Something has happened between me and video games. Our relationship has become rote. I no longer feel the spark I once did.
There was a time when I would hang on every game announcement, pore over every piece of trailer footage, and look on jealously each year when E3 rolled around and the press got to try out dozens of new games. Now, I mostly can't be bothered.
I want to say it's not me, it's them. Our love affair began when we were both young. Video games, then, were a few hundred pixels on a screen, maybe not even in color. I was a kid, playing a borrowed Atari 2600, snatching playtime on my friend's Super Nintendo, eventually pestering my Dad until he bought me a used NES and a stack of games.
Later we added a personal computer and a Sega Genesis, and after I got my first paper route, I got my hands on the gameboy and haven't missed a Nintendo handheld since.
I did not finish a lot of games in those days. The first I can remember beating was Dr. Mario; the second The Addams Family (NES) game. On PC, I played Oregon Trail and Sim City and King's Quest.
The first game I ever fell truly, properly in love with was probably Sid Meier's CivNet. I found it in a bargain bin and bought it with pocket money. Though it was built as a multiplayer version of the original Civilization, I played it single-player, renaming my civilization and inventing its ruler, its cities, its entire history. I never won a campaign, but that wasn't the point. The point was that those pixels on a screen and the game's rules gave me just enough to play with to let my imagination run wild.
I loved CivNet so much I immediately bought the next thing I saw that had Sid Meier's name on it, which turned out to be a Sega Genesis copy of Pirates! Gold. I played that game so much I still have the geography of the Caribbean memorized, decades later. For months, it was always the first thing I'd ask to do when I got home from school, hogging the family's only TV set for hours, which my mother only grudgingly allowed.
Again, it wasn't about beating the game, it was about roleplaying the kind of pirate I wanted to be.
When I started playing RPGs later, I was blown away by the vastness of their worlds. Every moment of my journey through Baldur's Gate or Final Fantasy VII seemed like it could lead anywhere, show me anything. Video games contained infinite promise.
So what changed?
Well, we both grew older, for one. As two people age, it's easy to grow farther apart, if you don't consciously put the work into staying close. Video game technology grew more advanced. There was now no longer any need to gesture toward the idea of a city using little colored squares, as in CivNet. Everything could be fully rendered out. Where Baldur's Gate was created with animated sprites on pre-rendered 3D backgrounds, newer RPGs were created with 3D spaces rendered in real-time. These developments changed the scope, the scale, the budget of games.
They also changed design sensibilities. Gone were fixed camera angles, and in their absence began the long struggle for developers to figure out how to draw the player's attention to the exact right things in the world. Likewise, as these worlds grew more detailed, more realistically lit, and more full of stuff, figuring out what to interact with became a challenge.
Imagine you're reading a novel, and the novelist pauses to describe every single item in the scene, its condition, how the light hits it, where it lies in relation to everything else, and so on. Most of those items are entirely irrelevant to the story, but by the end, because each one of them has been given the same care and attention, you as a reader no longer know which ones are important and which ones not.
This is the challenge more realistic rendering poses to game design. And for most video games, the solution wasn't to make the worlds more sparse, but to add more direction in. Now the interactables are highlighted, or splattered with yellow paint. The actions the player must take are marked out step-by-painstaking step, so that the player is less an adventurer exploring a world than an actor in a first rehearsal, trying to figure out how to hit her marks.
Along with these challenges comes skyrocketing costs. You can bet if a developer puts anything interesting or surprising into a game, it will be on the main path, where the player can't miss it. A couple years ago, I played Ghost of Tsushima, a very pretty game with a wonderful combat system, but the dullest open world I'd seen in ages. What made it so dull wasn't the world design (which was lovely) or the environment art (which was gorgeous), but how there was not one unique thing to find in all of it. Every good idea in that game (of which there were many) was repeated so many times as to make you question whether it was even a good idea in the first place. Following a fox to a secret is a meditative, endearing, mystical event; following 60+ foxes to similar secrets is not only tedious, it robs even that first experience of its wonder.
Wonder: that's what I felt when I played video games when I was younger. That's what I'm missing now.
Of course, it's not just them. I'm not a child anymore, and with growing older, the sense of wonder fades. One no longer believes that anything is possible.
I've also been a game developer for seventeen years now, so I know how the sausage is made, and I've become adept at seeing the patterns behind a game's world. I like to think I'm less cynical than many game dev veterans; I still love the work itself, and I still get up every morning excited to do my job.
Maybe it's also that I've played so many of them at this point. There was a time a few years ago when I would finish 40-50 games a year. Maybe I was better off never finishing them, always leaving that possibility open for what they could be, where
Baldur's Gate 3 is coming out in August. I say I'm looking forward to it, but I feel like I'm just going through the motions. The first two games made me want to be a game writer. But now I find myself wondering if it's ever going to be possible to recapture that experience, or are games and I going to have to admit that we no longer love each other as we once did?