The absolute most tedious thing about the new generation of games consoles is the endless parade of news stories with the headline “[game name] runs at [resolution] and [frame rate] on [platform]”.

This has happened before, of course, back when the PS3 and Xbox 360 first came out. Billed as “HD” consoles, people were quick to jump on any games that didn’t run at the full, promised 1080p resolution — usually for performance reasons. It was tedious and pointless fanboy baiting back then; it is tedious and pointless fanboy baiting now. And yet still it goes on and on and on, because, well, it’s fanboy baiting that attracts clicks and comments.

I do get the arguments why resolution and frame rate are important. 1080p resolution is noticeably crisper on a large screen, and particularly useful for games where you need to perceive fine details like first-person shooters where you do a lot of fighting from a long distance, or strategy games where you need to be able to parse a lot of information at once. Likewise, 60 frames per second looks lovely and slick — it’s almost impossible to physically perceive anything higher than 60 — and is particularly suited to games in which precision timing is important like, say, manic shooters, music games and driving games.

These two things are not the most important or interesting things about games, though. There are any number of interesting things you could say about upcoming games for Xbox One and PlayStation, and yet it always comes down to this, with the most recent example being Ubisoft’s upcoming Watch Dogs — a game which, embarrassingly, Sony bragged about running at 1080p and 60fps “only on PlayStation 4” only for Ubisoft to subsequently go “aaaaactually, it’s 900p and 30fps…” As the team behind The Witcher commented the other day, these numbers are little more than marketing figures, as Sony’s ill-advised use of them clearly demonstrates; I seriously doubt that Watch Dogs will be an inferior experience for running at a lower resolution and half the frame rate.

In fact, sometimes these things are almost irrelevant, or at least of significantly lesser importance than the universal “EVERYTHING MUST BE 1080p 60FPS” attitude that is starting to take hold these days. Take something like the visual novel Katawa Shoujo, for example, which I’ve been digging up screenshots for to post in articles over on MoeGamer. Katawa Shoujo runs at 800×600 — yes, the 4:3 resolution that your old 386 used to run Windows 3.1 in — and looks beautiful due to its gorgeous art style. Likewise, from a frame-rate perspective, heavily cinematic-inspired games such as Uncharted, Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls actually benefit from lower frame rates closer to the 30 mark because it makes them look more like — you guessed it — film, which has historically run at around 24fps. In these cases, bumping up to 60fps may look smooth and slick, but also looks very artificial and unnatural.

In other words, looking good is less a matter of technical proficiency and more a matter of art style and direction — picking the appropriate means of presenting your title, in other words. Like so much else in gaming, this isn’t a “one size fits all” situation, and I look forward to the day where the industry collectively stops assigning such importance to arbitrary numbers and focuses on the important things.