An actual picture from a party at a friend's house in the early 2000s ;)
I am a pretty introverted person. I spend most of my day at my desk, talking to no one. It's not that I don't enjoy people's company, but the act is fairly draining to me. As a result, I have to save up my energies for my home life, where I have four kids and a wife who desperately need me on and engaging, and since my home life is important to me, the number of social visits throughout the day become minimal.
I've always loved video games, and fit some of the stereotypes of the hardcore gamer, while avoiding others. I'm introverted, I know a lot about video games, I find the world of video games a lovely escape from the real world, and I love Mountain Dew. I constantly bemoan how much video games have shifted lately towards exclusively multiplayer experiences, with games like Street Fighter V and Star Wars Battlefront being big disappointments to me, despite their extremely polished mechanics and presentation, due to their lack of serious single player experiences. I've sunk countless hours into single player JRPGs, and cleared enormous amounts of classic single player games in the last year alone, to compensate for the perceived lack of new, single player games (I know that they exist, but tend to be big open world map checklist games that quickly bore me, with the exception of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Grand Theft Auto V).
Yet as I was thinking about it the other day, I realized that my despair at the current trend towards modern gaming isn't that it's multiplayer, but that it's not very social, in the true sense of the word. Most of my absolute best gaming memories, and most of my favorite games involve playing with other people. Thus, Super Smash Bros. Melee will almost certainly always be my favorite video game of all time, not because it's flawlessly programmed (it isn't, but the flaws have been exploited charmingly in the meta game), but because I enjoyed it up late at night with friends. Goldeneye will always be one of my favorite first person shooters, not because it's a superb game, but because I enjoyed it with friends. My memories of the NES are predominantly of Super Mario Bros. and Bases Loaded. I would absolutely say that Super Mario Bros. 3 is better than Super Mario Bros., but I remember the first more because I used to play two players with my dad. I remember Bases Loaded not because it's the best baseball game on the NES, but because I can still remember getting mad at my dad for hitting my best player with the pitch, causing him to charge the mound every time, and get ejected. Even the JRPGs I love most I love because I was playing them at the same time as my friends, and we would talk about them all of the time.
The shallow social interaction of online play is predominantly about competition, not socialization, because the truest socialization almost always revolves around physical proximity, or at least it makes it much easier, especially for me. I've played more League of Legends than Diablo III, but my memories of Diablo III are sharper and more treasured simply because I played it on a couch with my family over Christmas time.
So I'm going to try this year to not sink so deeply into bemoaning the lack of single player content, and try to use games as a tool to connect in a fun way with friends and family. I've already finished the campaign of Diddy Kong Racing this year with my wife, a semi-regular tradition of ours (we trade races) and want to just spend time using the medium of video games to build new memories to add to my cherished hall of fame of video games.
-TRO
No comments:
Post a Comment