Oh how we love to make mountains from molehills. Especially if we’re the sort of people that can add melodrama to pretty much anything!
Recently a big scuffle over Bayonetta’s ‘plain as day’ differences between one format and another has been clogging up gaming comment threads here and there. It’s an astonishing display of pedantry and hypocrisy.
Some are insisting that anything less than sixty frames per second (60fps) is simply unbearable to their ultra-sensitive vision. Others bemoan an interruption in vertical synching (resulting in momentary ‘screen tearing‘ – and when I say momentary, I’m referring to fractions of a second) as though it had permanently scarred their retinas.
Most of these people were the same ones that argued, in one breath, that Halo 3’s sub-720p resolution (despite the claims on the back of the box) ‘didn’t matter – the game still looks great’ and, in the next breath, that nobody running less than a 42″ screen can realistically tell the difference between 720p or not anyway.
This sort of ridiculous arguing over minutae that, in ‘real world’ terms, no normal person can actually spot is fuelled by crappy, fanboy baiting websites that have spent tens of thousands of dollars on hardware to spot an issue that sometimes occurs for a thirtieth of a second or less. Certainly, if I’d spent a five-figure sum to spot errors in someone else’s work I’d make damn sure that my ‘discoveries’ were important sounding and do all I could to drag readers to my site and expose them to all the adverts embedded in my articles.
I’d like to claim that it simply doesn’t make sense to me. But I know exactly why people like to act as though an imperfect second of gameplay is the end of the world to them. It’s because they’re not people that play games nor understand their construction. It’s because they’ve picked a side and are looking for any sort of ammunition to prop up their transparent arguments over. It’s a massive deal when the other platform suffers imperfections. It’s never a big deal on the times their favoured platform or product suffers similar imperfections. And that contradictionary behaviour is all the proof that’s required to expose these people for the transparent fools they are.
There’s added melodrama and the cliched stance of how one group of people are being ‘ripped off’ compared to another. How that imperfect fraction of a second is tantamount to a crime against humanity. It’s really not – it’s just that those with an interest in arguing over the insignificant love to blow anything out of proportion.
In this instance, that behaviour is deliciously ironic. After all, what sense is there in spending hours arguing over something that happens for less than a second?