The End of Thought

When I was growing up I played a lot of video games, not unlike many boys my age, though I’d like to imagine I was more than your average 10 year old gamer.  When other kids put down Duck Hunt and picked up a baseball glove, I stuck with the games.  I spent time honing my Contra skills rather than going outside.  Collecting issues of Nintendo Power was more important to me than collecting baseball cards.  Knowing all of the secrets of Super Mario Bros. 3 was essential and the most important event of any month was running downstairs to see the new Sega Channel lineup.

That’s why it’s upsetting to me that I just don’t care as much about games as I used to.

Games used to be everything and now they are just diversions.  They used to fill my time, but now, they simply pass it when I can’t think of anything better to do.  I think I did what I’d never thought I’d do; I outgrew video games.

Now that doesn’t mean I don’t play them anymore.  Quite the contrary.  It’s just that they don’t breed the same excitement in me as they used to.  Case in point:  Crysis.  If you don’t know, Crysis was a game that came out for the PC last year and received tons of accolades for it’s ultra fancy graphics and environments.  It was one of two or three games that I specifically upgraded my computer to play.  I got it and rather than spend countless consecutive hours conquering every level, I set it down about a quarter of the way through.  Here was a game that I was really anticipating and spent lots of money on, only to go, “meh” and move on to something else.  Recently, I picked it up again and have been having more fun with it this time, but there’s still nothing life changing about it.

That’s my problem with games today.  They should be shooting so much higher.  If they really tried, they could be on the same creative level as movies, but so many seem to settle for the same stagnant ideas.  How many first person shooters/Halo sequels will we have to go through before we get something new?  Games even have the built in advantage of being interactive as opposed to other media like movies and TV where the viewer is a passive participant.  More games should use this to their advantage.

One moment in recent gaming that utilized this advantage was Bioshock.  In it, you play a survivor of  plane crash that discovers an underwater utopia gone awry.  Genetic freaks jump at you from all directions and your only ally is a man on a radio guiding you through the levels.  (warning: game spoilers ahead) About halfway through the game, you come to meet this man and realize that he is actually the lunatic creator of the underwater paradise and that you are simply a servant of his doing his bidding though a sort of mind control.  Several things you, as a player, did earlier in the game of your own free will turn out to be objectives that you were being compelled to do by this mind control.  If it were a movie, you would simply see the actor straining to come to grips with the fact he is a pawn, but since this is a game you were controlling (or so you thought) you begin to wonder about the amount of free will you had within the game in the first place.

Other than more creative narratives, game should also strive for more varied experiences.  Most genre games are just recycled versions of previous games with better graphics and maybe one new feature.  Supreme Commander is just a fancy Dune 2.  Halo 3 isn’t any more interesting than Quake 2 was when it first came out.  EA Sports has even managed to build a base of people that will pay 50 bucks every year for essentially the same game.

RTS, shooters, and sports genres do little evolving from year to year, which is why genre-defying games are so much more exciting.  Try and admit that you weren’t giddy the first time you played Katamari Damacy.  You couldn’t really explain it to your friends because there was nothing like it at the time (now it too has fallen into the trap of recycle, rinse, repeat, as two sequels have produced basically the same game.)  There have been other recent games that have provided unique experiences.  Portal isn’t quite a shooter and isn’t quite a puzzle game, but blends elements of both those genres to make a great game.  Shadow of the Colossus looks like a platform adventure game, but it doesn’t play like anything before it.  Games like Lumines show that you don’t have to completely reinvent the wheel or spend lots of money to have a unique game experience.

The next game I’m going to check out is a free computer game called Facade.  From the trailers, it looks like a conversation simulation where everything you type is read and responded to by the virtual couple.  It might turn out to be a gimmick, but at least it’s not Halo 4.