“Good enough for your eyes and mine.” Applying Depression-era thinking to modern hardware upgrade cycles.

Things mentioned in this episode:

“Everything can can be invented has been invented.”
Agmena Paneuropean Book, the typeface used by Elden Ring
The $485 Volume Knob
Godot, an open-source game engine

Full transcript:

“Resolution”

I am told that the Steam Deck has a resolution of 800p. I’m sure I’ve read exactly what this means, more than once. And every time I let myself forget it soon after, lest the knowledge tempt me to gracelessly yearn for a counterfactual world where that number could be bigger, leading me away from satisfaction with the marvels and wonders already in my hands.

This is Venthuffer, a reverie of the Valve Steam Deck by Halstrick.

My father—from whom I derive my nom de jeu—was of the breed of conservative American dad who—perhaps by dint of a childhood that overlapped with the Great Depression—didn’t cotton to the notion of upgrading perfectly acceptable hardware. “Good enough for your ears and mine!” he’d say whenever one of us kids suggested a replacement for our home’s Kennedy-era stereo system. “Good enough for your eyes and mine!” he’d say as we pointed out opportunities to think a little bigger with our collection of mid-century televisions.

I think I understand where he was coming from. My father lived in a world of binaries, as far as property and possessions were concerned: either you had a thing, or you did not. If you did not have a thing, and you needed it, then by all means, work to acquire it. But if you did have a thing, and then you act as if you didn’t, pining for a slightly shinier version of the same thing? Then, son, you need to check yourself, because you’re on a path of eternal dissatisfaction, refusing to ever feel happy with what you already have.

I think of dad’s dismissal whenever I hear speculative talk about game console upgrades—which, of course, has lain thick around the Steam Deck almost since the day of its launch. The system has enjoyed a few improvements in its first couple of years, gaining an OLED screen and more generous storage while shedding a bit of weight—but nothing so drastic that you’d call it the Deck 2. And yet, I have absolutely witnessed friends stating that they’d like to have a Steam Deck but will wait until they can buy its successor—a system which, at the time of this recording, has not even been hinted at by Valve.

I understand the impulse. Barring unforeseeable drastic changes in consumer-electronics paradigms, we can surely expect the Steam Deck’s official followup to arrive some day. But I temper this expectation with my strong belief that any single aspect of consumer technology advances along a sigmoid curve.

Back when I was really into Apple hardware, millennial Macs and early iPhones especially, one felt the vertigo of living in the steep middle of that curve. The upgrade cycle was not merely inevitable; it was exciting! I’d hang around websites with gorgeous charts and graphs pinpointing—with evidence!—precisely where on the historically proven cycle every major Apple product sat, letting you plan your next upgrade so as to maximize the lifetime of each purchase.

Beyond the fact that this approach encourages a definition of “lifetime” which states that your computer or other gadget drops dead the moment a fancier model becomes available—the sort of thing that would earn withering skepticism from my father, “What, did it stop working? I hear you typing away on it every night!”—I think that when it comes to squeezing more meaningful power out of microprocessors, we rounded the top corner of that curve many years ago.

At risk of sounding like the proverbial nineteenth-century patent officer who declared that everything worth inventing had been invented, I really do get the sense that few technological barriers still exist to prevent the realization of worthwhile game concepts. We can figure out more ways to pour more simultaneous polygons into a game world, letting them individually render every eyelash on your character’s face as they blink away raindrops which each have runtime-computed trajectories, but none of this contributes to the truly engaging and long-term memorable elements of a game, the stuff generated only by the creative muscle of human minds.

Sometimes—rarely, but sometimes—advances between two major platform revisions do represent true leaps across a quantum threshold.

My current paternalistic grouchiness about upgrades came about in the run-up to the PlayStation 5, when I still felt utterly floored by the abilities of the PlayStation 4 I had received for Christmas many years prior. I saw nothing but a cynically commercial ploy in enticing people to drop another thousand dollars or so on a new box, controllers, and other clattering, miscellaneous plastic in order to enjoy barely-perceptible improvements in graphical rendering.

But then, of all people, my manager at work—a former games journalist—sat me down and explained the true differentiator between this console generation and the previous. That was the presence of solid-state storage, a marvelous looping-back to past eras of games burned into ROMs and cartridges, where the loading times of games’ increasingly vast data sets were no longer constrained by physically spinning media. Solid-state drives don’t improve the frame-to-frame appearance of any game, but they do vastly improve the overall experience of spending time with any interactive work recent enough to require load screens.

I was convinced and that sold me on… the Steam Deck, actually. And shortly after that, I purchased the Steam edition of Elden Ring, even though my family already owned it for our PlayStation 4. And I saw the look of astonishment on the face of my partner, who had perished a thousand times in the Lands Between, as my own gurgling deaths were reset in moments, rather than a full minute, I felt satisfied with that upgrade.

At the same time, I was aware that, as much as Elden Ring on the Steam Deck absolutely runs good enough for your eyes and mine, something about it still looked off compared to the PlayStation. Presently I realized that it was the text: the game’s use of a tasteful, serifed, variable-stroke typeface looks wonderfully evocative on a traditional console. But on a Steam Deck pushing its video out to an external display, any flourishes of text become reduced to juddering, palsied jags. It’s still readable, but it doesn’t look great. And sometimes it isn’t even readable, which can all by itself lead to Valve to stamp a game with that timorous yellow dot of partial Steam Deck verification, instead of a green checkmark.

I know what kind of games I like. And as much as I luxuriate in amazing effects of computed sunlight filtering through breathtaking artificial mists, my ongoing attention will always be on mini-maps, and inventory readouts, and journals full of scrawled intrigue, and on and on. I need those small, flat symbols to look as crisp as they can, as round and healthy as the dialog of a Zelda character on first-generation Nintendo Switch. My understanding is that the fixed resolution of the Steam Deck is a trade-off that optimizes gameplay on the handheld system’s built-in screen, and which allows output to much larger displays, but only after passing through an up-scaler that’s prone, by its nature, to lose fine details. I find this acceptable for screen-filling landscapes and character models, and less so for text, where details carry information.

And so the expensive particle-effect mists part to reveal the frontier of what might actually entice me to upgrade, when the day of Deck 2 arrives. My internalized emulation of dad’s skepticism could concede the point, and allow an agreement.

For all that, my father’s brand of conservative confidence has the disadvantage of a certain closed-mindedness, one which can manifest as a blindness to the value of other peoples’ interests, compared to one’s own. On my first draft of this monologue, even as I confessed to my own hunger for better text rendering, I had decried the pursuit of optimal frames per second (FPS) as a foolhardy obsession among a certain class of videogame enthusiast.

The Steam Deck caters to this sort of twiddling, making it easy to tune the maximum FPS of individual games. I once set the FPS of Elden Ring from one number to a different number, following the advice of a popular online guide, and experienced—no obvious difference at all, leading me to dismiss the whole statistic as a kind of pseudoscience, the equivalent of hi-fi aficionados arguing over which kind of wooden stereo knobs contribute to the richest sound.

But then, between that draft and this recording, I started a weekend project of learning the open-source game engine known as Godot. This exposed me to several fundamentals of how modern video games work. And here’s where I learned that frames-per-second is a fundamental unit of measure for a game’s processing loop, including the speed at which it can poll and respond to player inputs. This can have much greater effect on the quality and playability of a game beyond its mere appearance. It can even affe...