Fun and games

Been listening to Carly Rae Jepsen (her again! I swear I listen to other things!) in anticipation of her September album drop. Also, I needed to write a romance scene and nobody does horny pop quite like her.

Around the same time, my poor bombarded brain was absorbing a lot of information and opinions about physical media in the wake of Sony's death-knell announcement about the future of games. Mostly, I've just been feeling sad, mulling over disappointed thoughts in my head to a contrasting backdrop of happy pop songs. I was resigned to it, obviously. Who wasn't? The decline of physical media has been on the cards for quite some time. But that doesn't mean I wanted it to happen.

There are layers to my sadness. I feel a kind of ache for a shifting world that is rapidly becoming something completely different. I'm trying to parent in 2026 with 1996 knowledge. Suddenly I understand why older people can turn sad, and then, with enough time and unfair life experiences, utterly cynical. It's destabilising. Things were better when I was younger. Right? Like, objectively?

Sometimes I catch myself in this train of thought and I feel silly. I am doing what every generation has done. At the museum I sometimes volunteer for, they run regular nostalgia mornings, pulling out boxes of objects: tin food containers, old-school kitchen scales, rotary phones. People come to look at them. They pick them up in their hands. They share memories. Sometimes they just sit there quietly. It provides a therapeutic experience that is unusual and possibly difficult to defend on paper to people who run the budget at the town council.

Objects do more than gather dust in our houses. They're a reflection of us, individually and collectively, all the kaleidoscopic versions of us that still exist inside. From where I'm sitting, I can see various objects and remember (roughly) when we got them. The food bowls we were given with the cats when we adopted them, 2024. A battered copy of Lords of Waterdeep, 2012. Splattered canvas paintings by my kids, 2025. A signed poster from a Chromeo gig, 2023. A mirror we were given when we got married, 2009. I could never be a minimalist. Each to their own, but empty houses make me feel sad.

What makes my heart ache when I look back at photos are the things in the background. I like the backbreakingly chunky televisions. I like the blue plastic CD tower that used to sit on my desk in my bedroom. I like piles of video tapes scattered on the floor. I think of all the things of my childhood that aren't here anymore and it makes me want to go back for a while. The big chunky boxes from PC games. Transparent electronics. But I know that my vision, and therefore my opinion, is totally clouded by nostalgia. (And I do quite like my slimline TV. Less of a surface area for dust to gather.)

I just think things matter. Not only because the things have personal significance but because of the industry around them. Pokemon cards were better when they weren't an internet-hyped commodity. Games were better when you could rifle through the paper manual in the back seat of the car on the drive home. Music was better when you could pick up tape singles for under a quid on a whim. All of those things produced jobs in both manufacturing and sales. All of those things felt like an event. For a minute there, we hit a sweet spot. We couldn't afford to buy as much, perhaps, but what we did have felt less disposable precisely because getting hold of them in the first place was more of an effort. I had probably half the amount of clothes that I own right now, but none of them were so full of plastic that I felt afraid around naked flames. Nothing feels important anymore. It's all flimsy and transient. I look at the library of films on Netflix and it just feels like another life admin thing I have to do, to scroll through another screen to decide another thing that the algorithm thinks I might like because the search system is laughably terrible.

We hit a sweet spot where, yes, overconsumption was a thing and yes, exploitative labour practices existed. But in terms of creativity, job creation, economy boosting, experience-making, and, I dunno, permanence. It felt like we were onto a good thing there for a while.

I'm sick of not owning anything outright. I'm sick of juggling subscription fees. I'm sick of the algorithm. More and more I'm craving the physical. I want experiences, I want to hold things in my hands, I want to pay for something once and really feel the weight of that purchase decision, I want to be able to lend things to people, I want to pick something up and buy it just because the cover looks interesting, I want random chance, I want to make autonomous decisions without being steered towards something, I want small everyday rituals that make life less of a monotonous drone of switching from screen to screen. I want to have to put effort into things. I don't think perpetual convenience is good for us. We have everything on a plate and it's all so impermanent.

Questioning myself over this because I, of course, stream stuff. I literally streamed PowerWash Simulator 2 this morning instead of reading a book or something. And I buy a lot of games digitally. I've got a Steam library that makes me feel guilty every time I look at it. Most of the indie games I adore don't have physical releases. I can't go into Game and rifle through the second-hand table anymore because they all closed ages ago. My choices as a consumer reflect this.

There is an inevitability to Sony's announcement. We knew it was coming, but it still sucks.

I don't think there's a perfect reaction to this. I've read a lot of discourse. I see everyone's perspective. Recently I've decided that it is okay to shift around a little bit right now. To be imperfect in your standards or your opinions. Because everything is changing. How are you meant to know what's best? Everyone is a hypocrite sometimes.

But the backlash is heartening to me, in the same way the backlash against AI gives me a little emotional boost. There's a whole middle ground between 'absolute perfection in all actions and thoughts' and 'lie down and take whatever corporations decide is best for you and never complain about it'. Has every generation had something they didn't want to let go of, even if it wasn't practical to hang onto it anymore? Yes. It's okay to feel sad about that. It's very human.

Going forward, I think I'll probably focus my attention (and voice) on the issue of digital ownership and consumer rights. What does it mean to own something? When I pay for a game or a film or an ebook, do I own it forever? For five years? For as long as their respective platforms decide I'm allowed to? Why are we not allowed to lend things to people digitally? Why can't we sell games once we're done with them? These things are inconvenient to players like Sony, obviously, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't demand them. Or at least attempt to reach some sort of middle ground.

For my part, I'll be buying the new Carly Rae album on CD. I'll put it in our CD player, make myself some sort of 0% cocktail (boring teetotaller over here), and listen to it start to finish in one sitting, as the pop gods intended.

I can't afford to do this for every artist I like. I can't afford to buy lots of physical releases of games from places like Limited Run or Lost in Cult; I can just pick and choose occasionally. I'll still buy digital releases of games. I'll still stream music in the car. Right now, this is the only balance I can think of. A rough and imperfect middle ground.

This Time in 2025: I talk about robots and horror movies in Users

This Time in 2024: I fume about Beauty Pageant Aloy in Hey, good-lookin'