I worry that have been falling out of love with video games. The drive I used to have to finish this quest line, explore that new area, or be the first to beat that new game has been waning. I’m not gaming less, by any means, but my gaming has begun to change shape. I’m enjoying much more board gaming, belonging to several board game groups. I have been playing more online games with friends through the iPad, such as Ticket to Ride, Settlers of Catan, and Hearthstone. I recently opened my WoW account again and have been trying to get back into it. There aren’t many games on my radar that I’m dying to try. I walk around the game stores wishing anything looked good to me. They will either require enormous economic investment (Lego Dimensions, Skylanders) or just aren’t the types of games I enjoy. There are very few couch co-op games to play besides the Lego series, which is a bummer. So is the problem with me? Have I become too jaded to enjoy these games because of the years of research I’ve done exploring how fucked up the gaming community is? Am I slowly becoming not the target audience for games anymore? Or is something else happening with games that is keeping me, and those like me, away?
I think for me the heart of this transition away from video games, particularly console games, toward board games and other traditionally social games has been prompted by a shift in the industry, not from an oversaturation of studying abuse of women in the gaming community. I don’t want to seem nostalgic here, as if I’m lamenting for some lost era of gaming that I consider the pinnacle, or as if I’m angry about “kids these days.” I do think a fundamental shift is happening, though, and I am worried games might lose me, or at least lose some of me.
In an effort to make everything social, companies have made games incredibly isolating. Games like Call of Duty have their place in the gaming world. I’m a huge fan of FPSs that are online multiplayer based. I think they can be really fun, and mostly they have couch co-op options to play on or offline. However, many of these games are now exclusively online and exclusively multiplayer. I tried to play the new Tony Hawk game the other day, and it sent me online looking for “matches.” Even in the Xbox One Plants Vs. Zombies you can’t play offline or alone, and their pathetic couch co-op is so one dimensional as to not even make it worth playing. It seems as if the success of the CoD, Halo, and Battlefield series has convinced developers that online multiplayer is the only way to go. This makes sense for many FPSs, but certainly not for Tony Hawk. PvZ, you could argue, is primarily an FPS and thus it makes sense to have an all-online platform. But at its heart, PvZ is a tower defense game, and it should always have solo options.
What else happens when you make everything so widely social is that you end up undercutting the need to find a dedicated gaming group. The Group Finder option in WoW is great because you can always find a group to do an instance with. The downside is that it completely subverts the need for guild groups, finding friends on your own server, and cultivating relationships. I could do Group Finder 100 times and never be with the same person twice. Sure, on the surface it’s social—you are playing with other people after all—but it’s really just as anonymous as playing with a group of NPCs, except of course when you get called names and mocked because the tank died while you were healing. That’s what this anonymous socialization has come to. After a CoD match people may send you a message, but most likely it will be an insult or sexual comment. In WoW the only time I get messages after a Group Finder instance is people telling me I suck or to suck them. You always had PUGs in the past, but you would see the people again on the server so there were some social rules in place. This sounds nostalgic; I don’t mean it to.
I worry about the success of some of my favorite game franchises if this social element keeps getting rammed down people’s throats. Sim City was put all online, with social interactions between neighboring towns. It pretty much flopped. The gameplay wasn’t good, the servers weren’t reliable, and the socialization aspect was surface level. It didn’t make sense for the game. Just because it makes sense to force you to visit your neighbor’s farm in Farmville doesn’t mean it will work for every game, especially when it comes at a substantive cost.
Maybe this is the whining of an introvert. I don’t want socialization with thousands of random players when I’m gaming online. Or at least, I don’t want that to be the only option available to me. I think the gaming industry, especially in regard to console and AAA games, has taken the wrong message from the social gaming revolution. Socialization enhances the experience of play when the socialization is meaningful. As players we want that, yes. But we don’t want only that at the expense of everything else.
