The habit

When it comes to psychoactive chemicals, I’m considered quite the prude. Not even mentioning the “harder” drugs, I consider making use of marijuana or alcohol irresponsible at best, tobacco disgusting, and even regular intake of caffeine to “get through the day” nothing but a crutch, and one that quickly replaces a perfectly good leg. But I try to keep my nose out of other people’s indulgences and just stick to what I believe is right for me and my body.

There was, however, a wild and ignorant allegation I came across not too long ago that forced me to stop and take stock of myself. I have never considered the claim that video games should be viewed as a dangerous drug in their own right as something to be taken seriously, except perhaps in the most extreme cases– though arguably, any remotely enjoyable indulgence can be called a dangerous and addictive threat to one’s health in the right hands, in the rarest cases. A person could, theoretically, become so engrossed in movies that their life begins to unravel, hiding from all their responsibilities and draining their resources to hide in the magical worlds through the screen.

Game loss

The spread of subjects in video games has ever been dominated by violence. Certainly there have been some notable alternatives here and there, but in terms of popularity and widespread use, violence has been the foremost focus through every stage of development, straight through to today. But with the development and expansion of the market, the flourishing independent market, and the constant search for a unique premise to offer up, to stand apart from the crowd, many alternatives have been raised, and some of them have been surprisingly successful.

Some of these games may well make us wonder why we enjoy them. Some are modeled around wholly mundane elements of life, literally things we can do ourselves, perhaps things we already do frequently. Yet we play these games, and we enjoy them. Some may be so inaccurate to the theme they present that it’s simply an amusing flavor for engaging gameplay, but some make a close enough approximation as to make us wonder, perhaps, “why don’t I actually just DO this myself?”

In Memoriam Evolve

Because we do not yet live in a single enormous information superconductor that allows all data, all creations that can be transmitted as series of bits to move freely between brains without cost or arrangement, there exist intermediary services that package our ideas and creations for easy distribution and consumption. And because we do not yet live in a post-scarcity utopia free of the trappings of economic models, starvation, and the burden of the worker, the same intermediary services must also act as exchangers of liquid value, attempting to transform these provided ideas, these encapsulated and encrypted pieces of art, into as much money as possible. This allows them to pay the creators for their time and effort, and to pay their own costs. And, incidentally, to make a profit.

Idle fantasy

(Another late post, another game review. Coincidence or conspiracy?)

Today I would like to review an old game. Many of you may have played it already, but I believe this may be a worthwhile read for you even so. In the true sense of the word, this is a review of the game, a retrospective on the game and the role it played in history, both its quality and what it represents. It is my hope that some might be inspired to play it if for some reason they haven’t, some might be inspired to play it again, and some might come to gain a new appreciation for an old memory, as I have.

Final Fantasy IX was a long, heartfelt farewell, in video game form. It was the last FF for the original Playstation, a fine platform for the series, and it was itself a retrospective on the series as a whole, leading up to that point. Square knew that with future titles, they would begin to push further and further away from their established style, and they would experiment with the series in ways we could not yet imagine. So when Final Fantasy IX came out, in a way, it felt like more of the same. It was nice, but not as ground-shaking as others before it. It was packed with references to earlier games and certainly embraced the feel of classic high fantasy, but that seemed little more than a pleasant bit of nostalgia, and that mainly for those that had played the majority of titles that came before.

Consume and repeat

When one reads a book or story, often, once is enough. You’ve enjoyed the plot (hopefully) and now you can return it, or put it on the shelf and suppose that you might read it in a few years. And if it’s a really good story or book, maybe you’ll read it again sooner. This is, I think, a pretty typical way to experience a written piece of work.

When you play a classic, linear video game, once is probably enough for the majority of them. Back when there were very few out there, we might have replayed the best ones a good deal since we had little choice, but today, even if you’re penniless, we’re nearly drowning in options. The best games might get played again, though, and maybe even fairly soon.

Spending Time

Friends, readers, players, it is with great solemnity that I bring news: today, early this morning, the worst came to pass. I failed to make my blog post for Wednesday. And I couldn’t even blame wonky time traveling posts, or claim that it’s still Wednesday somewhere because time zones. There’s no disputing it. I have failed. And I am sorry. Whether this is the first crack, to be followed by the slow but rapidly accelerating collapse of my entire life, ending with me bleeding out in a gutter drenched in heroine, or if it will be the galvanizing proof that even when I stumble I can press onward and upward to greater things, this remains to be seen.

My excuse is that I found a video game that I cannot directly describe in terms of praise so much as in terms that would grow increasingly disturbing and sexual no matter how much I tried to avoid such implications. It does things to me. It satisfies needs that, though I knew I had them, I had never realized were so vastly unsatisfied. I am captivated, and I lose hours in a joyous and occasionally cackling manner. There. That didn’t sound TOO sexual. Better than the first three tries.

Clockwork in the darkness

I enjoy stealth-based video games. I like the feeling both of sliding unseen through a network of security measures, skillfully accomplishing my goals without being detected, and also that of systematically removing these “measures,” often people, one by one until a bustling inner sanctum has been reduced to a graveyard in the literal and figurative sense, the lights snuffed and the bodies stuffed in every closet and dark corner available. There is a satisfying peace derived from chaos in both cases. In this sense, I suppose that my enjoyment of stealth games derives largely from my aforementioned perception of the world in systems. I see the level as a system, and I either navigate it or dismantle it with care to prove my superiority to it.

So maybe this answers some of my questions about stealth design in my own case, but I don’t know that this is the same answer others would give. I’ve been playing a stealth game recently, and it’s brought to mind a few issues. When you’re engaging with a situation in stealth, what is it that’s important? That your “targets” act for the most part consistently, patrolling the same sections endlessly so that they can be dispatched in due time, or that they are realistic, that they wander at random and especially change their behavior if they have any reason for suspicion of their surroundings? Especially when you engage in save abusing to get through difficult areas, questions of truly consistent and predictable behavior come up often. Should these people be defined as static puzzle pieces, or should they be “people?”

Shoot because you must

I don’t like shooting games. There are endless scores of games out there that are centered around shooting people in the open shooting people from cover, shooting people from far away, shooting people up close, shooting other players, shooting AI people, shooting monsters, shooting abstract things, just about anything you can imagine where you align a cursor with a thing (or, if you wanna get really fancy, just ahead of the thing) to make it stop moving and maybe blow up. And a lot of these games are just about doing this thing a whole lot, because apparently that’s what people find rewarding.

There are a few obvious reasons why. Shooting people is one of the big things that’s emotionally evocative but that we can’t really do in reality, and which is easily approximated through common control schemas. But along with that, it’s a matter of momentum. The big games of the past were shooters, so when publishers want a successful game today, they make shooters. People understand shooters. They’ve always been playing them, and if you give them a shooter, they can work out how to play it pretty easily on their own. And even when the market is saturated, oversaturated, flooded with shooters, people keep playing. They buy the new version of their favorite shooter every year and brag about how much better it is than the other shooter that comes out every year.