DISPATCHES JULY

Leave them all behind

The first two letters in E358, about abandoning fandoms and losing saves, got me thinking about what we really take from our attachments to particular media. If we can walk away from a ubiquitous corporate media entity because one or more of the important people turned out to be a shit, were we already looking for an excuse to let go? I too know the mind-emptying thud of realisation that you’ve just lost a precious game save, and the peace that follows. Was I ready to find a new fixation and just hadn’t realised it?

As series, franchises, episodes and new content updates stretch off into infinity – not just in games, but in TV, film, and books – it might pay to stop now and then, and wonder what we’re sticking around for. If it’s the friends we made along the way, then maybe there’s a dignity in moving on to greener pastures, and beckoning them to follow.

Alex Whiteside

Sugar for the pill

Jake Mellor’s letter in E358 got me thinking about my own consumption of computer games. For me personally it does matter who makes a game and how. Rather than punitive, I see this as positive. Look at it the other way: I frequently choose to purchase games because I want to support the developers. I bought Hades on day one of release because I had followed its development in the wonderful Noclip documentary and had come to know and appreciate Supergiant as a profoundly ethical and good company. I recently bought Dicey Dungeons after listening to a fascinating interview with Terry Cavanagh on the Eggplant podcast, and Signs Of The Sojourner after a feature in this very magazine. One of the things Edge does well is to peel the curtain back a little to reveal the people and companies who make these games. Edge shows us time and again that these creations are inherently linked to their creators. So if I choose to buy games to support people I respect and value, I guess it cuts the other way too. I choose not to buy games – and indeed other products – not because everyone who was involved in it is bad, but because the weight of evidence tips me into wondering if this is a largely unethical offering which I should probably skip.

Joe Crook

Some fine choices for recent purchases there – we’re certainly pleased to hear that we haven’t been banging on about Signs Of The Sojourner in vain. On the topic of things you should probably skip, though, it might be an idea to turn the page right about now…

Sweetness and light

Joe Crook’s blithe dismissal (E357) that “we don’t need to preserve everything” actually made me furious. His belief that “artworks can really shine precisely because they are fleeting” is embarrassingly reminiscent of one of my colleagues who once told me that only cappuccino stencils were “true art”: never mind Rembrandt or Picasso, milky froth was superior to them all because it could not be “commodified” as it was “ephemeral”. Then, oblivious to the irony and devoid of any self-awareness, he took out his smartphone and snapped several photos of his cup.

There are multiple ways that this hostility to physical media is objectionable. Firstly, it smacks of I-know-somethingyou-don’t-know scenester elitism, and like crusty geriatric hippies who are still trying to dine out on bleary foggy memories of Woodstock, eventually you run out of stories to tell. Someone watching a recording may not “capture really being there” but even if he cannot tell that story, he can still use his own experience of

“I frequently choose to purchase games because I want to support the developers”

watching that video to tell his own, different story. Why deny that to him?

Secondly, it is irresponsible. We are teetering on the brink of a digital dark age where we’re just a few power surges away from petabytes of data being irrevocably erased. Physical media is more preservable.

Really, though, Joe’s justifications for “ephemeral media” miss the point: the loss of physical media, which used to be able to be constantly repeated, is not analogous to the unreplicable uniqueness of going to a gig or watching a play. “Cloud gaming” and “games as a service” are euphemisms masking what’s really going on: digital landlordism. You own physical media, but you only lease digital media; not only can you be evicted at any time but your contract can be changed without your approval.

We already have multiple examples of online streaming services actively doing this by editing older movies to delete politically incorrect jokes. On its own, that seems laudable – “you don’t want to be offensive, do you?” is a great way to smother misgivings – but it’s the thin end of the wedge. Once the idea of service providers freely altering content is normalised, more blatant media control can be exerted. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to remind readers that there’s a whole passage of Nineteen EightyFour about this very thing: “History had stopped. Nothing exists except an endless Present in which the Party was always right.”

What’s worse is that this has happened entirely with our sanguine, thoughtless approval. For nothing more than the mild convenience of not having to store CDs, gamers have surrendered their influence over business and willingly reduced themselves from owners into renters. Robert Frazer

Going out on a limb here, but we imagine you’re not a digital subscriber, Robert? Regardless, we’re obviously sympathetic towards any argument for physical media – even if, for some of us, the issue of storage is becoming more than just a mild inconvenience. Still, after a month in which Sony has gone back on its decision to close the PlayStation Store for PS3 and Vita, the transient nature of digital media has never been more in the spotlight. It feels like this discussion has some way to go yet.

Something more

While reading E357 I was struck by the old “don’t judge a book by its cover” adage. Specifically, I looked at the screenshots for Book Of Travels (no pun intended) and initially dismissed it as another modern reimagining of SNES-era RPGs. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but there seem to be a lot of them at the moment and they are just not for me.

Then I read the write-up, watched some gameplay footage, and now I think Book Of Travels could be the best thing ever if developer Might And Delight pulls it off. (You had at me at “why not make a name for yourself as a tea-addicted gambler?”)

So now I’m wondering if there is a way to divorce considered opinion from that initial snap judgement. It’s not a serious suggestion, since I have no good idea how you’d do it. (Perhaps a column where the game title and type are revealed at the end without any screenshots, like a sort of blind taste test?) Indeed, maybe the solution is for me to stop giving unsolicited editorial advice and focus on being less judgemental on the basis of six screenshots.

Leonid Tarasov

We always welcome constructive feedback, Leo, old chum – particularly from long-term readers such as yourself – though you’ve probably answered your own question there. Also: no screenshots? We’re currently holding our art editor back.

How do you do it

My late father always used to read newspapers in an odd order. He would frequently turn to the back first for the sport, then read the TV and puzzle pages in the middle before working his way through from the front. Just recently I have been mixing up the order in which I read

Edge. E357, rather uncharacteristically, I read from cover to cover. With E358 I found myself intrigued by the cover story on Lemnis Gate and read that big piece first – something I rarely do. A more typical order would be a quick browse through, then the front section including Dialogue, the reviews and Time Extend/Long Game before the previews, nipping into the middle for the team feature or The Making Of before rounding an issue off with the main features.

I find this so much easier to do with a physical magazine than digital or a web page. There is something about turning the pages, scanning the captions for sarcasm and then finding out the game I was hyped for is disappointing in some way. The Post Script scrutiny and interviews in particular seem even more important when committed to the printed page somehow, as if this is the final word and Edge will brook no argument. I would also love to see more coverage of the retro scene, building on the excellent look at the MiSTer hardware and going deeper than emulation or backward-compatible titles.

And so I have a pile of magazines I regularly dip back into, re-reading features and adding titles to an ever-growing Steam wish list in hopes of a bargain. The physical magazine remains important to me, no matter which order I read it, and the subscriber covers add to the collectible aspect. Just promise me one thing: no more massive runs of multiple covers, please?

Andrew Fisher

Come on, like you didn’t turn to these pages first this month. But however you choose to read Edge, thank you for the continued support. Twelve months’ worth of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate will surely help you to save a bit of extra cash to invest in any future multicover run. And if anyone has any complaints about that, sorry, but this is our final word and we will brook no argument.