Back in the ps2 days I would have gotten a booklet with game instructions and lore, a booklet on how to not have a seizure while playing the system, and a coupon for a gaming magazine that doesn’t exist anymore.
it makes me sad as hell. I use to pour over that little booklet 5 or 6 times before even starting the game. I’d look at all the little concept art and lore. I’d try to imagine what the game would be like in my head based on what the game prompted me with. I’d imagine being in the world myself and what the heck the dash button meant.
There have been a lot of reblogs insulting me about this, but nah. I stand by it. It’s not a giant sadness, but a tiny tinge of feeling like something is missing in the same way that I miss cd booklets with lyrics sheets, art, and listed credits or dvds with features. Somehow I as an adult move on with my life. Fuck, I even make my own art y’all.
For me it’s about presentation of it an an experience. Going to see a movie in a theater vs. watching it on netflix. I like the presentation. I also have a fondness for pop culture ephemera on a layer beyond that. Booklets often had lore and art that helped you get into the mindset of those creating it. It was interesting to see what they thought to be important lore, or trying to cram in stuff they couldn’t fit into the game itself.
Also, less universally, it was cool to read credits. See who worked on what. The little dedications and special thanks. Credits exist in games still, but it was like a theater program for your game.
it was neat and a reminder that it was people that made the things I like, not corporations or some big auteur.
I used to get so excited about the art in the booklets!!! I’d copy them all the time trying to get better at drawing. And the booklets would have little character info profiles with fun facts and stuff!!! I miss it.
A thousand years ago, back in the 80s and 90s, computer games used to come with stuff called “feelies.” Feelies were things like maps, or travel brochures to the places depicted in the game, or crime scene photos for the murder you needed to solve, or tickets for an in-game train. Little bits of ephemera or merch, basically. Most of the time they were meant to give you extra lore, or some added immersion into the game world. Sometimes they acted as a primitive kind of copy protection - maybe you needed to tell a guard a password that was scrawled into the theif’s journal that came with the game (that you thought was just gonna be extra lore, until you encountered the guard). Sometimes they were silly things! The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game came with an empty plastic bag that the game assured you contained a microscopic spaceship fleet, for instance.
This was in addition to beautifully printed manuals on glossy paper, and hint books or lore books (or lore books that doubled as cryptic hint books) that came with the games. And when I say books, I don’t mean bookLETS. I mean books with covers and spines. Not always proper books, of course - a lot of them were booklets. But a lot of them WERE actual books, short though they might be. There was so much love poured into these! So much creativity! And this was all for just regular, standard retail editions of the games!
I see $100+ Special Ultimate Luxury Edition Pre-Order versions of games these days, and what do they come with? A poster, some bonus consumable items (and if you’re lucky those items will apply to multiple save files, but it’s not a given), an extra character skin or two (only available through the pre-order! better buy it now!!)…It’s bullshit.
Good feelies create a tangible link to the game world. There’s something about the feel of physical things in your hands - real things, even if they’re actually pretend things - that adds so much immersion to the fantasy. It is genuinely so cool to hold a wanted poster, admire the beautiful art and roughened paper, contemplate where you might wanna display it on your bookshelves, and then not get mugged by a side character who offers to help you because you recognized him from the wanted poster and knew he was not to be trusted.
They didn’t stop making feelies because nobody wanted them. They stopped making them for the same reason they stopped giving dev teams time to actually finish their games instead of forcing out broken releases that take months of patching to make presentable: Because some bastard decided doing it that way would earn the shareholders extra profit, and to hell with everything else.
“As WGA leaders meet today to finalize our deal, we begin a new era for writers — and for labor in our industry. But we also begin to face the final and most insidious form of unionbusting propaganda: a years-long effort to sell the lie that our strike was not worth it.
Over the coming days, months, and years, the studios, streamers, and their surrogates will take every opportunity to undermine what we have won together. They will seize on the inevitable consessions and compromises made by our NegCom as proof that we “failed.”
They will urge us to overlook all that we won through hard work and unwavering solidarity. They will claim it wasn’t enough, that we should have gotten X instead of Y, that we lost more by striking than we gained in this new contract. And they will be wrong.
They will tell us that the strike was unnecessary, it was a waste of our time and our savings, that our agents or managers or lawyers could have gotten us everything we won through individual negotiations without anyone having to walk a picket line. Well… then why didn’t they?
As hard as it is to believe right now, these lies can work. They’ve worked before. During our 2017 strike authorization vote, it was shocking to discover how many members believed we lost the ‘07-08 strike, in which we went on strike for the internet — and won the internet.
This didn’t happen by accident. It was the result of years of whispering by studios and anti-union allies. And they don’t just do it because they’re bitter about losing. They push the lie that we used our power and lost because they hope to stop us from using our power to win.
Our strike was necessary because, in our individual negotiations, our employers consistently refused to acknowledge our right and reasonable demands. Because the profound changes we needed could only be won through the unique and overwhelming power of collective bargaining.
Our strike was necessary because our employers made it necessary by driving our income down 23% in 10 years. Because they refused to address free work in features, streaming coverage in comedy-variety, the abuses of mini-rooms and the threat of AI until we withheld our labor
Our strike was necessary. Our strike was effective. Our strike is a victory. If anyone tries to tell you otherwise, it’s ‘cause they never want to see us stand up for ourselves again. Don’t believe it. We won this fight. We’re the WGA, and when we fight, we win. #WGAStrong”
i literally can’t stop thinking about this video and i lose it every time
Lmfao
okay everything about this video is absolute gold:
the fact that the guy argues via the puppet the entire time
the music
“let’s discuss the contradiction”
the overuse of the word “camera”
the way the puppet goes from trying to placate the guy to actively arguing against the guy and like turning it around on the guy
“youre consciously making a conscious choice”
the fact that by the end the puppet is basically screaming and the music is just. so loud.
“YOURE BREAKING THE CAMERA” as the video abruptly ends
for anyone who wants to see more stuff like this, you can probably find clips of it on YouTube. it came from a show called “Wonder Showzen” and it’s responsible for these gems, too:
“But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work. We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.”
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