Towards Improvement
Videogame studios regularly release patches and upgrades that aim to fix and enhance the game in question. This affirms that the work of art needs fixes and enhancements and an intent of rectification from the creators. The former points towards a notion of incompletion, while the latter conceptualizes it as a whole that can be completed. The intent is to finalize the piece with parts it lacks.
The aforementioned words also carry positive connotations. Since the game itself is lacking that intent aims to change, that leaves intent as a category that is vested in positive connotations. The game merely is, in its lacking state. Any assessment must come outside the category of an upgrade, if we consider it as a whole that is yet to be made as such.
Yet, an upgrade is often characterized as an improvement that impacts “visuals and overall game quality,” as the latest, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt next-gen update announcement puts it. These categories lay outside the category of the whole since we can’t deduce what a piece of art’s qualitative properties entail beyond the allusion to a ubiquitous notion of good. This notion of quality then has no use for our analysis. The concept of visual property appears similarly fleeting, as we have no context beyond the general notion of what can be perceived by our eyes. But if we consider improvement in the aforementioned context of intent towards the whole, then we may look at the movement this aims to carry out.
Let’s consider the aforementioned The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt announcement as an example. A fictional place is depicted in the screenshots below, as it was posted on Twitter by the game’s publisher: the Playstation 4 version on the left, and the Playstation 5 version on the right.
We may infer from looking at the pictures side by side that they have been taken at different times as the weather in one of them is more foggy, while the other is more lush with flowers. Yet, the screenshots aim to depict some sort of improvement, that is, a rectifying movement from the left (PS4 version) towards the right (PS5 version.) We may compare them to see what the PS4 version lacks in contrast with the PS5 version to determine by this comparative look what this improvement entails. By going back to our earlier assessment about fog and flowers, we may say that one has more flowers and less fog than the other. But it is a quantitative analysis that cannot determine whether something lacking has been rectified, because then the evaluation becomes a question of less or more within a finite number of categories. This won’t do.
If we consider this difference in context of “detail level,” as the announcement puts it, seemingly on par with the announcement’s categories of “quality, range and density,” we may conclude that a field brimming with flowers is indeed denser than a barren steppe. Yet, what appears to be a thick fog on the PS4 screenshot, seems to be thinner on the PS5 version. By being absent, details of flowers and trees may be revealed. Does this make the PS4 version lacking details that have been rectified for the PS5? If so, we’re still looking at a quantitative difference that instead of the number of flowers and trees, looks at their parts by disassembling them according to the abstraction of details.
Perhaps we’re being misled by the language of the announcement and there’s a qualitative difference to speak of when it comes to the depiction of plant life and weather phenomena. If we return to the notion of improvement as movement, towards which the author’s intent aims to inch closer, then can we sidestep quantitative categories this movement implies?
A movement may be looked at from any angle to observe its contours, study its diversions, and so on. How does knowing its speed, velocity or other quantitative properties influence our analysis? If quality is what we’re after, we may simply carry out our analysis without any regard for quantitative properties. Intent, however, has no such movement, because it knows its destination in advance, which in our case is a reparation and enhancement of what the game lacks. It doesn’t choose the fastest way to get there, but goes down a road according to categories it intends to rectify. By emphasizing intent, such announcements draw out connotations of intent according to categories it wishes it be measured against. These suggest a quantitative approach, that becomes bogged down with intent’s aim to make it better, where fixing and enhancing parts come to refer to a whole through specific properties as to how they fit within. Through these movements, quantity appears as quality, a part as whole, as intent sublates categories according to its connotations.
