After playing SOMA, I recall it every time I see moderately glitched images. Using digital "distortion" as part of the visual aesthetic was absolutely brilliant. I feel like it started a trend, although maybe multiple developers strated using the same tricks independently roughly at the same time.

Somehow these PNG glitches feel "natural", just like analog radio noise, unlike the usual artifacts of heavy JPG, MP3 or video compression. Why are some degradations much less annoying than others? When I need to upscale an low-rez image I usually blur it using anisotropic smoothing, then add random noise. It actually looks sharper than the plain Laczoz/Bicubic upscale.

Maybe we need to design new audio/video formats that degrade more "artistically" when there is data loss or insufficient bandwidth. This is less relevant now than it used to be in ~2005. Still, would be an interesting experiment. Is there an encoding that would naturally produce smoothed visuals without sufficient data?

If I have some energy tonight, I will experiment with taking an image array, "deleting" random pixels and filling them with blended neighbors.