Destructoid Checkpoint - Hauntologies in gaming

I’ve been thinking a lot about media in the current age, and how things feel somewhat frozen. The early part of my life was filled with rapid change. I saw the arrival of home consoles and the subsequent death of arcades. The cycle from 8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit seemed measurable by heartbeats. The advance of home computers, which then gave way to the neatly distinct concept of personal computing. Mobile phones bubbled to the surface of the technological zeitgeist and then became smart, and in doing so, became an effective extension of their user.   

Things don’t seem to be moving very fast, if at all, anymore. I was always worried that as I grew older, the world would leave me behind, reduced to the role of an unwilling Luddite by technology that had outpaced me.

Instead, I find myself falling into the ranks of those obsessed with hauntology, a concept wrestled with by Jacques Derrida in “Specters of Marx,” but more fittingly, in this case, by Mark Fisher in “Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures.” While Derrida was the first to really land on hauntology as a concept, it was Fisher who would tie it so inherently to technological advancement and the plundering of the past for new products to sell. 

Fisher became obsessed with the idea of the slow cancellation of the future, that the inherent promise of what would be was dying because there was no longer a desire to get there. Fisher saw that we were becoming marooned in the 20th century, and described the 21st century as being “20th-century culture on higher-definition screens.”

In a basic sense, hauntology is the persistence of unformed elements from the past that keep coming back to exercise some power on the present. These are dead futures, things that never really existed, made real because of a conscious or subconscious blending of the before with the now. You can see it in the endless ways that the now mostly digital means of producing entertainment will seek to replicate the imperfections of film, vinyl, or paper, or how some video games will include filters designed to make their graphics look like they are being shown on CRT screens.

If nostalgia is the plundering of our past for warmth, comfort, and familiarity, then hauntology is the inability to escape the unease, anxiety, and dread of the thing that we were so sure would come, but that never was. The odd feeling of footsteps behind us, as, due to some form of social arrest, there is the memory of a promise unrealized—the reminder of a better or different reality that, for any number of reasons, failed to catalyze. Worse, this cultural intransigence can often be applauded, as if the promise that failed to blossom between past and future would have been burdensome should it actually have materialized. 

It is a complex topic, one I will likely joust with in more detail in the future, but one of the reasons it is on my mind has been a feeling as if gaming’s past is haunting me. I find myself beset by specters, the shades of old games looming up at me, time and again. 

Yes, this week we are talking about remakes and remasters.

Lost futures

While remakes and remasters are not new in the games industry, the last few years have seen a noticeable uptick in volume and their importance within the release calendar for publishers. Nintendo has always been an absolute terror at this, happily going back into their own back catalogue for almost every generation and finding games that could be given a fresh coat of paint, then serving them back up to the audience for a premium price. Sony and Microsoft have also been happy to embrace the process, especially over the last couple of hardware generations. 

A lot of this is because there has just been less of a jump from the PlayStation 4/Xbox One era into the PlayStation 5/Xbox X and S era. The quantum leaps of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Genesis into the Sony PlayStation and Nintendo 64, or even from the PS One into the PS2 and original Xbox series, have already been made. Recent generations have focused more on pushing the boundaries of pixel density than making true systemic leaps that allow for wildly exciting game design experiments. I cannot begin to explain the sheer awe I felt when firing up GTA 3 in my PlayStation 2 for the first time. I do not think I have felt anything like it ever since, and I don’t think that is a good thing.

This is almost terrifyingly dismissive to say, but there just isn’t that much of a difference between the vast majority of games released this generation and the last, from the standpoint of hardware limitations. Yes, graphics have been pushed to be ever shinier, doing more complex things with light and photogrammetry and all that jazz, but for the most part, PlayStation 5 games can run fine on PS4; they just need to be uglier. 

This also means that the design language of games, how they feel, how smart their AI and how deep their conversations can be, has all somewhat stagnated. Older games don’t need to be reimagined or built upon anymore; they can just be made a little shinier, repackaged, and resold. The advantage of a generational leap has now just defaulted, in the mind of the average consumer, to being a graphical jump. Games won’t be expected to actually do anything interesting or magical or different, like the jump from 2D to 3D, or linear to open-world, or static to immersive design. Games will just be games.

Somewhere along the way, some of the promise of what games would be when I was an adult was surpassed, but in other ways, it also failed to materialize. Graphically, everything got better; even pixel art is now swamped in complex shaders and beautiful effects, but the hinted-at fractal-like complexity of the evolved Deus Ex and Ultima Underworlds died. The immersive sim never took over the world; it never even really evolved. Now, the features list of any game is usually the least sought-after thing about it. You know what the game will be, because genre is now a trap, not an aspiration, but you hunger for the minimum specs to know if you can run it.

This paradox, this latent sense of excitement and disappointment, feels like the most defining aspect of modern gaming. Hype trains become so tangible and suffocating as the PR machine fires up, but the reality is that what is being sold is, more often than not, just not worth the price of entry.

Remakes and remasters attempt to plunder my nostalgia in an effort to earn yet more access to my wallet. Already-experienced scenes at higher definitions, improved pixel counts, and better lighting are expected to be enough of a difference to have me part with yet more cash for the thing that a younger version of me already played.

Instead, it is the brutally stark lack of progress, the samey systems and familiar features that turn an attempt at nostalgia-bait into a true hauntology. I cannot escape the cold knowledge that I have been here before. I have played this game, and the promise of what gaming would be, based on what it was, seems to be missing.

It’s the disrespect I can’t stand

If anything, I would argue that the modern remake has become almost disrespectful of the originals they seek to “elevate,” and I mean that for both music, movies, and video games. Seminal music albums will often be remastered with all the character and charm of them sanded down, everything perfectly leveled and stereowidened but almost entirely devoid of the urgency and vigor that made them so good in the first place. 

The vital imprints, dents, and divots made by the anchor of real-world opportunity and geography are diminished. The personality and peculiarity of the exact combinations of available equipment no longer matter; all just raw material fed into Pro Tools and spat back out via the same effects chains, no matter the genre.

There is a remastered version of Rage Against the Machine's jaw-dropping self-titled first album out there that is so bad that it robs the music of all vitality, the vocals of all their bombastic impact. The heaving, barely contained yet ferorciously inviting rage present in the music from start to finish is a ghost of itself, the effort to bring it forward to a modern standard doing nothing but stretch it thin across too large a space, a translucent mockery of the sonic knucklesandwiches that had been delivered with such aplomb by de la Rocha et al. 

(I could sidetrack here about hating streaming services for this very reason, but it would just be one more bullet point on the long list as to why they all suck.)

Movie remakes are almost universally garbage (Roadhouse, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Jacob’s Ladder, Flatliners, Total Recall, Oldboy, The Departed, and Red Dawn all being prime examples). These movies were not all masterpieces by any means, but they possessed oodles of charm, defined by cultural, social, and technological standards of their time. By comparison, the remakes are often soulless, pointless cash grabs that miss any of the original messaging or commentary, forced to leave anything smart or timely about the original behind, paralyzed by the fear of adding new relevance to the scripts instead. 

Even movie remasters tend to just obliterate charm. The never-ending additions and alterations to the original Star Wars movies, the 4K version of just about any Alien movie, the weird recolor of the Tim Burton-era Batman films. Just gross efforts to revisit past art and make it “modern.”

And games are the worst of all, because not only is the charm of the time obliterated, but its destruction is then sold to you as a feature. It must be better because the lighting acts just like real lighting now, and the polygon count of something you never look at for long is higher.

The major downside to all this is that it has given publishers and developers what they perceive as an easy win when it comes to not just selling us on a new generation, but also on the idea of remakes and remasters being a truly valuable part of that era. 

Sony decided to make a remaster of Demon’s Souls the focal point of the launch of the PlayStation 5. The game looked stunning, it truly did, but it just didn’t have the same impact as the original release did. The art of it had already been experienced. Ears, eyes, and heart had already devoured the terrifyingly disjointed tale of hardship, sacrifice, longing, and power. What we were left with was an often unflattering contrast against more modern games that, when broken down to their basic parts, just hadn’t really moved the language of design forward all that much in the interim years.

This is why nostalgia is so powerful, and why the nostalgia of the gaming industry is so odd. Most media uses nostalgia to sell you on the idea that you can revisit a time or place, experience your own personal retro. You can be, for a brief moment, who you used to be.

What games are actually doing is serving up hauntological reimaginings that can barely imagine anything at all. The future that those games first hinted at when you played them is dead. The remasters are just specters of promises unkept.

Those ephemeral futures are a place you can never really get to. The only place you can be is the present, and that present is starting to look alarmingly like the past. Ultimately, you can never really visit the same places, the same songs, the same games, and the same movies as the same person; you can only ever be who you have become.

Exposure to those things changed you, and you can never recapture the magic of being who you were before that catalytic event. You cannot wipe them from your mind and your heart and be who you were before you found them. Worse, you cannot get the time back between the promise that you felt and the harsh, pulsating reality of a now that has failed to live up to what could have been, because it's easier and cheaper to sell you the familiar than the new. 

The remaster or remake is the ultimate act of modern alchemy, turning the gold of art into the bilge of pure product, trapped somewhere between the bubbling hope of its initial creation and the stark stagnation of its reimergence from the fog of the past.

What ya doing, Destructoid?

Over on the mainland of Destructoid, Scott Duwe has realized that age brings a yearning for single-player experiences. - “Multiplayer games are generally enriched by having friends to chat it up with, talk crap to, or work together with to achieve an objective. But by myself? I detest my teammates, I dislike how sweaty I have to play if I want to succeed with random allies, and it usually just ends up pissing me off more than anything else.”

Adam Newell spoke to the 2XKO team about the potential for original characters in their upcoming League of Legends-based fighting game.

Bhernardo Viana is wondering about the future of games, and why randomized experiences might be a thing for a while. - “In 2025, it feels like the 30-minute randomized gameplay loops of rogue-likes are the new trend. Every game seems bound to become a rogue-like, or at least become a bit more random than it would have been if it had been released 10 years ago. Rogue Prince of Persia, Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core, and [REDACTED], from the world of The Callisto Protocol, are games that embrace the rogue-like label after being of different genres in their original form.”

Kacee Fay spent time with Tiny Bookshop, happily nestling between the pages of this indie effort from neoludic. - “Tiny Bookshop is rich with secrets and fresh content to uncover. Whenever I thought I’d seen it all, I’d end up finding or unlocking even more. This includes special collectibles you can use to spruce up your shop, new interactables around the various spots you can visit, and fresh locations you can only explore on certain days or in certain seasons.”