In his essay, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?,” Bruno Latour suggests that unlike the military industrial complex, “It does not seem to me that we have been as quick, in academia, to prepare ourselves for new threats, new dangers, new tasks, new targets” (225). These sentiments were recently echoed by his former student, Prof. Bart Simon, in Montreal’s game studies listserv, “y’all are being mighty quiet for the birth of the post-next-gen. You (we) are the critical voice of game culture and yet at TAG and even on the gamesnetwork there has been not a peep.” Dr. Simon is referring to the “8^th Generation” of video game consoles released this month, Sony’s Playstation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One. He offered several hypotheses for why scholars have been silent thus far, which prompted 26 additional messages on the listserv, a record number for the four years I have been a subscriber. Perhaps our tastes as scholars have pushed us towards independent titles which provide bite sized (read intelligible) innovations? Perhaps we are just too busy? Perhaps we are just too slow?

In an attempt to say something interesting in the face of too much data and not enough time, I have produced a distant reading of these video game console. Inspired by The Onion’s satirical comparison table, I thought of looking at what Latour calls “matters of fact” and “matters of concern.” My hypothesis was that the comparison table would point readers to those features of these consoles which are currently being socially produced (i.e. matters of concern), whereas missing features would be those which have fallen into that which is culturally taken for granted (i.e. matters of fact). The Onion in this instance is offering comedic critique of games journalism, corporate hype and the absence of social functions in these tech specs abstractions.

The Onion’s PS4 vs. Xbox One comparison

To begin, I selected The Verge.com’s comparison chart articles because they chronicled the 20 years of PlayStation and Xbox consoles. From there I recreated a meta-chart, focusing on the features that were being compared.The table is meant to aid us in seeing the processes of matters becoming concerning (appear), becoming matters of fact (vanish), or whether they perennially exist as matters of concern (remain).

A cursory overview shows that CPU Speed, GPU Model, GPU RAM and Physical Controller Ports are the only features that have ceased to matter.  Controller ports go away because of an assumption of USB standardization, as well as wireless connectivity. The disappearance of GPU RAM has to do with a change in architecture in the machine, where the same pool of RAM is being shared. Mysteriously, the speed of the CPU has vanished. One reason might be part of an effort on behalf of Sony and Microsoft to avoid publicizing that this generation has lower numbers than the previous generation. Customers have been trained to go after the most GHz, where above three sounds right. These have approximately half the expected amount (1.6-1.75 Ghz), in exchange for having 8 cores. Despite this drop, performance has increased. It is the marketing campaigns, built around cursory explanations of CPU power, which have failed. There was only one feature which appeared and subsequently vanished, the GPU Model. This feature ceases to makes sense in the context of consumer graphics card advertising which standardizes nomenclature to produce meaning (a 7770 is one step below a 7780 for instance). The cards in both the PS4 and Xbox One exist outside that market and its nomenclature, and therefore have meaningless names. It has nearly always been the case that console GPUs were custom fitted and unlike their PC counterparts, but it seems that only now that The Verge has deemed it irrelevant to mention their titles. It might have only made sense to leverage this feature for a brief two cycle period when interested parties knew video cards mattered, but did not expect to be able to gauge them by their names. In producing this meta-table, we can begin to think about what processes are at work in creating video gaming consoles as objects. We might hypothesize that these objects are being presented (or constructed) in a particular way by these circulating tables, and that these tables necessarily (and often on purpose) obscuring others properties of these objects. The Onion makes us comically aware of this with its feature, “Absolves guilt of divorced parent? Yes. / Yes.”

An alternate move might be to compare different charts on the same topic, such as the Xbox One vs. the PlayStation 4, to each other. The following table was created by taking the first 11 graphs I found with the search term “ps4 vs. xbox one table.” Every feature that appeared in at least two tables was recorded in the meta-table below. Certain items were collapsed under one term, but for the most part, terms were kept distinct even if they meant similar things. At least two graphs were incomplete plagiarized versions of IGN.com’s table. These were included, given that they indicate a need to second certain features, but not others.

Here we can begin to see what the concerns of this generation are. I am reminded of Latour following passage, ”"Give me one matter of concern and I will show you the whole earth and heavens that have to be gathered to hold it firmly in place”?” (246). Once we look past the ever present interest in Optical Drives, RAM, Storage, CPU, and GPU, it is apparent that Motion Control, Backwards Compatibility, and Used Game Fees are the matters of pressing public concern. These are the objects which nearly every journalist and corporation is turning every fan-girl/boy and tech geek are turning our attention to. While the interest in Motion Control is formal, the latter two are interested in modes of distribution. With used game fees, the worry is that players will not be able to sell their games or give them to friends without paying Microsoft or Sony for the privilege. Going further down, skipping the perennial input/output concerns, we find a similar pattern. Region Locking and Required Internet Connections further press the issue of control over play. Journalists are framing layers as consumers who want to know what kinds of media restrictions are being imposed upon them. In some ways these are unexpected features, where historically physical dimensions have been reported over social relationships. That said, deeper problems of control are left unattended by these tables. Originally, the Xbox One was going to launch with a camera (Kinect) that would need to be plugged into your machine at all times. Not only is it capable of recording images on IF and visible light spectra, but produces round the clock analysis of these images. Given that the machine requires internet connection at least once to download day-one updates, it was entirely conceivable that Microsoft would have big data on your play space and market specifically to your living arrangements. Responding to general outrage, Microsoft recently announce that this requirement would no longer exist. These social relations apparently still escape the table and require long form journalism. Only this week did Edge Magazine publish an article called “Xbox One and Kinect: Saving Our Lives or Just Creepy?” in which they satirize the system specifications of the Xbox One, but unlike The Onion, point to a matter of concern to many. They write, “Sure, the console might be able to monitor your pulse and record your voice and send any data it collects to anyone in the world, but it almost certainly won’t do this. This is reassuring, although admittedly only in the sense that someone who has your house keys texting you to say they definitely won’t sniff your pillows while you’re on holiday is reassuring” (Davies).

What interests me here is the critical step that distant reading of journalistic representations of consoles gives us. As a game scholar, it conceivably falls to me and my colleagues to pass some form of judgement on these objects and yet how can we? The number of games available for each will move from none to an unplayable amount. The number of contexts in which these objects are used is unintelligible. Our perception of them is constructed by journalists remediating spoon fed titbits by industrial hype machines. Console production is hidden behind factory doors and opaque engineering patents. While we might develop some methods such as Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort’s platform studies or even Latourian Actor-Network theory, to what end do these allow us to make claims before they are irrelevant, before these objects obsolesce? Even if we learn to work faster, some (market analysts?) suggest that it might be the last console generation, what with cloud computing on the horizon, plateauing software development, the similitude to PC hardware, and the race to the bottom in game pricing, where 99 cents feels expensive and yet console owners are expected to pay 60 times that for their titles. With a distant reading method such as comparative analysis of summary forms such as comparison tables, we can take hold of new weapons and assault new targets, but for how long?