Braid – Jonathan Blow
It’s inevitable: it’s all going digital. How soon I’m not so sure, but that’s just a detail. However, legal and financial wrangling aside (a little hobby horse of mine), there is something I’m going to miss about having an object to hold and cherish. This really struck home the other night when I was playing Jonathan Blow’s Braid which recently came out on PC (long after its Xbox release). I fell for it in no time and felt it was so seamlessly created, such a complete package, that it just cried out to be lavishly wrapped up in a bespoke, tactile package. The reality is that it came in cold hard bits that for one reason or another I find much harder to cherish. There’s definitely a risk of sounding exactly like vinyl lovers do when talking about CDs and banging on about the artwork and that’s something I’m keen to avoid, so I’m not going to wax nostalgic about the way PC games used to be packaged because let’s face it they were packaged like crap. Needlessly huge and cumbersome boxes gave way to impersonal plastic DVD boxes with ever diminishing manuals; the closest we get to object fetish now is brushed aluminium ‘Steelbooks’ – which I suppose is nice but it seems like too little too late. When Braid whispered in my ear about reification, images came to mind of folded card embossed with patterns, a rainbow of matte colours, a notable absence of child-like, techno-hip, jumbo fonts yelling the title out and a distinct lack of bullet-pointed product feature list on the back.
I’m not a fanatic collector or rabid object fetishist, but I do wonder about my tastes. Am I outdated? Is this something I’ll grow out of? Or is holding things, touching things, something that humans won’t escape? Maybe it’s to do with ownership I suppose, in that we might sub-consciously equate being able to hold something as having the power and control over it and confirming our ownership of it – having the object there permanently is irrevocable proof. But I wonder if that attitude is the same for the next generation that has grown up with digital ‘possessions’ (for lack of a better word)? Do they still equate physical possession with ownership? Do they even think of ownership in the same way? The shift from vinyl to compact disc was a minor step, updating and modernising without really changing the premise, but the shift from hard-copy to digital is a whole new paradigm as you can’t hold it and it doesn’t even have a package! Thinking about it, I have become attached to certain box-less programs I use and that feels similarly warm and fuzzy. Maybe it’s even purer as I’m not swayed by fancy packaging. In any case, it will be interesting to look back in ten, twenty, thirty years and see how far we’ve come (or not as the case may be). Will the digital revolution be utter and complete or will we still continue to lovingly weigh ourselves down with objects?