Sunday, 13 September 2009

• game over

  I played 5 hours of video games today.  Something I haven't done in a while.  And something I don't intend to do again for a looong time.  The game is called Madworld.  It's on Wii, and it's a gore game.  You have a chain saw, and obviously, you kill lots of things with it.  There's a lot of blood and swearing and all that crap.  So you start the game.  And you learn the controls.  There's the basic attack, and some other fancy attacks, but you settle for the way that scores the most points.  Yada yada.  You move the buttons a certain way you get this effect.  Or that effect.  But you settle for the combo that inflicts the most pain and you use it over and over.  Again.  And again.

  I don't know why I would spend my life oogling over games all the way from my prepubescent years to my early college years.  I'm just realizing now that video games, especially single player video games, are repetitive.  For first person shooters, you just fine tune your hand movements, then point and shoot.  Maybe it takes time to learn the finer points of the game...the AI for example, but then you've got it.  And you reuse the formula again and again.  Rinse and repeat for the next first-person shooter.  For RPGs, it's the same deal.  You spend time collecting XP and money, you buy the better and better weapons and armor, and there you go.  After playing a whole bunch of RPGs you realize that there are common story and gameplay themes that people use over and over again.  Formulas.  Repetitive hand movements.  Maybe it's the enjoyment of guaranteed level-ups.  But come-on, after you finish the game, it's over dude. 

  So I'm really proud of myself today.  At one point, I felt more like reading a book than playing games.  Yeah, I'm liking this.  But in the end I didn't because I wanted to finish the frekkin' game.  I think I've got to work on that.  It's good to finish things, but you don't have to finish video games, you idiot :P

  Some food for thought.

  Over time, designers and companies will continue to make what they think are "better" games, but in the end, I don't think games will ever have the ability to make a virtual world better than the real thing.  Example.  Even with the ease of communication through facebook and skype...nothing beats meeting a friend face to face.  Maybe, for a moment, the virtual world might seem better, but nothing replaces the real thing. 

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