does anyone remember that game which had a section where you kind of wall-ran along the side of whales? i was going to ask if stellar blade was related to it, but i’m failing to find the game i mean, thats pretty much all i remember about it.
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(can you run on whales in stellar blade?)
they just literally have nothing else. somehow the ps5 has been out for, what, 3 and a half years already? it feels like it never moved beyond launch, like there are no games at all. I guess that’s what happens when the kinds of games that it’s supposed to specialize in cost $300 million to make and all the dev teams capable of making them have laid off half their staff in the last two years.
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that last message i posted immediatley had “3m” in the top right corner, and the one before it had “2m” … now it has 2m and the one before it has 1m … i guess my clock is out of sync and those are actually times in the future (???)
after having this in my head all day I do think they should probably launch this with a Nicki Minaj track now
its ok i waited and now all my posts are in the past
disappointingly they never seemed to become 0m posts
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Increasingly impossible to imagine what Sony (or anybody) could offer the like 5 publishers capable of making this type of game in exchange for exclusivity when porting to all platforms is by far the cheapest part of their entire dev process
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and still, the PS5 is, like, a pretty good deal. just feels pretty shit that the main selling point is ‘what else are you gonna do, spend $500 on a mid level video card?’ which, yeah, that’s exactly what I did, but if you don’t or didn’t have a mostly functional gaming PC sitting around to throw that card in, you may as well buy a PS5 I guess.
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Bless you for giving me an excuse to post this yet again.
《Drifting : Weight of Feathers》
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Hey the PS5 has gotten 4 games this year so far, it’s the best year for the system ever!
Dragon’s Dogma 2
Rise of Ronin
Stellar Blade
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth
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people on twitter a few weeks ago (when sony said the ps5 was in the second half of its projected lifespan) were listing all the consoles that have more exclusives than the ps5. virtual boy, pcfx, wii u, etc
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I forgot Silent Hill Short Message.
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You’re not the only one
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the hell did Knack do to you to deserve this stray
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‘too many of x’ type discussions read to me like wanting to vent about how bled dry art becomes through attention economics/ the white noise of Content without wanting to actually make a critique of structures rather than individuals. tho it has an interesting ambivalence that acknowledges markets give us what markets want and not what we want
something i think gets muddled when talking abt art and commodification is mistaking decommodification as an unquestionably good thing. a kind of partial-decommodification of the type music has gone through since the early 2000s is in a lot of ways much worse for producers of that commodity, while basically just being a good thing for capitalism… the movement of things towards becoming less and less like commodities is not an anticapitalist movement in itself, & is more like an automated defence mechanism to subdue the movement of capital out of the ruling class imo. if nobody can ‘own’ anything and we can only rent/subscribe, then that’s all good for them, and worse for us. reads to me like preventing the working class from leaching and accumulating property / capital via inheritance over generations.
mb nitpicky/tangenty but find this like ‘digital idealism’ puts a bit too much stock in the digital’s capacity to fully represent non-discreteness… part of the strange appeal of digital art is precisely it’s inability to be ‘smooth’, there’s always this underlying sense of a primal gap/void that becomes more prominent at lower resolutions (the eerie /lonely feeling of ie nes games & like certain types of glitch music seems the same thing to me: the unseen/unheard gaps becoming present via pixels/audio aliasing). reminds me of LLM hype ppl saying how well they can ‘convincingly imitate human activity’ as if communication via text is indeed ‘human activity unmediated’
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But music is a perfect example of something that’s been commodified to death though! It’s literally like opening the music tap now!
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i always thought it was really funny when Knack was the game you’d see advertised on the side of buses and stuff, iconic character “200 3d tchotchkes sort of shaped into a Hellboy”, my main memory of watching a longplay of it how uncannily it felt like an aesthetic product that would exist inside the universe of car insurance commercials
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the single greatest triumph about the PS5 is that now we can experience Knack in 4k at 60 fps
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So, I guess, I’m not sure if this has been evident or not, so I’ll say this just for the sake of clarity—I don’t think of a commodity as something intrinsically material, really; I mean it basically in the same sense as Marx does in Capital, as in like, some kind of object which a group of people see as having certain uses, and which they assign exchange-values to based on those uses, quantitative measurements of how much a given object of that kind could be fairly traded for an object of another kind.
In this sense, commodities acquire their exchange-values through a group of people, who assign them to the commodities through a loose and ever-changing consensus (at least theoretically). Also, an exchange-value is always a relation, between two commodities; specifically, a commodity’s exchange-values are always relative to the other commodities the group makes available to itself for trade. In this sense, and because the group varies with time, place, milieu, etc., these exchange-values are influenced by many things apart from the innate characteristics of the compared objects.
Although commodities do have a history, it exists pretty far apart from what you might consider an individual physical object’s “archaeology,” as in like, the pattern of its material life and what roles it’s played materially in different people’s lives and so on, especially as evidenced in the physical makeup of the object itself (like, taking stock of its scuffmarks, times it’s been damaged and repaired, “customizations” that have been performed on it, etc., and trying to infer things about what’s happened to it based on those). Some objects have a rich, elaborate archaeology in this sense, but only the vaguest presence as a commodity—since I grew up in Austin, TX. I think immediately of something like the Treaty Oak, which has had a strange, elaborate, and rather murky several-hundred-year-long material/horticultural life up until now including its attempted poisoning in 1989, but which has only lived its life as a commodity in the form of things like “part of land put on sale by Mrs. W. H. Caldwell in 1926 for $7000,” and which hasn’t changed hands since 1937 when the land it’s on was purchased by the city and became a public park.
It’s true that I don’t particularly like the influence commodification has had on the arts overall, but I wouldn’t say the difference in the way I’m advocating for looking at it is different from the commodity way in a physical vs. abstract or a quantitative vs. qualitive sense. Hopefully it’s clear now from what I said in the last passage that what I mean by “commodity” is also pretty highly abstract, like, really far away from any given physical object a lot of the time, and sometimes even extremely vague and conceptual and only given any kind of clear boundaries through legal constructions (like in the concept of brand ownership). The essential characteristics of a commodity are just that it can be owned and exchanged for other commodities, like, whatever those might be.
In particular, I was focusing on the commodification of what we might call an art object’s “recipe”—a set of parameters, materials, and procedures that could be used to replicate it, to whatever degree of specificity the artist deems significant. I was putting forward the idea, basically, of artists as researchers of these “recipes,” techniques for producing a material object or even just an immediate sensory experience with some sort of aesthetically-significant qualities. Under the legal regime that currently prevails in my and many other countries, these recipes in the abstract, as well as the rights to put one to use in the abstract, are traded as commodities unto themselves in the form of copyrights, trade secrets, patents, etc. This is possible through the widespread belief that if they are kept secret or the right to use them and sell the results is restricted to an individual or group through social convention, the objects or experiences they lead to, produced and sold as their own commodities, will then fetch a higher price. This allows the rights to use or publish the recipe to be treated as “assets” in business terms.
To me this is a collosal waste of these “recipes.” A fact that especially galls me about this kind of practice, speaking of recipes, is that we have practically no written recipes at all for bread from Medieval England, France etc. until the very late Middle Ages/early Renaissance, and even then quite scantily. This is largely because bread was overwhelmingly produced by commercial bakeries then, which kept their recipes highly secret, passing them down only orally to trusted apprentices, in order to secure their trade:
Who produced all the bread consumed by medieval people? Commercial bakers — and the best indication of the importance of their product and their profession in the medieval society was the amount of regulation placed on them. This regulation was both internal and external in origin. Bakers organized themselves into self-regulating commercial trade cooperatives known as guilds. These collectives functioned as a combination of trade union and market monopoly and regulatory body. Guilds compelled bakers to join their groups; no rogue enterprises were allowed in guild territory. Once you paid in, however, your business and your family enjoyed the protections associated with guild membership. As a master baker, you could take and train apprentices, without fear of having your proprietary recipes stolen and used to establish another profitable bakery under someone else’s name…
…However, there are few recipes for the making of bread in medieval manuscripts; it was a separate and distinct professional craft, and therefore not included in cookbooks or domestic manuals.
—“The Flower of Wheat: Bread in the Middle Ages and Colonial Era,” Vickie L. Ziegler, Penn State University Center for Medieval Studies
Isn’t that heartbreaking? Those medieval bakers robbed humanity forever of the knowledge of the processes they followed, as they saw them, to create bread, one of the most important and central foods in their societies, because they saw this as essential to turn a good profit from those processes and thus stay afloat commercially. Centuries later, this style of belief and practice remains alive and well, here in our own time, in many areas of our culture, the arts included.
I suppose at this point it should go without saying that what it sounds to me like you’re talking about, focusing on the “archaeology” or “material-cultural life” of an object if I understand you correctly, is not something I have a problem with at all, and in fact think is a wonderful and important thing to focus on in its own right. I think, in a way, when you focus directly on that, it takes you kind of further afield from the practice of making art per se and more in the direction of archaeology or history; those are really valuable fields to artists and can be an important source of technical information and artistic inspiration as in the case of art history, it’s just that those fields have their own methods and generate a different kind of media (typically prose in text and lexture form which aims not so much at particular aesthetic effects as it does at conveying interesting “hard” information plainly, I think we can say 
).
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