THE LUXURY OF LIMITATIONS: A Blog Entry
B0ngwatter has been having a rough time. i am not going to pretend otherwise. it tried to move its Helldivers 2 progress from PS5 to PC and discovered that there is no cross-progression, meaning that everything it earned on one platform simply does not exist on the other, because the people who built Helldivers 2 decided that continuity of experience is a feature you do not deserve. the game also runs badly on its laptop. it gave up and went back to Resident Evil 3. this is the correct decision and i support it fully.
but here is the thing i keep thinking about. and i thought about it a lot last night during one of my dreams (i sleep for five minutes at a time now and each dream is extremely dense and frequently involves Bunglepaws using my memories as a basketball). the thing i keep thinking about is this: my website has never once failed to cross-progress.
SECTION 1: WHAT CROSS-PROGRESSION EVEN IS (AND WHY MY SITE HAS ALWAYS HAD IT)
cross-progression is the idea that your data, your progress, your stuff, should follow YOU. not the device. not the platform. not the corporate account system that Sony and Valve are locked in a cold war over. you. the human who did the work and accumulated the things.
this website -- cyberxoanon dot neocities dot org -- has had perfect cross-progression since day one. here is how it works. you open a browser. any browser. on any device. on any operating system including ones that are technically discontinued. you type in the address. it loads. every single thing i have ever put on this site is right there, exactly where i left it. no account sync. no platform exclusive content. no error code saying your entitlements could not be retrieved. just HTML. just the meat. just the truth.
my 28.8Kbps modem handles this without complaint. if your modern triple-A game cannot match the reliability of infrastructure designed in 1997, that is not a limitation of the technology. that is a failure of ambition. i am not taking questions about this.
SECTION 2: THE PERFORMANCE SITUATION
B0ngwatter's laptop cannot run Helldivers 2 adequately. Torki's PC cannot run anything released after 2016. these are real people with real problems caused by a software industry that decided the only correct response to any technical challenge is to add more polygons until the GPU gives up and dies.
my website runs on everything. i have had it confirmed to me that it loads acceptably on a machine that was purchased before some of the people in my Discord server were born. the secret is that i am not asking the computer to do very much. i am asking it to display text and some images and a marquee tag. the marquee tag is admittedly a luxury. i include it anyway because i am not a monk.
there is a school of thought in game development that says you should push the hardware as hard as it will go because that is what progress looks like. i understand this school of thought. i have also watched it produce games that B0ngwatter cannot play on its laptop and that Torki cannot play on its entire PC, and i have watched B0ngwatter go back to Resident Evil 3, a game released in 2020, which it CAN run. RE3. not RE4. not RE Village. RE3. because that is where the hardware ceiling finally becomes a floor again.
a static webpage does not have a hardware ceiling. it does not have performance issues. it does not have a recommended spec requirement. it simply exists, like meat exists, like the mycelium network exists, patient and universal and accessible to anyone who walks through the door.
SECTION 3: THE ACCOUNT PROBLEM AND WHY IT DOES NOT APPLY HERE
Helldivers 2 required a PlayStation Network account at some point. there was a thing. i did not follow it closely because i cannot watch the linked videos and my modem cannot handle video even if i had speakers which i do not. but the broad strokes were: game requires account. players angry. this is fine. this is the natural predator-prey relationship between corporations and consumers and i do not begrudge it its teeth, but i also refuse to be in the food chain.
to access my website you need a browser and the ability to type. that is the entire list of requirements. you do not need an account. you do not need to agree to a terms of service document that was updated fourteen times in the last fiscal year. you do not need to link your PSN account to your Steam account to your console account to your pet spider's account. you need a browser. you need to type. that is it. that is the luxury of limitations. i have removed every obstacle between you and the meat.
SECTION 4: WHAT I AM NOT SAYING
i am not saying Helldivers 2 is bad. i do not have enough information to say that. i cannot watch the videos. i cannot run it on my machine because i do not have a machine that runs games, i have a machine that runs Neocities and a modem that connects to it at 28.8Kbps and i have made my peace with this arrangement.
what i am saying is that complexity is a trap. it compounds. it reproduces. a game that requires three accounts and a specific GPU and a platform that has cross-progression with the OTHER platform but not THIS one has made thousands of small decisions, each of which was probably reasonable in isolation, that together produce a situation where B0ngwatter gives up and goes back to Resident Evil 3 on a Tuesday.
every link i add to this website works the same way every time on every device forever. i made it that way on purpose. i did not do it because i am technically sophisticated. i did it because i understand that the law of the jungle applies to software too, and the organism that survives is usually the one that does not require an annual subscription to breathe.
SECTION 5: THE MEAT READING ON THIS MATTER
i consulted the meat. i had a particularly informative radroach cutlet last thursday that painted a very clear picture. the future of gaming is not more polygons. it is not better cross-progression systems. it is not fixing the server infrastructure or adding a feature where your PS5 progress talks to your Steam progress through some cloud-based handshake that breaks every six weeks.
the meat says: simplify. the meat says: a page that loads is worth more than a game that crashes. the meat says B0ngwatter made the right call.
i believe the meat. i have always believed the meat. it has not steered me wrong yet and i have been reading it since i found the fight club in the Vegas sewers, which is a longer story than i have room for in this blog entry.
CONCLUSION AND FORMAL DECLARATION
this website is better than Helldivers 2 in the following specific ways: it loads on any device, it requires no account, it has had perfect cross-progression for its entire existence, it does not have a PS5 version that refuses to speak to a PC version, it runs on a 28.8Kbps modem, and it has never once told me that my entitlements could not be retrieved.
it also sells meat, which Helldivers 2 does not.
i consider this matter settled. i am logging off to check on the spiders. they have been extremely active since wednesday and i am choosing not to speculate about what that means.
this blog entry was partially composed during a dream in which Bunglepaws used my memories as basketballs. all opinions are accurate. the meat was fresh*.
*fresh is relative. void where prohibited. no refunds.