Author’s Note: This brief essay was first published by The Howard Bloom Institute in October of 2022. Given certain recent events, I got to thinking about it again, and decided it might be prudent to share the piece here on in my own space on Substack.
Among the various forms of art that I have discussed and rallied in defense of previously, there is one that I have not yet given my clear support for in this space- video games. For most of their early history, I wouldn’t have made the argument that they even were an artform, but as far back as the 16-bit era, and even including a small handful of 8-bit titles, we have had examples of visual, audible and narrative artistic beauty shining from our televisions and handheld game devices.
The first examples I can quickly recall of games that narratively enthralled me were the first Ninja Gaiden on the Nintendo Entertainment System, and a game called Werewolf: The Last Warrior. Both games used sprite-based, anime-style image overlay stills, accompanied by text under the letterbox images, to relay story beats along with some pages in their instruction booklets. Sure, the stories were pretty simple and straightforward, and a little silly, but they were also pure 80’s cheese, and that’s its own kind of fun. If you don’t believe me, explain the successful nostalgia of Stranger Things.
In modern video games, by contrast, we have mind-bogglingly stunning visual fidelity available through technological advancements, fully voice-acted characters, cinematic sequences, and in a whole host of titles, story arcs and developments that change based upon decisions the player makes as they go along, impacting the game world itself. But just because we have the power of modern visuals and audio, and the variety of available mechanical systems, and can pack hundreds of hours of content into a single title, that doesn’t mean those newer games are automatically better than older games. There are two titles whose stories, characters, mechanics and artistry are so potent that Ill never forget them, and would gladly replay them even today: Chrono Trigger, for the Super Nintendo, and Xenogears, from the original Playstation system.
Now, video games for home play have traditionally come in two forms; cartridges and discs. Early on, it was all cartridges, but laser/compact disc became the standard pretty much as soon as the Playstation took hold as a dominant system. It wasn’t the first, but they were the best performers in their time, besting the Sega Saturn/Sega CD, the Neo Geo, and the Atari Jaguar CD systems easily. In home game consoles, starting with the Playstation 3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii, games became available for 100% digital purchase and download to hard drives and memory units inside the systems themselves, something PC gamers had been doing for years at this point.
But, there’s a problem here, and it’s a problem that beats with the sickly thump of the diseased, postmodern heart of ‘well actually’. If you have a Kindle, or a digital movie archive account, then you’ve likely come across the User Agreements for accessing digital works of art on those devices/services. Buried in almost all such agreements is this terrible little nugget of poison, which effectively says, “You paid full price for ownership of work of artistic effort X, Y or Z, under the false assumption this conferred full ownership of the work to you. Surprise, sucker! It’s just a license to access it, and we can revoke that license whenever we want, for any reason we chose, or no reason at all!”
Until the last couple of years, this seldom caused a problem, but more and more frequently now, people are losing access to their digital libraries, user accounts, and materials they paid for. This carries echoes of the whole ‘you will own nothing, and you will be happy’ creepfest of the World Economic Forum. Ubisoft made eyes pop just a couple of months ago by making one of their modern classic Assassin’s Creed games digitally unavailable, and even owners of a physical copy could suddenly no longer play digitally purchased DLC, or downloadable content, that released after the core game had been out a while. Owners of the physical copy could no longer load their old save files if they had DLC content on those save files, because said content was no longer accessible/readable by the core game’s programming.
These works of artistic effort are being walled off and kept from their buyers, and moreover, the men and women who worked so hard to craft these pieces are being robbed of their chance to share the product of their labors. Corporate maliciousness deserves its own write-up regarding this subject, but that’s a whole other piece for a whole other time.
So, what exactly does one do now? Digital downloads are convenient, save space, and are generally pretty easily accessed these days. Not only that, but in some cases, the only way to get a copy of one of these artistic endeavors is to do so digitally. For instance, the man known as ‘America’s Boogeyman’, Stephen King, wrote a serialized novella, “Ur”, and had it distributed exclusively through Amazon for their Kindle e-reader devices.The narrative work only exists as an electronic book; if something catastrophic happens to the Amazon servers hosting that file, his work pretty much vanishes from the world as a whole.
‘Surely he has a copy of the work on his own personal hard drive, right’? Likely, yes, but what if that file is lost or corrupted? Can digital truly be trusted as the future home for our artistic efforts, if a simple glitch or power outage can destroy or lose it forever? This is why physical format is still relevant and worthy of preservation and usage, and why things like AI-generated art will never (hopefully) wholly replace authentic, tangible, human-made products of artistic merit; because art, like all things worthy in our world, is a real, permanent, usually tangible thing. Perhaps saying so makes me a modern-day Luddite, but I’ll be one who can still enjoy his books, films and games, even if the networks crash.
What’s more, there’s another reason that this whole topic strikes close to home for me. You see, not so long ago, I realized that an old novel manuscript file that I had decided needed to sit for a while before I went back to trim, edit, and re-draft, had been sitting on my previous laptop for about half a year. When I went back to that laptop, I was able to plug it in and power it up, no problems. I opened up my copy of Microsoft Word on the laptop, and tried to open up that file, and was greeted with a prompt informing me that something had gone wrong, and that the file was not accessible.
Now, that book had been a headache to write in the first place, but I felt it was deserving of a second attempt and cleanup, ultimately resulting in presentation as one of my forthcoming serialized stories. However, due to the fragile nature of all things digital, that first draft is now permanently beyond my reach, unrecoverable, and incapable of being redeemed and used. Thankfully, I’m pretty obsessive when it comes to my outline notebooks, and I can make a brand-new attempt at the story by using the thorough outline and droplists I had handwritten for the story.
Given all of this, I hope that my colleagues in the arts will remember that it’s always best to have a tangible version of their work, so that their efforts do not prove to have been in vain.