Press Start: Dare to Care
Week in, week out, I find that I give fewer and fewer fucks about my greatest love: video games. Something about the world has changed recently: perhaps it’s a winding down as the console generation nears to a close, or maybe the industry has just plain run out of ideas. Whichever the case may be, I can’t help but wonder why anybody other than dedicated, pathetic losers like myself would be inclined to care. Abruptly, he slaps himself across the face with a force that ejects two fillings and a week’s worth of shitty debris that previously resided underneath his grubby fingernails. God-fucking-dammit, man! This is your one-true, your reason d’etre! C’mon, surely I can muster up a handful of halfway adequate reasons to deter any other would-be quitters. Here goes.
The People
Whilst Keita Takahashi is lost to a world of artistically driven obscurity and 16-button custom arcade machines, we can still rely on a gathering of ingenious and passionate creative minds that are dedicated to keeping gaming interesting. Alongside heavy-hitters such as Suda 51 and Ken Levine, we have the lesser-knowns; Phil Fish; cult star Swery 65, as well as the teams over at Dennaton and Capybara Games. Don’t ask me why the nick-names include numbers. My best guess, though: android model numbers.
Gaming is also fortunate enough to have such exuberant personalities as Yoshinori Ono and everybody’s favourite bro, Cliffy B, a.k.a Dude Huge, a.ka. Cliff Bleszinski. And where would we be without Hideo Kojima? A man, who now into his fifties, has yet still to recognise just how mental he is. This tentative grip on sanity has benefited game design for decades so far and I hope more in the future. Whilst the gaming landscape may look a little bleak and undernourished right now, it’s my faith in the creativity of these people, along with the ones that I forgot to mention, that has me believing it won’t be too long before gaming flourishes again.
The Future
The future of gaming is increasingly independent. As bigger budget games collapse under the weight of their own pomposity, smaller, more focussed and importantly, cheaper, games will swoop in to fill the gap in gamer’s hearts. I’m not suggesting that kids are going to have formative, record-store-style moments like that time the rubenesque goth from Spiller’s Records introduced me to Bad Brains, at least not yet anyway, but there is going to soon come a time when the independent market is a viable alternative for nearly every type of customer.
Perhaps naively, I hold out a lot of hope for the next generation, too. Gaming has become so stagnant lately, that I’ve pinned my hopes on the new console generation giving the whole scene an almighty kick up the ass. Like, I want that foot lodged right up there and the boredom to come shooting out of its filthy mouth with gusto. So, let’s just blindly hope that this new coat of paint will make everything better, you know, like when a struggling couple foolishly brings a child into the world to kick-start the relationship, when really all it does is drive them further apart and make some poor little sod bitter and resentful for eternity. Life sucks, but gaming may not.
The other possibility that the future brings is the kind of gaming we were promised in the 90’s. If I asked that chubby little turd that was my ten-year-old self what did he think gaming would be like in 2013, he would have probably come up with something close to what you see in this video:
Shit just got real. This is a omnidirectional treadmill prototype being used in conjunction with an Oculus Rift headset. Not everybody wants to be flailing and jiggling along with their favourite game, except me. Working out and playing decent video games at the same time sounds like a match made in heaven. When this technology becomes affordable and practical, I’ll probably be too old to give a shit, and definitely too old to write another self-convincing post like this. I’ll just watch on with glee as my bitter and resentful children enjoy a five-minute respite from my over-zealous and unflinchingly sterile parenting style.
The Past
Whenever the future, or present lets you down, you can’t beat a bit of good old-fashioned nostalgia. The MTV neon-liquid-shit face assault getting you down? Man, Netflix has whole series’ of Dexter’s Lab. Chill. The same goes for games: there are some constants that we can always rely on. I’ll take playing Street Fighter until death if I have to. Fuck it. I’d be a machine without the distraction of new releases anyway. My Balrog would be the stuff of nightmares.
It’s often been the case that gaming’s intrinsic relationship with technology has allowed games to feel dated, old before their time. But, as the medium matures and more of us come to appreciate the essential mechanics that go into making a good game, then the past becomes a lot easier to fall back upon. Nobody’s criticising Monopoly, Scrabble or Risk for being out of date. Sure, the boxed product formula may not always be here, but those solid, well-formulated rules will always remain. A good game, in whatever format is just that: a good game and luckily for gamers there is a tear-inducing wealth of content to be pillaged.
What gaming’s past also affords us is a wealth of certifiably rad creative content. Tumblr in particular is full of gif-makers, comic artists and writers all celebrating the age of pixels and scan lines. Nothing makes me happier than seeing my favourite Capcom background character getting a dedicated animated gif. There’s something special about being able to re-purpose and enjoy this kind of minutiae and it’s something that’s almost exclusive to gaming. Follow VGJunk: trust me.
So, go play the classics. Repent for your sins, accumulate some cultural capital and play cult favourites. You have until the end of the world, after all.
If all else fails, just remember that Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is coming out any minute. Have you seen the trailer yet?
This game looks, frankly, fucking ridiculous and is just the kind of thing I never imagined actually getting made. The designers were only allowed to create costume items of around $100 real-world value, it has Michael Biehn in it and is full to the gills with VHS nostalgia goodness. Hip though it may be, there’s little denying how much fun this looks. Far be it from me to pin the hopes of a medium on a single title, but it’s hopefully a good indication for things to come. As the landscape grows increasingly stale, perhaps more designers and major studios will take the time to flex their creative muscles and at least try to make us laugh.
If we’re going to pin our hopes on a single title, let’s make it GTA V. After all, these games induce years of hyped-up cock rubbing and lust. They promise the earth and usually, just about deliver. I swear, that if I don’t come out of that game with a new, hopeful outlook and some relentless positivity, then I’m going to quit. I’m going to piss all of my hard-earned money away on Warhammer 40,000 models. I’m going to gain fifty pounds, switch out water for full-fat cola and retreat into a nerdy wank-cave for the next ten years without even questioning my life’s total lack of direction. I’ll do it, video games, I really will. Don’t create that monster.