Thoughts on games, work, and… well, mostly games

My brother sent me a link to an article on Wired: “21st Century Shooters Are No Country for Old Men”. We had recently had a discussion where I told him that I’ve reached a kind of turning point in my life as a gamer.

Despite the desire I have to play video games, I don’t have the time to play them like I used to. There was a time when I could spend an entire weekend marinating in a single game, but, alas, not anymore. I have too many time commitments to immerse myself like I used to be able to, and too many games to stay on top of if I’m to have any hope of maintaining my credibility as an enthusiast.

One symptom of this time starvation (starvation, I say!) is a decrease in skill level. That’s why the Wired article resonated with me; I can relate to that sinking, aging feeling that comes only from trying to compete against someone who’s as young as I was 15-20 years ago. Sure, some of the hand-eye coordination and reflex enhancement I got from games is irrevocably baked into my DNA, but I’m not in top form anymore and probably never will be again without lots of time to commit to the effort (and it would be a lot of effort). But having said that, I don’t have any desire to get back to that level. The article’s interviewees and I have that in common.

But the slow march toward gamer retirement affects the single-player experience, too.  It manifests as an unwanted sense of urgency when trying something new or venturing off the game’s beaten path. Instead of immersing myself in a game’s world, I feel like I have to rush to complete anything satisfying in the little time that I have.  (This may be what really kept me from enjoying Demon’s Souls more than I did.)

I’ve been giving this a lot of thought lately, and I reason this way: my particular flavor of video game starvation is rooted in not being able to get lost in the game.  Getting lost takes time.

I’m the kind of guy that could spend an entire day just roaming around the wasteland in Fallout 3 hunting creatures and finding whimsical locales, or blowing up Nazi installations and taking in the amazingly crafted scenery in The Saboteur. Up until recently, I’ve felt that the real fun of today’s games hasn’t been found pursuing the main story, but rather in treating the game as a giant sandbox: poking and prodding it in different ways to see just how alive it really was. It’s a hypnotic way to play. And that’s just what it is: undirected, goalless play. It’s the same kind of play that infants can experience in something as simple as a bucket of wooden blocks.

But here’s the rub: the thing about play is that it is positively wrenching to be interrupted, especially when you consider how long it takes to truly let the world sink in. I imagine it’s what coming down from a psychoactive high must feel like.  And I think this phenomenon actually gets worse as you get older, when interruptions are more and more likely to occur.

Think about your favorite movie. I bet it has a pacing to it; a rhythm that glues the most intense scenes together with cohesive but less-gripping scenes; you know, those scenes during which you sense it’s probably safe to go to the bathroom and not miss anything good. Now imagine one movie that manages to string together all of the most engaging, most cliffhanging, most surreal bits from your favorite films into one epic cinematic experience. No breaks; everything’s edge-of-your-seat all the time.  That’s how I used to feel about long freeplay sessions in the big open-world games.  In these binges (and make no mistake, that’s what they were, complete with a weird kind of hangover), I’d go for days or weeks without pursuing the main story.  Instead, I would completely fall into the virtual world and marvel at how it reacted to me when unchained from the stilts and props of beginnings, middles, and ends.

Sound strange?  I wonder what made me approach games from such a radical angle, wherein I free-played almost in spite of the main story.  Looking back on those days, when “non-linear” was evolving into “open-world”, I think what motivated me were two things: discovery (resulting from self-guided exploration) and unscripted interactivity.  I wanted to drive every street (GTA III) and see what was around each corner, break into every house (Thief III) and see if I could get away with it, chart a course to the horizon (Elder Scrolls: Oblivion) to see how random encounters affected traveling, investigate every species (Spore), find every space station (X3: Reunion), or enact whatever other limit-pushing stimuli I could imagine and observe how the world reacted.  I wanted to learn what the game (a world, as I saw it) was capable of.

Those long freeplay sessions were so engaging, so hypnotic, that there weren’t really any breaks at all.  No pacing; my mind was racing all the time. I found them as captivating as any cliffhanger or any climactic scene in the biggest summer movie.  Back then, the interruptions were fewer and farther between.

The flip side, though, was that I never finished anything.  And this regrettable trend is where a lack of time has had a measurable impact on my life lately.

I can’t have those freeplay binges anymore.  But my brain still wants that escapism.  So it discovered a compromise that, to others, probably seems like a real “duh” moment: follow the main story instead of roaming aimlessly.  ”You’ve got less time,” said my brain, “but you can fill it with an equivalent amount of dopamine by compressing the immersion.  More often than not, game designers design the game’s plot to be engaging, so walk through that funhouse and hope for the best.”

Seemed reasonable.  So with some effort, I ratcheted back the freeplay throttle and focused more on games’ main stories.  The result is a net positive: I can take advantage of the game’s inherent pacing to measure out shorter but “denser” bursts of play between bouts with real life.  It dampens interruption syndrome because you’re more likely to reach a reasonable stopping point in the hour-or-so you have to play every few days, whereas an interruption in a freeplay session more resembles a fishing grenade thrown into your stream of consciousness.

There are other bonuses, like no more post-gaming-marathon hangovers (ever have those?).  And I finish more games.  I just finished The Saboteur after forcing myself to stop blowing up the countryside and was rewarded with some great World War noir.  Uncharted 2 is underway now, and Mass Effect (1, not 2!) is next on the list, now that I’m a lot more in-tune with games that tip the scales on story rather than sideshows.

Like I said, this bit of life hacking is a net positive, as I’m able to enjoy games with less frustration.  Because it takes less time to ramp up the immersion when a story is involved, I can get a bit more out of satisfaction out of each sitting.  But it’s not without its negative aspects.  When time constraints force you to follow the main story, the merits of open worlds sort of evaporate.  Exploration and experimentation is replaced by storytelling in the interest of time.  Real escapism is replaced by what amount to interactive movies.  Or vice-versa: with more time, finite storytelling may be replaced with exploration and experimentation in the interest of immersion.  What we haven’t seen yet is a game that can sustain both experiences simultaneously. (Ico & Shadow of the Colossus come to mind as maybe having hit close to the mark.)

And there’s a subtlety here that makes a solution elusive: for reasons I haven’t quite figured out yet, finishing a game’s main story somehow spoils the world in which it’s set.  It’s like deflating a balloon.  When I finished Fallout 3, I lost my desire to go see all those untouched locales on the map.  (However, its expansions truly rekindled that interest, and I look forward to getting to the ones I haven’t yet cracked.)  And when I finished The Saboteur, dynamite-on-Nazis lost its appeal.  I lost interest in Spore immediately after reaching the ultimate destination.  WTF?

But conversely, too much freeplay will burn you out: I explored Tamriel for so long and consumed so many side quests that I honestly forgot what the game’s main story was.  By that time, my character was so high-level (and ruined) that the main story lost its hook in me, as if it were some contrived thing in an otherwise sublime, organic simulation.

There’s a deeper truth here.  It’s probably something that could be molded into a life lesson for kids that spend too much time playing video games.  Suffice it to say I’m transitioning from an active side of the gamer spectrum to a passive side, sacrificing escapist sandboxing for a more directed, spoon-fed kind of entertainment.  Time deficiency is the catalyst in this mutation.  But this 31-year-old doesn’t want to get out of the sandbox, and is kicking and screaming all the way home.