and started handing out slices. it was 8 PM on a tuesday and nothing about that day was particularly special; we might as well party.

one time i hosted a free "paint along party" and about 20 adults worked quietly while i taught them how to paint nessie. one time i taught community dance classes and so many people showed up we had to move the whole thing outside. we used chairs and coatracks to balance. one time i showed up to a random band playing in a random location, and the whole thing got packed so quickly we had to open every door and window in the place.

i don't think i can tell you how much people want to be making art and engaging with art. they want to, desperately. so many people would be stunning artists, but they are lied to and told from a very young age that art only matters if it is planned, purposeful, beautiful. that if you have an idea, you need to be able to express it perfectly. this is not true. you don't get only 1 chance to communicate. you can spend a lifetime trying to display exactly 1 thing you can never quite language. you can just express the "!!??!!!"-ing-ness of being alive; that is something none of us really have a full grasp on creating. and even when we can't make what we want - god, it feels fucking good to try. and even just enjoying other artists - art inherently rewards the act of participating.

i wasn't raised wealthy. whenever i make a post about art, someone inevitably says something along the lines of well some of us aren't that lucky. i am not lucky; i am dedicated. i have a chronic condition, my hands are constantly in pain. i am not neurotypical, nor was i raised safe. i worked 5-7 jobs while some of these memories happened. i chose art because it mattered to me more than anything on this fucking planet - i would work 80 hours a week just so i could afford to write in 3 of them.

and i am still telling you - if you are called to make art, you are called to the part of you that is human. you do not have to be good at it. you do not have to have enormous amounts of privilege. you can just... give yourself permission. you can just say i'm going to make something now and then - go out and make it. raquel it won't be good though that is okay, i don't make good things every time either. besides. who decides what good even is?

you weren't called to make something because you wanted it to be good, you were called to make something because it is a basic instinct. you were taught to judge its worth and over-value perfection. you are doing something impossible. a god's ability: from nothing springs creation.

a few months ago i found a piece of sidewalk chalk and started drawing. within an hour i had somehow collected a small classroom of young children. their adults often brought their own chalk. i looked up and about fifteen families had joined me from around the block. we drew scrangly unicorns and messed up flowers and one girl asked me to draw charizard. i am not good at drawing. i basically drew an orb with wings. you would have thought i drew her the mona lisa. she dragged her mother over and pointed and said look! look what she drew for me and, in the moment, i admit i flinched (sorry, i don't -). but the mother just grinned at me. he's beautiful. and then she sat down and started drawing.

someone took a picture of it. it was in the local newspaper. the summary underneath said joyful and spontaneous artwork from local artists springs up in public gallery. in the picture, a little girl covered in chalk dust has her head thrown back, delighted. laughing.