Confessions On Modern Gaming As It Passes Me By

Photo by Nelo Hotsuma, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

“Over the centuries” quipped Terry Pratchett, “mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil… prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon…”

Hey, I understood that reference! I played me a bunch of Doom, along with its spiritual, developer, and blocky first-person cousin Wolfenstein 3D. The late-80s through mid-90s was a magical time for video gaming, as PCs evolved enough to vastly expand past what the consoles and arcades could manage. What more could a teenage boy want than blasting early 3D graphics demons and/or pixelated Nazis while listening to the latest Metallica cd and trying to avoid actual responsibility.

And I was good with it.

But that was 30 years and seven Metallica albums ago. Eight if you count Lulu where the biggest metal band ever played overdriven yacht rock while Lou Reed did bad poetry as far off time as possible. Which you shouldn’t. We all agreed that didn’t actually happen.

Anywho…

I got to thinking about that simpler time before Up Yonder even had internet at all whiles reading some press about some forthcoming games coming out. One title coming in especially hot right now, Jedi: Survivor caught my attention. Not because I generally like Star Wars and played Star War games, but because so much of the media coverage is the mechanics of the release itself. There is a release date, but then there are preload times, and then the release times, and then the 140GB estimated size of the download. Any of the three expected and advertised can be a potential disaster, as other high-profile games have found out, not to mention bugs, bad designs, and the fact a bunch of folks playing something only limited tested might not come across as intended.

With high level games like Jedi: Survivor having the development time and budgets similar to theatrical movie releases, and considerable computing horsepower required just to download and play the cutting edge of gaming hotness, the days of blowing into a cartridge are far, far behind us.

And I feel it.

Gaming reviews are usually some variations of “After playing (x game) for the first ten hours, here are my thoughts” or “(insert culture war item here) makes anyone who plays (insert game title here) a (insert worst thing you can think to accuse someone of being of here)” these days. Like most of the rest of media, gaming media has a creeping habit of tapping into outrage and controversy to keep the views and clicks coming. Gaming is now the largest category of the entertainment industry, almost five times bigger than movies, and bigger than film and music industries combined. In 2021, gaming globally had $180B in revenue. While the actual act of playing a game as far as hand-eye coordination goes has not changed all that much, everything about gaming today is lightyears from the days of double-barreling leaden death to demons in stunning 640×480 VGA.

Online is what really is different in gaming between young me and early 40s me. Not just in playing and delivery of playing video games, but in the explosion and growth of the culture and community of gaming. To my teens and their discord servers of game-specific interaction, stringing 35ft of phone cord from the living room to bedroom to talk to your friends while trying to solve the point and click puzzles of a Sierra Online game of my early teens would seem hilariously archaic. Twitch and YouTube have such a hold that there are probably as many, if not more, folks watching other people gaming as actually gaming themselves.

Don’t call it a subculture, gaming IS the culture now, or at least a massive swath of it. It has its own language, customs, traditions, heroes, and folklore, much of which has spilled over and is now ingrained more widely. For the most part when I travel about the gaming landscape, I feel like a pilgrim in a foreign land. My teens play Japanese games with no English involved at all, have their discords, and bounce from game to game faster than I can keep up with. Friends and colleagues play big-ticket games, while I mostly just wonder where they find the time to do so. The modern massive multiplayer free-for-alls seem like way too much chaos and not enough fun to me. I get it. I’m not cool enough. I’m not on the cutting edge. I’m not in that community. I don’t get “it” when it comes to gaming today.

And I’m good with it.

Bandwidth is something I spend considerable time thinking and managing, not just because of the websites and online work I do but also in understanding I, me, I have limited bandwidth. Only so many hours in the day. Only so much mental energy. I play two games fairly regularly, but the one in short bursts to distract and the other, a sports management simulation, runs mostly as background noise with occasional need to be tended. Like many other things, gaming has just been pruned down to an occasional thing in my adult life. I’ll play the phone app games that let me do so with my children. I still dabble on two ongoing games I use as respites from whatever travails of the day are being traversed. But anything remotely qualifying as being a “gamer” in even the loosest sense of the word is just not for me anymore. Actual responsibility has long since won the internal debate that dictates external actions,

My pinball machine master of a father, who despite holding multiple degrees and a minister’s ordination could hustle most anyone at card and pool with a questionable ease, just couldn’t hang with his son and changing technology. Dad hung in good through the Atari years, but somewhere around the Sega Genesis-era and despite giving it the good father try, he gave in to the inevitable. For myself gaming as a primary pursuit made it — just barely — into the new millennium, but once XBox and PlayStation started needing defining nomenclature for newer models I too fell off. My own children passed me by even faster, being native to the modern fully online, integrated gaming world and culture. While part of me would love to just — like the original Mario Bros of my youth — headbutt an 8-bit box, get a fire flower, and spit bouncing fireballs at the tides and time that did not wait for this man, I know that’s a bad look. Not to mention the valid accusations of cringe my children would level at me for wanting to do so.

Besides, look how well the movie version of the venerable video game plumbers just did at the box office. No doubt that will spawn a bunch of not-as-successful follow-ups. We’ve already had second-rate Doom movies. Heck, that wasn’t even the first Mario Bros. movie. But could we at least shoot high with the soon-to-be flood of video game movies. Maybe we can get Christopher Nolan to take up Wolfenstein 3D, or Scorsese can do a 4-hour adaptation of Duck Hunt. Antoine Fuqua could make a masterpiece out of a Streets of Rage or Altered Beast. Maybe let Wes Anderson loose on Maniac Mansion, or Ava DuVernay delve into Final Fantasy VII.

At least with those movies I’d get the reference. What a time to be alive, when you find yourself less cutting edge, and more the meme that folks get a chuckle out of.

I’m good with it.