screenshot via Tomb Raider
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I played both of the next-gen versions of Call of Duty, and didn't really notice a difference between the two. Sure, maybe if I squinted at my TV screen I could parse out the various inferiorities of the Xbox One version, but after poring over articles about "resolutiongate," the main question I was left with was: who gives a shit?If we want to understand video games as the cornerstone of pop culture that they are, we have to question whether or not these technical details are actually important. Pitchfork saves its best critical faculties for discussing the artistry of music, not the technical details of sound systems and headphones. The New Yorker and New York Magazine only glosh over screen specifications and 3D technology in movies when things like that actually say something interesting about the authorship of a film. Good critics talk about the work itself first and foremost (although there was that critical flare up over The Hobbit's frame rate last year).A good friend of mine who now serves as my de facto travel guide through the vibrant world of online gaming forums explained to me that people like him care about resolution because, to them, the fact that Call of Duty only runs at 720p on the Xbox One is indisputable, definitive evidence that the PlayStation 4 is a more powerful device. Gamers love a good rivalry. And they're spending a lot of money when they buy a new console, so I can understand why they'd care about this.Journalists, however, face another question when they start to see stories like this appear. When you write about something as a controversy, you're telling your audience that they should be viewing it as a controversy.I suppose an editor could defend their choice to run with these stories the same way people riding atop the iPhone rumor mill can: people are interested in these stories, and they deserve to read them. But the problem here is that it's not that simple. Publishing isn't a zero-sum game, but choosing to continually inquire about stories about frame rates and resolution takes time and energy away from other, more human questions.When we ask ourselves whether the Xbox One or PS4 version of Call of Duty is better, we're choosing not to ask ourselves why we're even still playing a game like Call of Duty long after the series stopped trying to be culturally or politically relevant. When we focus on the amount of pixels that are being used to render Lara Croft, we overlook the implicit creepiness of the game industry's androcentric obsession with creating such an "obsessively detailed" version of someone like Lara Croft in the first place. And if we continue to nitpick over just how "obsessively detailed" this young woman's virtual body is, we forget that the real controversy of the new Tomb Raider came from its uncomfortable participation in rape culture. To borrow a quote from Evgeny Morozov, work like this refuses "to evaluate solutions to problems based on criteria other than efficiency."I'm not saying that we should ignore stories about how gaming technology like, say, the Oculus Rift is pushing the medium in new and exciting directions. But does a slightly faster frame rate or denser resolution say much of anything about the role of video games in society today? It's time that game critics started separating out the signal from the noise.If we want to understand video games as the cornerstone of pop culture that they are, we have to question whether or not these technical details are actually important.