#we think of new houses and new construction. we think of how our wool greatcoat still holds out nearly a century after its making.
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Our apologies if we're... inconsistent in the next little bit. If you'll allow us to be briefly negative, the 3DS/WiiU online services shutdown is... hitting us, with the abrupt GRIEF of something that was loved and cherished and cared for being abruptly... shut down, just like that. Features taken out forever. Parts of games that could have been loved for years to come simply being... gone. An axe that, unlike with older games, CAN'T simply be recovered from, except with infrastructure. Communication between games lost forever. A whole link in things gone, with a lifespan of barely more than twelve years.
It's...
We enjoy the Pokemon games. If we were to start a trade between two GBA Emerald cartridges nowadays, provided we tracked down the hardware, it could still be done. Nothing is lost of communication features. Platinum is a full game without the wifi features, albeit missing a few trade evolutions, and if you have a wifi router with antiquated enough settings, you can still transfer your pokemon forward to Gen 5. Black and White lose few features and can be played in full without hurting too much. With the 3ds...
Pokemon Bank being shut down means no more transfers to future games. A guillotine to transferring beloved Pokemon forward, with no real remedy. ORAS's secret bases rely on passively collecting data from other participants to function. Hacking 3DS games is already difficult, and we doubt that reverse engineering parts of infrastructure that are simply gone will be easy. Maybe it's just other things fucking with us, and we're definitely being a bit dramatic, but... the eShop shutdown already cut off massive amounts of previously playable games. Who will archive online features? Who will archive the things that require connective infrastructure? As things grow more complicated, they grow more difficult to repair. How long before it becomes impossible to replace that which once was?
Twelve years feels like a horribly short lifespan for any technology, and things keep trending worse - making things faster and faster and more and more rushed as the structures they're built on require more and more work. This isn't sustainable. This can't keep going. This market is running faster than we can handle, and it feels like it's only getting faster. Modern things keep being discarded the moment they aren't shiny and new, keep leaning more and more on communication and intercommunication and infrastructure that will rot the moment it isn't actively attended to. How much worse will it be for future things?
There is a game on our computer, fully installed. No online features at all. Yet, it cannot be played. It was made with AOV to prevent piracy, and the servers it was meant to connect to no longer exist.
We don't want more games to be made the same way. But we don't think that this road branches anywhere but an awful demise, approaching faster and faster by the day.
#we speak#negative chatter#we do apologize for this. we've been spiralling on and off for the past While#a specific project we thought we had time for is now on a six month deadline and we aren't coping well with it#it's. look let's just say we're not in a great state of mind#this is a subject we feel strongly about and this is hitting us in the gut in all the wrong ways#we hate how archiving games isnt considered important we hate how digital history is seen as Less Important#we hate how everything that we cant hold in our hand is liable to vanish the moment that someone decides it isnt making profit#we. don't like the fact that the lives of the things we care for are growing more and more finite#there's a rot in everything digital that just grows and grows and grows#and we arent sure it can be rooted out. and we arent sure it can be stopped. but it grows and grows and grows#as more and more peoples lives and health are dedicated to a beast that eats and eats and eats#we don't like how modern things are made. we don't like the way things are going.#we think of new houses and new construction. we think of how our wool greatcoat still holds out nearly a century after its making.#we think of how our new winter coat had to be discarded barely five years after its purchase.#we crave permanancy and variety but more and more everything is growing faster and blander and more discardable#and this is only a symptom of it. but it brings enough to the surface that we're struggling to cope.
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