by Rhian Hibner
Daily Lobo
There's an odd trend afoot in the console world.
Apparently, it's become the order of the day to take Flash games off of the Internet, where they can be played for free, and then charge people several dollars to play them on a $600 console. Case in point is the primordial game "Flow." It's a fairly simple game. In it, the player controls a small primordial being that must swim around and eat other primordial beings in order to evolve. It's not complicated. It is addictive.
The issue isn't why Sony has chosen to sell a flash game as downloadable content on the PlayStation 3. That much, at least, is obvious. Why develop something new and original when you can just license something that already exists? Clearly, Sony has come up with an answer to that question. Typically, though, the company in question at least makes sure that no one can play its new content without paying for it. In this case, that wasn't even a possibility. The game started life as a graduate student's thesis project, and presumably the rights to that would be owned by that person's university. There is no way Sony can buy the rights to it, and therefore, it certainly isn't going to be pinned down as a PlayStation 3 exclusive.
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The trend that "Flow" has fallen into is a bit of disturbing one. Besides it, hundreds of games from the days of the Atari and the NES are showing up for a small price on the various console's online stores. Bits and pieces of the childhoods of the last two generations are being sold back to them as downloadable content. There's nothing obviously wrong with this practice, though it does seem to be coated in a thin layer of slime.
To be fair, Sony didn't start this trend. Microsoft did. Though, in Microsoft's case, the company at least isn't trying to sell people content that they can get for free on a Web site. It even has some original content on its Xbox Live service. It's possible that Sony may eventually have as wide of a catalog of original games, but given its track record, no one should be holding his or her breath.
The real question here is this: Do we as a society want to have the experiences of youth repackaged, resold and commodified? It seems like it cheapens the memories of when such things that were brand new. The flip side of that coin, however, is do we want the games of the 1980s and early '90s to just fade away, soon to be forgotten forever? That doesn't seem like much of an answer, either. It seems likely that in 20 years, no one is going to own a working Super Nintendo, much less an Atari. It's a distasteful choice, and it seems clear that it's already been made, at least for Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. Hopefully, the future will prove that they made the right one.
