Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
One thing that was never foreseen by the early cyber-boosters of the 1990s was that in the long run, all the ‘new media’ institutions that supposedly disrupted the landscape – the tech giants, the social networks – would actually want passionately to become old media: specifically, television. Apple and YouTube are joining Amazon in the linear-narrative content game, jostling to compete with Netflix and the rest.
The videogame industry too increasingly aspires to be television. Not just in the way firms are devoting larger budgets to unskippable FMV sequences so that betterknown actors can read out sophomoric lines that would be blue-pencilled by any HBO exec. And not just in the way that the IP borders between games and TV are increasingly permeable: witness the rapturous reception rightly accorded to the Netflix TV series of The Witcher, the star of which, Henry Cavill, was already a fan of the game series and so loaded his (brilliantly funny as well as effortlessly cool) performance with vocal and gestural Easter eggs for the aficionados in the audience.
Structurally, though, the really interesting way that videogames are approaching the condition of television is the phenomenon whereby seemingly every new tentpole blockbuster game also now comes with the offer of a ‘season pass’, so framing the initial game as simply the first episode in a TV-like series, and if you buy the pass you effectively give the publisher an interest-free loan in return for extra content that is not yet available. Nothing wrong with that, of course, if you like the game and want to support it. I personally was extremely happy to buy the whole season of Sniper Elite 4, to keep me in Nazi faces to shoot from a satisfying distance.
But it’s not just extra levels, of course, that come with a season’s worth of extra content. Every ‘episode’ must also give you more stuff. More skins, more gadgets, more guns. And it’s arguable that this interminable profusion of collectibles inevitably dilutes the core proposition of the original game. Because if the new stuff is truly useful and an improvement on what you can acquire in the pilot episode, ie the standalone game itself, then it follows that what you are given when you first buy it is not really sufficient, or at least that your armoury has not been so intelligently designed and balanced as to cover all eventualities in creative ways.
That, at least, was the opinion offered by Doom co-designer John Romero recently, when he told The Guardian that modern games give the player too many tools. “I would rather have fewer things with more meaning, than a million things you don’t identify with,” he said. “I would rather spend more time with a gun and make sure the gun’s design is really deep – that there’s a lot of cool stuff you learn about it.” But the new wave of ‘season’ releases incentivises developers to include more and more guns and whatnot with every episode, or fans will complain of being short-changed. The upshot is that all too often, in Romero’s view, you end up playing “an inventory game”, microscopically comparing stats among a hundred different pistols, instead of just having fun with what you’re given.
Isn’t it strange, come to think of it, how managing inventory – a concept borrowed from the retail and manufacturing business sectors – is, in videogames, now such a central part of the experience? The word ‘inventory’ itself came from the Latin for ‘found things’, and originally meant a list of someone’s possessions drawn up after they had died; it was later adopted to mean the stock of products in a warehouse. It was a fateful moment when Will Crowther and Don Woods, authors of the original text adventure, Colossal Cave Adventure (1977), decided to use ‘inventory’ as the command to list all the items the player had picked up. You wouldn’t watch a Netflix TV series about inventory management, and yet here we are in a world where reading numbers assigned to imaginary weapons and shuffling them around in slots is increasingly mandatory.
Some people love this aspect of games, and they should be able to do it if they want, but for the rest of us the firehose of added ‘content’ in modern games leaves us in a state of owning a hellishly excessive number of possessions that is, after all, rather countercultural in a world of decluttering and the new lifestyle minimalism. What would happen if we all did a Marie Kondo on our videogame lives? I think it might spark nearly as much joy as binging The Witcher.
Isn’t it strange how managing inventory is, in videogames, now such a central part of the experience?