Game Over

I was going to continue my recent series of posts on my personal Appendix N choices until I remembered this was E3 time. A change of subject was needed. So instead of that I decided to focus this post on video games to match it. And the medium is not in great spot.

However, not only am I not alone in this view, it appears to be a growing consensus year after year. The last few days confirmed it further.

One thing this recent E3 has made clear is that video games have lost their way, and had lost it long ago. For those that don't know, E3 is a trade show for the video game industry that is supposed to be the hobby's biggest even of the year, but it has gotten terrible in recent years. It exists to promote video games and show just how much the industry has in the tank. This year showed it doesn't have much. 2019 is the worst it's ever been.

What was once the hobby of your average kid, has devolved into being for no one. It hasn't grown up with its audience as advertised but has instead morphed. It is now about cults of personality, corporation worship, and "Geek Culture", far away from where it began.

If you want a summary if how bad this E3 was, crass and crude, but always insightful youtuber, Razorfist explains it in the profanity laden rant below.

It sounds like he's joking, but all that actually happened.

For a different perspective as this event was happening live, professional court jester youtuber Mister Metokur goes into a near-10 minute rant after the show by Square Enix had just wrapped up. It almost appears out of character for him, but it is completely understandable. This is after he sat through every live conference at the time and was very clearly getting more and more agitated throughout them all. His commentary paints a picture of a bleak industry.

Starting at about 1:25:50 in the video below he goes off on a tear going through everything bad the hobby has devolved into in recent years. Just as Razorfist, this is someone who has been gaming for a long time, and probably about has long as I have.

(Skip to 1:25:50)

I share both their opinions on this colossal failure of an event. This is not what gaming used to be.

At least, as both have admitted, the Nintendo presentation which ran last on Tuesday actually was extraordinary. They presented games, revealed new ones, and offered surprise after surprise in a compact time period. It was the anti-thesis of every other presentation. Nintendo still remembers what made this industry great to begin with, whch is great to see since they've been in it longer than any of the others at the show. However, one company cannot save an industry, and E3 2019 was still terrible.

So, what happened? How did video games devolve from being fun slices of imagination pressed to a cartridge that a kid would buy after a week of mowing lawns to becoming brain dead shallow interactive movies with the imagination of a thumbtack? When did they decide to become our priests and confessors instead of vendors? When did entertainment decide it needed to become a lifestyle brand instead of entertainment? A hobby that went from giving the censors the finger in the '90s to bending over for them in two decades is quite the fall.

Video games are not like the other dying forms of entertainment. Whereas movies and TV lost the plot in the '90s, slowly sliding downhill throughout the '00s to the dog's breakfast they are now, and comics went through the grinder back in the 60s before gradually rotting away into irrelevance, video games managed to stay the course kept their popularity on top of it. They never had to pander to be a gigantic industry.

You see, despite the revisionism that video games are being ruined now because of the dumb mainstream, video games have been mainstream since the 1970s. There were movies and TV shows based around them that were highly successful, and you'd be hard pressed to find a kid by the early 90s that didn't own an NES at least once. They got more and more popular because they stayed the course and attracted new people as an audience towards them.

The difference is that companies used to make games for gamers, the people that actually bought them, and not a phantom casual audience of millions that will buy watered down dross. You could list classic game after classic game throughout every decade since the '70s as genres came and went, some were twisted and were destroyed, and yet others rose from the ashes, sometimes within a single entry of a series, but creativity never appeared in short supply. Games were at their best when they had a defined identity.

Perhaps looking at the game boxes of popular games will give a hint. I will even choose older ones to illustrate the point.

If you've spent any time around here at all then you probably know what the similarities are between the above boxes. It isn't genre, publisher, developer, system, or release date year. They're all pulp inspired. They all share the fact that they play on the imagination and longing for adventure that the audience craves. The gameplay built around their pulp framework is what hooks the gamer into the adventure to make the experience even more immersive.

Here we go again.

Early games were based on comics, TV, and adventure movies that all have roots in the older traditions that go back further into the pulps. Throughout the '70s, and '80s, deep into the '90s all video games had these as touchstones and backing which made "Gameplay first, Everything else second" far easier to manage. This is how they kept to the narrow path of success. Now games are based on bad, boring, and overproduced modern Hollywood movies. The same Hollywood movies people are going out less and less to see and that games were out-grossing.

Imagine if you're a popular Jazz artist and you suddenly decide to play Noise Polka. You don't think there wouldn't be a problem with the audience? Of course it's a stupid example. Musicians aren't dumb enough to abandon what made them to begin with to copy a style that is significantly less likely to make them money or an audience. The game industry is, however.

But video games didn't use to be this restrained and limited. Actually, I will go further and include all games from Tabletop to Board. It's about the concept of gaming itself. The reason gaming took off was the tactile feel and close brushing against that world of imagination we all love to tap into. This is a different word than just "reading" or "watching", but also "experiencing" on top of it. What it's not is about mindless consuming and hoping one solid heroin hit will give you that buzz you are looking for. Gaming was about finding new ways to get the gamer into situations and push them further into that mindset of imagination and creativity.

You are the master of your imagination. They give you the rules and set up, and you play. Everything beyond that basic set up is up to you.

And because they were games that naturally meant its barrier of entry was challenge. This was needed to make them stand out from other types of art. The rules are what separate playing a game from passively watching a movie or patiently reading a book. This challenge is what helped games craft an identity apart from other art. This is why the roots in video games come from arcades and arcade rules such as "Continues" and "Game Over" screens.

That's right, arcade gaming is one of the deepest roots in the medium. It emphasized challenge to keep gamers coming back and pumping quarters and token into their machines. So with the death of arcades after the end of the '90s, gaming began to shift from this focus on players traversing tough challenges into being about advancing a pseudo-film plots through poorly aged cutscenes. It continued this devolution from the original PlayStation up to where we are today.

A good example of this is the shoot 'em up, or "shmup", genre. This used to be a staple style in gaming throughout the golden age of the medium up until the death of arcades and the movement towards "Cinematic experiences" and other such idiocy.

A "Shmup"

Back in the day, up until about the Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn and original PlayStation generation, you wouldn't find a game critic or gamer who didn't have a favorite shmup or have a few in their library, and publishers were still putting them out up until the '00s hit. But then it got worse as the industry shifted from challenge to cinematics. Pioneers in the genre such as Compile ended up biting the dust by the end of the generation and the arcades had to cling to the gimmicky and visually stagnant "bullet hell" subgenre to get by. Now not only is the genre practically dead, they are treated as outdated and cheap relics worth no more than a pocket of change by those salivating for the next $60 movie experience. This loss of a cornerstone genre is just one example of how watered down and diluted the hobby has become since ts heyday.

The concept of "Lives" and "Continues" have become a foreign concept for those who need save states and instant gratification to get by, when they are what built the industry to begin with. But challenge is now looked at as bad. Game reviewers actually mark games down for being too difficult today, and have since the original PlayStation. Having your hand held through static cinematics and pushing a button prompt on screen to "be awesome" has replaced it. What easier way to get that dopamine hit without the developer having to design anything new or the gamer having to strive to reach it?

At this point they aren't even games anymore. This isn't what the industry started from, and without those roots the static E3 show the above commentators were harping on is inevitable. Games are not going to get better from here because there's nowhere else to go. This framework of bad movies they are stuck in is a dead end.

What are they going to do to fix it or improve? Take more control from the player? Add in more cinematics fashioned on worse movies no one watches? Streamline design even more to the point you only need controllers with a single button? Game design has already been stagnant for over a decade now. It can't get worse from here, but it can, and will, continue to decay. They're even bringing back old series such as Commander Keen and Battletoads to spit on with terrible modern anti-consumer practices and bad, insulting art. If you can't beat the past, it's easier to destroy it.

It happens all the time.

But there are still many keeping the old flame alive. From middle market developers such as New Blood Interactive putting out games such as DUSK and Amid Evil to Nintendo remembering that people want that gameplay--that key component of gaming--more than ever. It isn't hopeless, despite how bad it looks.

While the AAA industry will eventually gorge itself to death, and will be forgotten rather quickly when it does by those moving on to the next shallow hobby, there are still those who remember where it all came from and are dead set on doing it right. We can only hope they stick around long enough to make a difference.

Next time we return to business as usual when I get back to my Appendix N posts. For now I think I'm going to go play some Soldier Blade. That's a game that never gets old. Because it wasn't designed to. It was made to have you keep coming back and improve your skill. And maybe that's the key.

So don't look for the future of your hobby of choice from corporations. They've long since lost the plot. You won't find any future there. Time's already almost up. Look to the past and you'll get an idea of what the future holds.

It's guaranteed.