by Alexander Wall on Mar 30, 2015
In the back of my mind over the past several weeks, I’ve been struggling to find games to latch on to and commit significant playing time towards. Part of me feels like I’m just getting older and busier with life, but another part of me feels like there just aren’t many games out there that resonate with me. Or perhaps if there are, they’re just so hard to track down.
The majority of games I play are social games, usually shown to be my friends, family, and others. I usually try to keep a watch on Steam sales as well, and look for things that I might like and might be able to get a friend or two to dive into with me. I’m really not much of a solo-gamer. I grew up in the early console and arcade era where most games were two-player and half the fun of playing a game had to do with who you were playing it with.
Gaming by myself isn’t nearly as exciting as picking up a title and playing it with a friend. I still remember quite fondly the very first day my brothers and I cracked open our brand new Nintendo 64 that featured four native controllers. We played more than our fair share of Mariokart, Goldeneye, and Super Smash Brothers and loved every minute of it.
Social interaction is what gaming is all about.
It connects people and provides a medium for entertaining interaction with one another. Which is probably why I gravitate so strongly towards massively multiplayer online games. They are sort of that pinnacle of a social gaming experience. Yet lately, I feel like these games just don’t answer the bell anymore. Over the past few years, I’ve experienced more social gaming interaction by participating in RPG forums than I have in MMOs.
That’s tragic.
What’s worse, is amidst this decline of socially interactive gameplay and a push towards ultimate accessibility, games (particularly MMOs) are losing the spirit of what has always made them truly enjoyable. Just because I’m growing older (I finally hit level 30 in the game of life this year), doesn’t mean I don’t still want to link up and play games with my friends like I did when I was a kid. The internet makes that possible, and modern games should do much better to enable and encourage that. Just because I’ve become an adult, doesn’t mean I don’t still want to cut loose and exercise my inner-child.
I honestly cannot wait until my kids get a couple years older and I can start introducing them to some of the really interesting, fun, and entertaining console games of old that I’ve hung onto.
MMOs and most modern console games today just don’t encourage that type of socially-enriching experience that you can share with friends. That type of experiencing is a niche category when you compare it to the wider mobile game market and all the AAA console titles. So many mechanics today even seem to actively hinder linking up with friends and just having a fun, casual play-session together.
Steam does an okay job of pointing people towards the fun little multiplayer co-op experiences, but usually those titles get buried under a sea of totally unrelated games that I have absolutely no interest in. Usually I’ve got to use a combination of searches through Google, steam, and game-review sites to track down the few-and-far-between titles that fit my tastes. There’s just no good system right now for finding the right games. It’s a problem that’s getting even bigger as the Indie-Development boom continues to surge and hundreds (if not thousands) of new titles hit the market every year. With the recent changes making Unreal 4 and the Unity engines more accessible and affordable than ever before (and gaming itself becoming more popular and accepted world-wide), it’s probably going to get even worse.
Right now, developers (big or small) can tag games however they want to. There doesn’t seem to be any control, administration, or management of all the tagging and labeling going on out there and that means that there is no way for industry standards to really solidify. Games are labeled whatever their creator labels them whether it’s accurate or not; and usually, extra tags get thrown on just to try and improve awareness – even if those tags aren’t really applicable to the entire game experience.
With the amount of time I get for gaming continually shrinking every year, time spent just finding new games I will enjoy will only get more frustrating. After all, I’d rather be playing a game during my game time then searching fruitlessly for ones I will actually like.
I really wish there were some way developers could get blasted for mislabeling or poorly tagging their games. Literally if there was a website for that I would use it to check up any game prior to purchase (and probably provide feedback and review often). There’s nothing I hate more when it comes to games that feeling conned by the label-spamming, poor marketing, or outright misrepresentation of the facts by developers.
I don’t care if it’s a big company or some kid building a game in their parents’ basement, it really grinds my gears.
Lately Illfonic’s upcoming MMORPG Revival has put such an emphasis on player/character immersion and encouraging natural Role-Play that it’s really made me realize how poorly that term gets applied to modern MMOs that honestly couldn’t be farther from an RPG if they tried. For every one MMO that has a real RPG-friendly set of core systems to it, there are a dozen other MMO”RPG”s that have nothing to do with role-playing at all.
It’s gotten to the point that the term RPG hardly has any meaning at all these days – especially in the MMO genre. And the term MMO itself is also getting watered down by tons of online games that are neither massive nor truly social multiplayer experiences. It’s not even worth looking at a game’s self-proclaimed tags and labels to make a quick read on it, as they’re so inaccurate and off the mark that it’s borderline false-advertisement.
Which makes search engines that rely on those tags essentially worthless.
It almost makes me wonder if the rise of live-streaming is directly related to the fact that players really don’t have a very good idea what they’re getting in a product and want to see some unfiltered, unbiased open gameplay before they pull the trigger on a purchase. That’s primarily what I use Twitch and YouTube for when it comes to gaming-related stuff. I just don’t feel like I can trust what developers are saying about a game.
Maybe I’m getting a bit more cynical and hard-nosed with age, but I tend to believe that if you can’t even trust someone with the small stuff – you definitely can’t trust them with the big stuff.
If developers can’t even do something simple like tag and label their games properly, why should I feel like they can do any of their other marketing competently or honestly? It all adds up to the end-user doing lots of their own research and leg-work, reading reviews, watching YouTube, Twitch, and other video services to get an fair assessment of a game. It costs players valuable time they could be spending actually playing games, and spending money on all those micro-transactions, subscriptions, and other forms of monetization.
That of course all doesn’t even account for the simple principle of honest marketing creating a natural bond of trust between the consumer and the producer. That’s what keeps customers coming back, and it’s nearly as important as creating a quality product to begin with.
Maybe one day they’ll catch on – but maybe my views are outdated and too traditional for this modern age of hopscotch gaming and instant gratification.