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THE INFLUX OF AWESOME GAMES
And How My Perception of Gaming Has Changed

When I’m not playing or writing about video games, I often find myself thinking about them. Just today, I was thinking about how much gaming has changed since my introduction to it at the tender age of three. Back then, games were equatable to toys, and they were only one type of toys that I enjoyed. Apart from games, I would also spend time with Star Wars or Transformers action figures as well as various now-forgotten toys from less popular toy lines.

As I grew into adulthood, toys stayed essentially the same. Sure, the newer Star Wars figures have more points of articulation, but they’re all more or less the same size, and they’re the same characters that were released all those years ago, too (prequel figures and Expanded Universe characters notwithstanding). Video games, however, have changed by leaps and bounds. I know it’s not fair in this comparison that Star Wars is just one microcosm of the action figure world yet video games encompass so many sub genres, but back then, they didn’t – as far as my perception of the time was considered.

I grew up in a somewhat middle-class family and was, for the most part, a have-not. My parents saw to it that I did get the main toys and games I wanted but considering their financial responsibilities and how much marketing I was bombarded with it’s no surprise that I didn’t receive 100% of the things I had asked for. From the time I received my Sega Master System to adulthood (which for me started during the N64-era) my parents bought me a few video games each year. Usually I’d get one for Christmas, one for my birthday, and then maybe one for the end of the school year.

In the Sega days, I was too young to be aware of any video game magazines or anything else that would help me decide on which games would be worth getting. All I had to go on were randomly aired commercials and first-hand experience with a game and a friend or cousin’s house. Games, those days, didn’t require many hours to play through, but I always put more time into them than a single start-to-finish play would require. I did this because I truly loved the games I had and, to be honest, I didn’t have that many.

These days, games tend to take longer to finish. They tend to be more involving and they are blurring the media distinction between movie and video game. This isn’t a bad thing, but it also isn’t necessarily a good one. It’s entirely possible that many games have gotten more complicated and involving than they need to be. In a one-game world, this would be fine with me but at any given week this holiday season we will see the release of several time-consuming and worthwhile games to play.

Recently, for example, Fable II was released and shortly thereafter Far Cry 2 and Fallout 3 were unleashed upon us gamers. Oh, we all wanted this. They’re all amazing games – but they’re all very compelling – perhaps too compelling! Oftentimes I’ve sat down to play Fable II for a half hour only to realize that three hours later I hadn’t actually gone on any plot-advancing quests. Instead, I ran around kicking chickens and murdering innocent villagers and gypsies. Has the blurring of video game objectives and introduction of “free will” in games also obfuscated the definition of what a game is?

Open-concept games like Fable II definitely have a path you can follow but in making it too easy to sway away from the main plot and by giving players so much freedom have the developers also taken away part of what it means to play a game? Personally, I’m a fan of being able to run around and do anything in a game, but I have a feeling I’d have finished the game by now and moved onto the next one if it wasn’t for the amount of freedom the title affords me.

And this brings me to my next point: several of my colleagues will consider themselves done with a game once they’ve finished the story mode. I also subscribe to this school of thought. Do we consider games to be finished after one play-through because they take so long to finish, or are they so long to finish because developers know the game will be tossed aside once people are finished it? It’s definitely a rare game that keeps me coming back to it time and again once I’ve finished it once (Resident Evil 4 comes to mind). When we finish a game, are we not inclined to go back to it because it stops being fun? People have no problem watching most movies repeatedly but hearing of someone finishing a newer game multiple times is a rarity.

A more realistic reason would be a combination of several factors. For one, games do tend to be fairly long these days. I’m all for engaging, interactive, and compelling forms of entertainment so this only becomes a problem when we have to choose which games we’ll devote our time to. And less face it, for people in my age group, time is a constantly dwindling commodity. Between work, writing, and family life it is often difficult for me to get a good chunk of time to devote to playing games. But this isn’t meant to come across as a complaint about there being too many amazing games available – the problem is that I find myself of the verge of taking a vacation for the sole purpose of finishing them all – multiple times if I have to.

Posted in Editorial |