Every time I see 'Look how much better games look on CRT posts, this is what your childhood looked like' showing closeups taken by phone camera of PVMs with crisp scanlines and shit I wanna die like no that's not what games looked like when you were a kid, that's what cameras see also you didn't have a fucking PVM in your house come on and even if you did you weren't cranking down the brightness to get crisp scanlines as a kid or using RGB lol come on
like CRTs are cool and it's almost a shame you can't convey the actual reasons why in photos but the """CRT Aesthetic""" people chase now feel's even faker than raw pixels to me, even if it looks cool sometimes.
Putting aside all the conceptual difficulties with CRT discourse (which CRT discourse doesn't so much resolve as ignore) - "How could contemporary designers intentionally design these aesthetics so precisely when CRT displays were so variable?", "How can any image function as a neutral depiction of the ideal CRT display, let alone one you staged and photographed through your fucking iPhone?" - what bothers me the most about CRTs is they've become exclusionary by design. Not a lot of people have their old CRTs from 2009, and barely anybody just randomly finds one lying on the side of the road or in a Goodwill etc. More to the point, people don't go out of their way to buy a CRT simply because it's the best way to experience these games; they buy them because they've become rare and expensive, and they elevate you above the average schmuck who downloaded a ROM off [REDACTED] so they could play it on their hacked Wii or something. As though the average commercial game developer intended for their game to be enjoyed only by an elite self-chosen few.
If I haven't made it clear enough yet, my response to this line of thinking is, "Fuck that." Whatever the original intentions, we're perfectly capable of enjoying old games with a sufficiently good (looking at you, anything that makes me fuck about with plugins) emulator.
Addendum: Don't tell me CRTs are the ideal/intended way to play old games unless you personally know what this is:
