I had another blog lined up for today. It had bells and whistles and everything. But after some unfortunate circumstances it all got wiped and now I feeling weak and useless and can't even work up the creative energy to re-enter the paragraphs that I lost. (I suppose I underestimated how much I needed the stability of this blog in my life.) However, I am sad. Really freakin' sad. So I thought I could replace my fallen content with something that fits my morose mood. (Don't expect many zany jokes and punchlines with this one.)
So what do I mean by a video game atrophy? It's a fairly vague term with many different possible meanings or connotations, but which drove me to write this blog? Well, I was thinking about the general wasting away of gaming in the industry sense. (Maybe I'll cover personal atrophy the next time I feel like hurling myself off a roof.) You see, gaming has evolved incredibly rapidly in the past few decades from a niche activity to the most profitable in the world, and that sped-up growth could be met with a hastened demise considering how things appear to be panning out from here. (FYI, the rest of this blog is going to be an off-the-cuff personal dirge of an article, so don't expect heavy research, mirth, or a happy conclusion.)
There have been a few individuals who have taken a look at the progression of gaming and remarked how it resembles the ebb and flow of other art forms, yet in fast-motion. So it is my no means an original idea when I point out how gaming trends fall out of grace in a matter of years as opposed to generations. Remember when breaking the fourth wall was the height of intelligent storytelling? (Well, maybe not in the mainstream. Everyone seemed to roll their eyes in Assassin's Creed 2 when Juno spoke to the player.) That trend seemed to be wholly axed off with the cumulative and creative; Doki Doki Literature Club. To try that again would be old hat and uncreative. How can you top the type of manipulation that Dan Salvato pulled off? Simple, you can't. People's tastes moved on and so did video game storytelling. All in the space of one game.
Of course, that isn't to say that there aren't trends that don't overstay their welcome. When Kojima delivered one of the greatest horror teasers of all time in PT, many indie Devs tried to copy the ideas and concepts that were introduced here. If I had a penny for every looping hallway horror indie project that I have come across since, I would have enough to pay off my debts and become a functioning member of society. (Thank god that's not the case and I'm resigned to this purgatory, huh?) Not that I blame anyone for borrowing an idea here and there, what Kojima and his team presented was truly inspired. In horror video games there are usually those few spaces in which the player is safe, these are areas that you get to know exceedingly well and take comfort from that familiarity. These help to pad out the time between terror sequences and prevent the player from becoming desensitized too quickly. Kojima turned this concept on it's head slightly by familiarizing the player with this hallway location and having them loop through it again and again, then he changed it up by subtly adding small detail to the map and throwing in horror ques to deeply unnerve you. He played on so many levels of horror that other games hadn't manage to reach yet that it was inevitable that someone would try to emulate his game. That being said, Polish Itch.io horror project 'Estacao Liberdade' is literally just PT on a subway. I mean, they literally stole the creepy radio script and re-worded it for their game. (Good artists borrow, great artists steal, I guess.)
So where am I going with this? Just that I think that the rapid adoption rate of video game trends could have an adverse effect on the future of gaming. Heck, I don't like being an alarmist, but I think that if things carry on the way they are it's only a matter of time before we hit a second Video game crash. Let me explain. Recently I was playing 'The Outer Worlds' (Today's blog was supposed to be on that game, but you know...) That is a game that is feature complete with every bit of desired content finished and shipped with the product. That is to say, this isn't an a work-in-progress game that is going to try and persist itself for years and bum a few pity bucks off you in order to keep up with expenses. 'The Outer Worlds' is a very "what you see is what you get", kind of game. And that strangely makes it something of an abnormally in today's gaming landscape.
I have spoken in length about the steady rise of live services in our gaming sphere, but I find it really is important not to understate just how prevalent these types of games are becoming. Every release window we seem to get at least two live service releases, attempting to compete for your money and attention through recurrency incentives. Ubisoft famously claimed that traditional games were gone and everything was about 'live services' now. They even demonstrated so with a hilarious amateurish flow chart featuring a .Jpeg of Bayek (from Assassin's Creed Origins) in the middle. (You guys need to start paying your graphic designers more. Or at all.) So that is one huge company that has committed to bowing out of making traditional video games in favour of ones that are more 'lucrative'.
The problem is that when such a trend starts to catch on, you start to run afoul of Syndrome's razor; "When everyone's a super, no one is". All these games want to be different and advertise their games as a journey for their players to go on. 'Join us and you can see this game start from humble beginnings to become the next WoW or FFXIV!' The problem is, this usually doesn't work out. When we live with a work ethic of "It's not where yo start, it's where you end up." (Thanks Todd Howard.) we start to see games that finish unpolished, unfinished, or straight up broken. (Or all 3 if we're talking Fallout 76.) From there these developers are expecting fans to latch onto these messes-of-a-game until the thing becomes worthwhile, dedicating their time and money along the way. The industry has essentially found a way to mix crowdfunding and early access in the worst way possible.
Even when things work out and the game isn't total trash, Devs still need the community to be playing and paying constantly in order to justify the game's servers being kept up. This leads to situations where players will find themselves with literally no more freetime left to split between their games as they have to do a daily in this game, before completing a dungeon here, and then the weekly boss in that game before finishing with the monthly contract. All of these 'recurrency incetives' are slapped with a timer in order to promote their exclusivity and encourage impulse buying. Essentially, this means that every live service game is competing each other for your screen time oblivious of the fact there is only so much to go around.
So, as the quality of games is slowly starting to become worse, people are starting to buy less of them and instead stick to the games that they know to be good, or are already a shoe in. Battlefield, Call of Duty, and Sports games are all going to hit their sales quotas, that's a given, but every other game has to struggle for recognition and sales. It's slowly starting to create a bubble where only a handful of games are getting the lion share of the industry profits, and bubbles are known to be susceptible to bursting. Wasn't the last video game crash caused by an influx of low quality products that cost too much to produce and nobody wanted to buy them? (I may be wrong on the particulars there, but I think I caught the gist.)
So what do we do about all of this? As consumers, we have to let these companies know that it's time to change tactics into something that it more sustainable and healthy for the industry. And that means we'll have to play hardball with the only bargaining chip that matters, their money. Of course, this is implying that people have enough social responsibility to even act in the greater good. Heck, the other day I saw a Reddit post of someone complaining about how they were getting rude messages over Xbox live because they purchased Fallout 76's subscription service and were running around in the exclusive ranger armour. "I don't agree with it either" He wrote "Blame Bethesda, not me.". If that is any hint as to the intelligence of the average consumer, then it's safe to say that gaming is doomed. (Have a happy Halloween!)
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