"I Think I Hate Video Games"
It’s been a long time since I last legitimately enjoyed playing a video game. How long exactly? It’s likely somewhere in the realm of several years, at the very least starting in the summer before entering college. Of course, there are exceptions to that rule, and some unique games have come and gone that have undoubtedly left some amount of lasting impact on myself. I’ve even come as far as to ask myself if I truthfully hate games now, and single out examples of the medium in its current state and play in attempt to challenge that notion of distaste. Even if one or two examples over the past six years have proved worth the time, by and large I can say that even my directed attempts have fallen flat time after time. While stating the affect itself is easy, the cause is something that I wrestle with every time someone asks me “Hey, have you tried Game X: Revengence?” Nothing fills me with greater dread these days than the possibility of investing time into some experience touted as “recreational”, as I regularly find myself wishing to rather clean my bathroom or do laundry instead of attempting to give Mario Odyssey another whirl. I used to chomp at the bit for games all throughout my life, so what the hell happened? The answer to that question is what I’m going to try to find today though a retrospective of sorts, and I figured I might as well drag you along with me. We’re going to start all the way from the beginning, so buckle up, it’s going to be a bit of a drive.
Enter the late fall of 1999: amidst the fads of gel pens and Beanie Babies came the now cultural juggernaut that was Pokemon. As a little kid, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the game that every kid at school was talking about. Mind you, I was only six or so, and like all kids of that edge, I was a fucking whiny little shit. I groaned and moaned for that first console I ever wanted, a “Teal Blue” GameBoy Color, and of course a copy of Pokemon Yellow. Thus began the decent into gaming that followed both me and my friend group all throughout our K-12 schooling. Many a night sat outside, tethered to one another by a link cable, the dot-matrices of our pocket screens lit only by the dim lights of the nearby deck. Ah yes, the knee-jerk parental response to video games that was all too common in the families of children born in the early '90s hit both myself and my friends quite hard. “Limited gaming time” became one of the first (and most seemingly unfair) rules placed on myself, as well as a strict parental adherence to the fun-sucking institution known as the ESRB. These rules became something to overcome, something to trick, and something to bend as the years trudged forward. One of the first workarounds to all limits was to invite over friends, then sit outside, giving the appearance of being active when in reality you’ve all had your heads sunk in your GameBoys for four or more hours. We even championed a conspiracy to overcome the “T” rating for Super Smash Brothers Melee, subsequently renting the game and influencing our parent group to hand down a “Mom’s Seal of Approval” to it. Ridiculous schemes like these should prove just the level of rabid, fervent passion that I had for games at a young age.
This pattern carries us to about late middle school, seventh and eighth grade, where everything changed. Welcome to the internet, a magical world where you can scream in chorus with the five billion other little shitheads whose balls haven’t dropped yet, and sometimes play a video game at the same time. The Xbox360 changed my opinion of what games could be forever, first with the near 800 hours I put into The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which I played religiously every day after school in a private voice chat with one of my best friends. This was long before the era of the “Xbox Live Party” system, so you either did the aforementioned or stuck it out in all-chat. While Oblivion was more a magical eye-opening experience to how far-reaching and engaging a game could be, Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 were more formative for me by a considerable margin. These games, and the group of friends I played with, taught me the joy, anger, frustration, and sense of accomplishment that can only come from playing video games as competition. Whether it was the friendly, jeering type of competition that arose between us, or the much more malicious intent of what arose between us and other groups of high school “crews”, nothing beats those high highs and nothing is worse than those low lows. I’ll never forget the times when I was responsible for losses (and my friends won’t let me forget “shop” either), but the high points were obviously the victories. Popping off with your boys in a crowded venue when you smack one of the top teams in the venue with your third-string team is a feeling that I’ll never fucking forget.
Where did that leave me in college? Despite the ability for our group to reconvene online and during breaks, the old online crew started to fall apart for reasons based on nothing but time. That newfound freedom, and yeah, I guess the responsibility too, really takes hold of you, and although it technically “demands” a lot of your recreational time, it never feels that way. Nevertheless, before you know it you haven’t even powered on your console in two weeks and your floor is littered with bottles of Nikolai, crushed cans of PBR, and a half-torn sheet of homework that was due last Monday. Even though this form of recreation was fulfilling in its own right, I could tell that something was missing. I started to seek out different forms of competitive gaming, and that’s how I found the Melee scene. This game that I had tricked my parents into letting me buy at the age of ten became the new focus of my entire existence outside of class and the occasional brain-drain weekend. Those feelings of highs and lows were more intense than they’d ever been before, and although the sense of camaraderie was different in nature from that of a team game like console shooters, it was something altogether more powerful. If I had to liken it to anything, it would be like adherence to the creed of a sports team; that raw, unfiltered passion that you feel for anything and everything related to your group. I’ve met some of the most amazing people through this stupid fucking 17 year old children’s party game, and I wouldn’t trade those years I’ve spent practicing, traveling, and competing for anything.
I think that this was the turning point for me. As I look back on those years I spent entrenched in the scene of just one mere game, things start to become more clear; all those hours spent planning tournaments, streaming sets, and practicing scar-jump ledge-dash invincible mid-stage forward-tilts on Yoshi’s Island were what began my descent into hating the activity I had grown up with so much passion for. In a comparative instant, the fun I used to have with what we’d call today a “single-player experience” was forever wrenched from my grasp, never to return. While Melee will always be fun no matter how many times I pick up the controller (depending on the environment, a story for another time), other games fail to allow for the sense of freedom and self-expression that Melee allows for. Once you get a taste of that, that open-ended analog bliss that can only be supplied by the childish shape of GameCube controller, you can never again go back to whence you came. I like to call this effect the “Movement Barrier”, a phenomenon where the base prerequisite of a game to even be acknowledgable becomes simply to have free-styling, near abusable movement options be readily available no matter the difficulty of their execution. Since it’s most fresh in my mind, I’ll use NieR: Automata as an example: my first twenty or so minutes of the game consisted of nothing but simply running around the starting area, getting a feel for how movement functioned. Through basic self-discovery, I realized that movement in any direction, at any speed, could be cancelled full stop with the “dodge” that functions more like a flash-step, and subsequently that you could choose to carry your momentum from one direction directly into another. This allowed for precise and break-neck handling, which when combined with the quick attack speed of the game’s combat, allowed for the game to easily break the “Movement Barrier” and I was able to then decide if I enjoyed the rest of the experience.
Note that I said "decide". Just because a game happens to break through that barrier doesn’t make it a good game, or even a fun experience. It simply allows the descended player to acknowledge the experience as recreation at its base level. Games that fail to overcome the barrier become, quite frankly, a laundry list of chores. Go there, get that, defeat the evil, save the princess. Who fucking cares? If I’m going to sit there and follow some god’s (see: game designer) instructions and have to play by that entity’s rules, I’d rather have a clean house or a meal or even a literal stack of clean laundry once I’m done following instructions than something as vapid as a “Game Complete!” screen. To answer the envitable question, “Bu-bu-bu-but what about muh stories?”, the unique part of a game is that there is effort involved in advancing that story and receiving the next bit of content. That effort is the gameplay, and if the gameplay is a terrible bore or frustratingly restrictive, then it’s not worth putting up with to receive story from “god”. Although it might be natural to continue this train of thought negatively, I’m not going to sit here and knock on game narratives as a whole, because even right here with NieR I can say that the narrative was one of the higher points of the experience. But what NieR did was let me freely and fluidly experience that narrative, unhindered by anything but nearly my own imagination in how to tackle objectives. That opportunity is something I’ve been sore to find anytime within the past few years; the greatest reason for the “descent” from my passion for games.
Still, to blame the entirety of my problem on the “Movement Barrier” is akin to the old man yelling at sky. While that’s fun, and sometimes can have a shred of truth to it, the problem at the end of the day lies with me. I can’t control the direction of the gaming industry, and frankly the direction it’s progressing in is one that I disagree with. No, the fault lies in me and what I’ve come to expect from my recreation; a need to be “unproductively productive” or lest feel unfulfilled. As most competitive gamers will tell you, the ability to out-think, out-maneuver, and otherwise out-play your opponent is the core reason why they keep coming back for more. The opportunity to interact with our opponents is a deeper experience than can ever be felt playing alone or in an otherwise “single-player experience”. The phenomenon of “playing against the game” is one that fills me with absolute disgust these days. The game should be a language that I use to communicate with someone else. Whether that person is an ally or an opponent is largely irrelevant, but the game should not be a challenge in and of itself; the challenge should come from the skill of your opponents. Yes, executing is always a challenge, but I’ve never been one to consider execution anything other than a baseline prerequisite for “playing”. If I can’t execute, I’m at a level below playing; I’m fledging… I’m bad… I can’t hope to speak the language of players who appear to be speaking in tongues, leaving me outclassed. And that’s alright, I just need to get better. I need to learn to speak the language of the game and bend it to my will, and outclass the same opponent that earlier bested me. If I’m just speaking to a robot- if I’m just speaking to the program that’s running the game itself, the experience feels worthlessly cheap by comparison.
That base effort required to play is something I’ve come to not only prefer, but require. The baseline, or what you might commonly hear referred to as a “learning curve”, is a necessary wall to which one must scale to be able to experience all something has to offer. That curve has become something of a necessity for me, a need for my experience to rise above the cesspools of easily-accessible gameplay. Nothing, and I mean nothing, creates this experience better than fighting games. While Melee is the only game I’m even remotely accomplished in (and accomplished is a hell of stretch), I’ve toyed around with many other fighting games to the end of a similar feeling enjoyment. The curve for every one is absolutely killer and unique; picking up a new fighter is sentencing yourself to the “lab” for a bare minimum of 20 hours just to hope to understand just the small handful of characters you’ll be trying to pilot. This lab time is learning to speak the language, where you hope to use it to triumph over your friend the next time they enter your home, both of you glued to the couch, sticks or pads in hand, talking to each other through the game in front of you.
“But Carmen, all that time spent pulling yourself over the learning curve… All that time that you spend just trying to ‘play’… How is that fun for you? That sounds an awful lot like work!”
And therein lies the root of the problem. I think I’m just fucking broken inside when it comes to video games and I don’t know how to explain it. The enjoyment for me doesn’t even come from the act of winning: it’s purely the ride. Seeing the gradual improvement of your “unproductively productive” time pay off is just so satisfying when you experience it alongside your opponents, your teammates, and all the friends you made along the way. The experiences I get competing or just playing for fun outweigh even the most epic of single-player tales. Maybe it’s just a result of getting older. Maybe it’s the act of playing through something solo that I find to be a chore. Maybe I just don’t have that sense of childlike wonder any longer; the ability to see something as nebulous as “experiencing the developer’s game or story” as a challenge worth overcoming is from a time long past by. In a similar way to how Dungeons & Dragons was created to provide that strict set of rules that allow for dead-inside 20-somethings to experience imagination again, perhaps I need another person or opponent to challenge me in order to see investing recreational time into a game. Imagination, or in this case the game itself, very rarely displays anything in and of itself that grabs my interest any longer.
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Love ya,
- Carmen “Beanwolf” Condeluci