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Retail Hallucinations And The Pointlessness Of Owning A PlayStation 4 or Xbox One

This article is more than 9 years old.

I gave it back. I could have afforded it, but only just barely and it would have hurt. So after a little less than a month with a PlayStation 4 I returned it to its chemical-scented packaging and got my money back. Sony ’s newest console is one of the fastest selling game machines in the history of the industry, and its combined sales with the Xbox One is more than 70% higher than that of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 over the same timeframe. There is an undeniable desire for these new machines, a hunger for change without knowing what exactly that change should entail. Nearly a year later, it remains unclear what's really different.

The energy that drives console transitions has always been one of groundbreaking curiosity, to see what new structures of play might emerge as the technical impediments around them were removed. In hindsight, many of these shifts didn’t produce longlasting ideas—the SNES’s ability to fake three-dimensionality with parallax scaling was easily left behind, as was the use of pre-rendered backgrounds on the first PlayStation. But emerging alongside new consumer machinery, these techniques added to the belief that participating in this economy of technological pleasure was fundamentally productive, producing experiences with no historical precedent. With each new generation there is an exponential increase in the need for processing power required to support linear increases in number and detail of objects drawn on screen, as Killzone Shadow Fall producer Anton Wiegert explained to me last month. Accordingly, there's no arguing that PlayStation 4 and Xbox One games look better, but the cost of producing better looking images has risen at a faster rate than that of perceptible improvements in image quality.

The PlayStation 4 has a more powerful CPU/GPU configuration than the PlayStation 3 and 16 times more memory, yet the distinctions these produce are almost entirely cosmetic, running games at a higher resolution with bigger texture files and extra special effects for explosions and water physics. The differences are so imperceptible they require zoomed-in frame by frame analysis to identify, while the effect on the play experience is marginal. Bungie’s Destiny is emblematic of the difference between the two generations. I chose to play the game through on an Xbox 360 instead of the PlayStation 4 after having played both versions. The screen resolution is perceptibly lower, wall textures become blurry up close, and there aren’t quite as many visual effects accompanying explosions and muzzle flash, but the experience of playing the game is otherwise identical. The game’s skyboxes are as grand and evocative, the shooting sequences as dramatic and tactically tense, the speed of movement and sense of overwhelming scale are all in-tact. And while they exist in different places, the PlayStation 4 version of the game is filled with just as many affects of fakery, the awkwardly animated joint on a body, bad lip synching, the tricks of texture wallpapering that project depth from a distance but still flatten into set dressing up close. The game is certainly prettier on the newer machines, but the idea of the game and its execution are interchangeable.

On some fundamental level this is a violation of what console transitions have been throughout history, and an exploitation of the desire to justify new devices through the experience of new ideas and not just higher resolution versions of older ones. Buying a new console now is less an act of discovery than one of continuing companionship, an opportunity to reaffirm one’s commitment to the faceless economics of industrial play, not because the community has produced something newly meaningful, but on faith that the size of the industry necessary to produce new boxes en masse couldn't exist if it didn't regularly produce new experiences. If Rise, Destiny, Forza, or Killzone have so far failed to produce anything measurably different from what's already been done, it’s only a temporary postponement of an inevitable breakthrough surely being worked on in an office park somewhere in Dallas or Redmond.

Buying new game consoles has become a kind of zombie patronage underwritten by a neurosis of identity loss, even as the process of evolution that once conferred that identity has begun to stagnate. This is the first generation where an update in hardware has not been preceded by some creative yearning to design ideas that simply couldn’t be done on the old machinery. One has heard quite a lot from developers about how convenient new machines would be to work on—it would be nice to have more memory, or standard hard drives—but there’s little talk about why any of that should be the basis for getting another $400 or $500 commitment from anyone.

The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are the first game consoles designed for no purpose other than to keep consumers from drifting away out of boredom, repackaging boredom with expensive gilding to make it seem like a new thought. This kind of neurotic consumption has been mastered in all manner of industry, from iPhones to shaving cartridge refills. To step out of the tradition of regularly buying a newer version of a device to do the same basic things as the last one did, is to admit that the things the last one did  may not be worthwhile. Without the manufactured spectacle of expense and restricted buy-in, you would have to wonder why you need a 64-bit processor to send emojis or a bleeding edge camera sensor when most of the photos taken with it will never be seen again. The next generation technology box has become a donation plate in a church, a storehouse for speculative optimism and a ritualistic release from having to imagine new thoughts alone, while instead supporting a grand economic scaffold of busyness, the complication of which rationalizes that exhaustion of thought in the face of the future.

To admit that the experience of playing Destiny on a machine engineered a decade ago is interchangeable with that of playing it on a newer and more expensive one is to accept the animating force in game culture has always been hallucinatory, influenced as much by the needful neurotics of the people people holding the controller as it has been the empirical advances in creative thought run through increasingly complicated microprocessors. For decades technology has been the backstop of our dreams for social and economic progress, but it’s turning out to be more of a drainage ditch meant to channel engagement away from the materially social and political, a dizzying spiral of disposable breakthroughs that seem like miracles until they’re so commonly accessible everyone can have them.

Most of what you buy with a new console is access to the hallucinatory intermediary period between these two points in time, when historical deadends seem like doors to the future, an idea that has value so long as it never actually arrives. When I bought my little share of that mercifully distracting future, it seemed, after seven previous generational tries, indistinguishable from the past. But the emotional pull of the black box was so powerful I kept thinking it was me who’d made the mistake, right up until the cashier took it out of my hands and placed it back on the other side of the cash register divide.