What’s Wrong With Video Games

I feel myself drifting away from video games.

Call it a between-console-generation lull, call it the belated maturation of a stubborn man-child, it may or may not be a permanent drift, but it is nonetheless real and it is significant. Video games have been a staple interest in my life since… well, practically for as long as I can remember. From my earliest memories of Chuck E. Cheese’s dimly lit arcades to the hours spent in front of my brother’s NES to my well-chronicled passion for XBox, Counter-Strike and Game Boy Advance, being a gamer is part of who I am.

Or rather, it was, until about eight months ago. The last game I played from start until completion was Resident Evil 4 earlier this year. I’ve managed to play maybe a total of eight hours worth of video games since then and not for lack of spare time but for lack of real interest. None of the new portable consoles (PSP, Nintendo DS, Gizmondo) really interest me and while there are some far-off titles that have me vaguely intrigued (Zelda: Twilight Princess) nothing that is currently out or slated to be released soon holds much more than passing interest, if any.

What’s going on here?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and I think I’ve narrowed down the problems that plague my enjoyment of my once favored pastime to five things the video game industry is doing wrong and one thing that I’ve done that has no bearing on anything else other than to redirect my attentions elsewhere. I guess I’ll start with that to get it out of the way.

0. Non-Video Gaming

My recent fascination with war gaming has probably more than a little to do with my reduced time with a controller lately. When you have 3,000 points of Warhammer 40K and 1,500 points of Warmaster plus three teams of Blood Bowl and a sack o’ Napoleonic minis to assemble, prime and paint that tends to suck up the free hours. This is not a complaint, merely an observation.

I might also observe before moving on to more interesting points that war gaming has provided me with a lot of the things that I feel are missing from video games, such as tolerable (enjoyable even) human interaction, strategic gameplay and creative involvement. Plus, hour for hour, I’d wager the two are comprable in terms of cost which probably explains why one had to wane for the other to flourish.

But my vide gaming hours being spent elsewhere doesn’t explain why that even when I do want for some downtime in painting, sanding, gluing and sculpting I don’t automatically reach for a controller any more. The reasons for that are in fact more due to what I see as failings on the part of the video game industry as a whole.

1. Stupid Human Interaction

I may be accused of assaulting a fallen equine here, but while the proliferation of online gaming is in my mind a Good Thing, it has so often taken the form of player versus player that the aspect has become synonymous with the whole. Don’t get me wrong, competitive online play certainly has its place and some games are ideally suited to it. The problem is that it has so overshadowed the cooperative possibilities inherent in online games that there have only been a handful of games which even bother to explore the possibility. Those that do (Full Spectrum Warrior, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory) do so in a way that betrays the lack of experience developers have in getting players to work together to achieve a common goal which typified competitive online gaming of ten years ago.

Games which sorely need cooperative play (hello, Halo 2) ignore it and games which could be developed with cooperation as a primary means are, as near as I can tell, never given a chance to see the light of day. I assume that game manufacturers are operating under the assumption that modern gamers don’t want cooperative modes in their games, and perhaps gamers themselves perpetuate this. The problem here is that gamers who feel they wouldn’t be interested in cooperative games don’t realize that a lot of the problems they complain about in player versus player (annoying opponents, unfair matchmaking engines, repetitive gameplay) would nearly disappear with strictly cooperative games.

In fact, many competitive games which have enjoyed a great deal of success incorporate passing nods to cooperation that suggest working together is not something players have no interest in: Witness Counter-Strike which more or less perfected team-based (nee cooperative) competition. Also note the extremely popular versus mode in the latest two Splinter Cell games in which two teammates work against an opposing pair. These hybrid type games (and their accompanying popularity) suggest that they are drawing from both the inherent fun of working with a friend (who may not even be in the same hemisphere) and the standard means of challenge of working against a thinking human foe, when in fact there is nothing being drawn from on the team-up side of the coin, and what should be half of a well-matched pairing is relegated to a novel concept due to nothing more than lack of previous example.

2. Misplaced Focus

I am impressed with modern graphics engines.

OK?

Now enough. Nintendo head honchos came under a lot of fire when the next generation consoles were being discussed because they started a mantra that went something like: “We’re not trying to produce the machine that generates the most whizz-bang graphics. We’re trying to produce a machine that generates the most fun.”

Page 1 of 4 | Next page