A Fine, Fine Line

I don't really play video games anymore. I'm not sure when I first realized this, but I certainly find myself remembering the fact often. I have a Wii, a DS, and a Playstation 2 in my possession, but they tend to collect dust more than anything else. I have a laptop capable of running a modest number of games (provided that they're run at settings on the lower end of the spectrum), yet I only find myself idly playing minesweeper over any other game.

Thrilling adventure awaits!

A thread was recently posted on a forum that I go to, asking the community about their picks for the top five games of 2011. The ones that he remembered to list were the following:

Dead Space 2
DC Universe Online
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective
LittleBigPlanet 2
Killzone 3
You Don’t Know Jack
Marvel vs. Capcom 3
Bulletstorm
Dragon Age 2
Homefront
Pokemon Black/White
Yakuza 4

Shogun 2: Total War
Crysis 2
Outland
Back to the Future: The Game
Stacking
Child of Eden
Duke Nukem Forever
DiRT 3
Alice: Madness Returns
Portal 2
Mortal Kombat
Hunted: The Demon’s Forge
The Witcher 2
F.E.A.R. 3
Terraria
Red Faction: Armageddon
L.A. Noire
Infamous 2
El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron
Jamestown
Shadows of the Damned
Bastion
From Dust
Catherine
Trenched/Iron Brigade
NCAA Football 12
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Resistance 3
Dead Island
Madden NFL 12
Gears of War 3
Rock of Ages
Xenoblade Chronicles
Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet
Sonic Generations
Rage
The Gunstringer
Driver: San Francisco
NBA 2K12
Dark Souls
Forza Motorsport 4
Battlefield 3
Kirby: Return to Dreamland
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine
Trackmania 2
Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure
Batman: Arkham City
Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Super Mario 3D Land
WWE '12
Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary
Aliens: Colonial Marines
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
The Lord of the Rings: War in the North
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning
Saints Row: The Third
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
Rayman: Origins
Trine 2
Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3
Assassin's Creed: Revelations
Mario Kart 7
Star Wars: The Old Republic

Of these games, I own two: Pokemon Black, and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. I beat the main story of the first game over the course of a very long road trip, and then put it down indefinitely. I am about halfway through the second game, after owning it for over a month.

It isn't that I particularly dislike these games; playing Pokemon Black was certainly better than being a vegetable, and when I do play Skyward Sword, I get very immersed in it. However, my gaming prowess is a far cry from what it was in my early to mid-teens. I even remember my summer break in 2008, the first summer where I owned a PS2 (yes, we bought it quite late, but at this point in time, games were 10 to 20 dollars apiece in new condition). Back then, I blazed through over fifteen games, cruising through all of the Metal Gear Solid games, the Phoenix Wright games, Shadow of the Colossus, and Final Fantasy X.

Now now ladies, don't get too excited.

I’ve come to terms with why I don’t play games anymore. As time went on, my days were better spent reading articles online than sitting down to play a game. My windows of idle time grew smaller and smaller as I accumulated more and more responsibilities and learned to manage my time more effectively. Now that I deal with classes along with formal work, a student position as a researcher, and an officer position of an RSO, it’s a wonder that I even allow myself to pick up a controller at all anymore. At first glance, it may sound upsetting to some that I have so little free time, but I honestly love what I do, and I embrace the schedule that I have imposed upon myself. I guess that makes me an adult or something.

Despite this, I have not come to terms with how there are people my age that game as much as I did when I was in high school. I used to be more involved in the online forum scene in high school, and interacted with many other like-minded gamers around my age. At the time, we were all at about equal footing when it came to life accomplishments. After we had gotten through with high school, however, the divergences began; before I knew it, I was finding myself visiting these same forums with nothing to say to these same people of my age group, who still talked about playing video games as avidly and as frequently as they did in high school. A lot of them - some my age, some a little younger, some a little older – could even find the time to have played a respectable proportion of the games on that list I mentioned earlier.

So, here, I ponder: What the hell happened?

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The first thing that strikes me as odd about how some of my online peers play video games is when I start thinking about how costly it is to be a gamer. Gaming is one of those hobbies where you need lots of resources at your disposal to properly enjoy. If you are a console gamer, then you need the funds to acquire the console, the controller, and the games that you want to play. The console itself is usually upwards of 200 to 300 dollars – presuming that you’re interested in consoles that are actually getting games released for them – while the newer, more important games can be from 50 to 60 dollars apiece new, and 20 to 40 dollars used. This is no small investment, especially if you’re someone who wants to appreciate the breadth of the medium (and, despite all the flaws of the burgeoning gaming scene, there still is something there to appreciate if you expose yourself to the scene enough).

Even if you’re a PC gamer, you’re also forced to consider the specs of your hardware. A good gaming PC can drain a person of around a thousand dollars, if not more. Then, of course, you have to buy the games that you want to play. Some of these games have monthly fees. Some of these games (console and PC alike) have extra downloadable content that cost an additional fee to unlock in a game.

Yeah, it'll run Crysis. Right after it runs your personal savings to NewEgg.

One can notice that the resources needed to read books or watch movies are not anywhere near the expenses that a gamer has to undergo in order to play a game. The reason for this is not controversial; games take lots of resources to make. No other aesthetic medium attempts to reap the benefits of our technological capacity quite like video gaming, where entire teams of people have to collaborate for months – even years – in order to design a thorough and convincing simulation of an alternative reality that can provide a dynamic and interesting experience for the buyer. These teams are comprised of people with trained programming capabilities and an exceptional capacity to produce – and advertise - an interesting world that can immerse and intrigue a customer long enough to buy their product.

Some people will also argue that such monetary investments in video games are reasonable from a cost to entertainment value ratio. A product that costs 50 dollars but provides upwards of 100 hours of gameplay is not terribly costly from a “per hour” standpoint, and can make the gaming medium level with other, cheaper mediums. However, the initial investment remains steep, and there isn’t necessarily any guarantee that gamer A will reap the same return on investment as gamer B.

There are, of course, side-notes and subtleties to the economics of video games that are not important to this particular discussion. There’s the issue of rampant piracy, there’s the issue of used game vendors cutting into cash flow to the original developers, and so on and so forth. These are not particularly relevant to the point that declaring video games as your hobby is not merely a matter of preference; it’s also a matter of shouldering an investment. Even the most frugal and amoral of gamers, at one point or another, have found themselves shoveling forth copious amounts of money in order to enjoy a game. Other common entertainment and aesthetic hobbies do not compare in monetary resources.

Now, I’m aware that financial burden is relative. What may seem steep for someone with my personal income may be trivial for someone else. However, it isn’t as though I’m particularly poor for my age. I make enough where I can pay my bills and eat decent meals. I still rely on my parents’ support for tuition, but I can at least provide for myself in terms of residence and personal needs. When budgeting for my lifestyle, a lot of fat gets trimmed, and the first things to go are video game funds. Because, you know, it’s really hard to mash game discs in just the right way so that when you have to eat them, you don’t bleed internally.

And, to be fair, I have a fast and loose definition of "decent meal".

But then, I see other people at or around my age playing video games fairly consistently, and I’m left wondering where they find the resources to do it. Maybe some of them pirate, and maybe some of them are just playing games that they’ve had since they were kids, but there are still a significant proportion of people my age who are playing new games that probably weren’t acquired illegally. With the way my financial situation pans out, either they have far more of their own money at their disposal, or far more of someone else’s money at their disposal. Seeing as most people my age don’t quite have a college degree yet, I’m a bit hesitant to think that it was the former. If it’s the latter, then I wonder what their providers would think about their money going towards the irrelevant whims of their dependents. I suppose that, at my age, a similar monetary sinkhole would be alcohol, given the bar scene in most universities. Certainly, that can be just as irresponsible (and certainly, it can introduce a greater breadth of irresponsible behavior), but at least that sinkhole doesn’t necessarily have to cost fifty bucks.

I already know the counter-argument that's coming. Some games are free to play! You've got your Runescape players, your League of Legends players and your newly minted Team Fortress 2 players who get to laugh in the face of capitalism as they play their freeware. I'll even throw them a bone and presume that they've never, ever spent money on any game ever. It doesn't hinder the next point.

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The second, more concerning issue is the time necessary to properly play a game. Money is relatively difficult to come by, but it remains an object. It’s not a question of plausibility that someone my age has money that they can spend on video games – it’s usually just a question of whose money it is. Time, however, is no such triviality. The fact that people my age have the time to play lots of video games is far more distressing.

Games can last a long time. As mentioned earlier, for the fifty dollars that you might spend on a game, you could very well reap a good 100 hours of gameplay for your investment. We’ve already discussed the financial points of this scenario, but it still begs the question: why is someone my age putting in 100+ hours of their life to play a game?

Because Gerard Butler's life depends on it!

Granted, the play time doesn’t necessarily have to be condensed. A person could certainly play 100+ hours of a game like Super Smash Bros over the course of months or years, and it would be reasonable. However, for the kind of higher budget games that get released on the market today, it’s typically not a matter of spreading your play time over the course of months or years.

If a game has a competitive multiplayer element to it, and if you want to be able to enjoy it without dying within the first five minutes of the game, then expect to spend lots of time learning how to properly play the game just to be relevant. And, like any other hobby that requires skill and finesse, you will get better with lots of consistent practice. Depending on how deep you want to go down the multiplayer rabbit-hole, this could amount to a week-long streak of ravenously playing Team Fortress 2. Or it can amount to months of playing League of Legends to the wee hours of the morning. Or it can amount to years of playing Starcraft just to get your name out there in multiplayer circles, if not just to be respectably decent at the game during an online match. Even if the player eventually decides to play the game less often after a certain point in time, there is still the initial time investment necessary to properly understand and play the game.

Nah, Jaedong only got good by playing on the weekends.

Then, you have games where the plot or world is designed to be so expansive that it would be impossible to fully enjoy the game without a significant time investment. Games like Persona 3 and Persona 4 come to mind, where the scope of things to explore and people to talk to in the game are so large that it can take up to a month of straight playing just to finish one run of the game – and then of course, you’d have to consider all the things that you’d missed during the first play. Games like Skyrim and Oblivion offer enough degrees of freedom where two given players with different play styles can experience the game in significantly different ways. There are also games like World of Warcraft, where the world and quests are expansive enough to demand a time investment in order to just level up; then, once you reach your level peak, the dynamic of the game shifts to multiplayer interactions that demand constant playing just to stay relevant in PvP, raids, et cetera.

Now, of course, one can point to the plethora of flash games online, the phone games, the older “retro” games, and a good two thirds of the Wii library and say that not all games demand the time investment that I describe. While this is true, it’s hardly a counterargument when most people who are really into the gaming scene hardly take those games seriously to begin with. Games though they both be, it is a rare and peculiar thing to see a gamer convey a direct comparison of Farmville to Starcraft in serious discourse. Or Cooking Mama to Grand Theft Auto IV. Sometimes you’ll get some flash games with a little more depth and involvement to them, like Pandemic II or Pokemon Tower Defense, but these games still aren’t significant subjects of discussion in gamer circles, and a subset of those games also begin to fall into the realm of taking up a significant amount of play time anyway.

So, games take up a lot of time. So do a lot of other things. Devoting that much time to a game – or anything for that matter – is going to impact the other things in your life in some way or another, be it less time to sleep, less time to spend on your other activities, or less time focused on work and other responsibilities. With some activities, there is typically some associated reward that gives the activity some utility. For example, practicing good exercise habits reaps clear physical benefits. Habitually reading about the news or world affairs will foster awareness and relevance in social circles. Developing performance ability in a musical instrument or artistic style allows you to create an aesthetic piece that can stimulate you as well as stimulate others around you.

Playing a game, however, is almost purely for recreation. Playing a game is inherently unproductive. It is one thing to devote hundreds of hours towards a skill or talent that will yield benefits to both you and people around you. It is entirely another matter to devote hundreds of hours towards a game. You are not being productive when you play a game. Society is not receiving any tangible payoff from you playing a game, excluding the flow of money from you to the game developers when you first bought the game (and, again, if you pirate, you didn’t even facilitate that). There are some instances where playing a game has yielded surprisingly beneficial data to academia, but these are case studies and are firmly the exception instead of the rule. The most credibility that a video game can hope to achieve in society is as a public venue for entertainment on the level of any traditional sport. However, seeing as sports are also inherently unproductive (and, realistically, a subset of ‘games’ in general), this isn’t much of a counterargument to the assertion that playing a game is unproductive.

But, that's not to say that there isn't some middle ground between hobbies.

We return back to my example of people on my forum, where people my age not only have the money to fund their regular acquisition of games, but have the time to play them to the end, and with reasonable thoroughness. I have to reason that, if I don’t really have any time to play games given my schedule, and they do, then they either manage their time far better than I do, or they simply don’t have as demanding a schedule. It begs the question, what is their schedule like, anyway? If it turns out that their schedule happens to be very lax, should it remain that way? What levels of productivity do they deprive themselves of by opting to devote such time to video games?

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Wrapping up, let’s return to that prime question: What the hell happened?

It’s hard to say what the lives of people on online forums are like, seeing as I only know them through a very controllable filter. Any inferences I make are based on what I see get written, and how often I see the written topic. If someone is posting about a new game that they’re playing every week or every other week, then that’s when I start thinking about this. The way some people seem to spend their time and money, they could probably have been far better off if they’d bought fewer games and played games less in general. Is this a lack of foresight on their part? Is this apathy? Is this escapism?

Ours is the first generation to truly experience the development of video gaming as a medium. Though I’ve levied some criticisms on the video gaming scene in this post (and, admittedly, I’ve omitted some of the less relevant ones), there is certainly some wonderful potential to be seen in the medium. There are very hard working game developers with plenty of ideas, and it will be interesting to see the ways that these professionals push the envelope with games, with respect to aesthetics and perhaps to how they relate to human experience.

Despite all this promise from the perspective of the game developer (the top-down vantage point), there is something still very concerned to be seen from the bottom up. From what I’ve gotten to see in my lifetime, gamers themselves do not yet form or comprise a refined subculture. With a generation of people being exposed to games, being immersed by games, being enthralled by games for hours on end, how does this ultimately cut into our productivity and our potential as adults?

Eventually, most of us will have to rethink what we find important. The funds that we reserve for games eventually have to go toward necessities not just for you, but for the well-being of your dependents. The time that we have at our disposal will only get more precious, and it will seem like a gross perversion of prioritization if we opt to play video games over getting things done – if not for the awareness that your work output positively impacts society, then for the fact that you need money to buy things. That’s not to say that we don’t all need a break from our agendas every once in a while, but the time put into some games by some people goes beyond an acceptable break time.

Maybe I’m just not adapting fast enough to how fast the gaming industry is expanding; I’m sure that I’ve done a great job coming off as a preachy curmudgeon. Perhaps I’m just describing a minority of people that I’ve happened to interact with for a disproportionate amount of my time. But is there something to learn here for gamers and gaming in general? If gaming is to develop depth and culture as a medium, then there has to be a certain degree of social responsibility that must simultaneously develop.

This is not representative of all gamers. But it's still representative of a few too many.

It’s totally fine to be an adult that plays video games. In fact, it’s awesome. I wish I knew more adults who played video games when I was growing up. But at the end of the day, you’re still an adult. Gaming can’t be an excuse to act like a grown-up child. We must mature, handle the hobby maturely, and make the medium mature with us. There is a fine, fine line (dohoho that's the post title!) between being a gamer and being a man-child, and gamers should strive to make that line thick and distinct.

There are a lot of games in the 2011 games list earlier in the post – how many of them have you played, out of curiosity?  If you're reading the blog, chances are you're around my age, and if you've somehow managed to play through fifteen or more of those games, then what exactly are you doing with yourself?  But, again, hey, maybe you're just really successful and I just don't know any better.