DISPATCHES NOVEMBER
Low battery
You’ve had a few letters along these lines over the years. Those about young gamers who’ve now grown up, and complain about the usual – slower reaction times, a bit of apathy towards gaming in general, and so on.
I’m now one of those gamers – at the age of 42. I’ve had my lulls over the years, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve always ‘recovered’. This time though, I’m not sure what’s wrong. I find it harder and harder to pick up the pad. It doesn’t stop me spending a stupid amount of money each financial year on gaming gear though – a PS4 Pro being the most recent addition to the family even though I’ve a PS4 already – all to try and get out of this ‘dip’. Even as a developer, working on the Vive and Rift, hasn’t stopped this particular run of can’t-bearsed-ness.
So what’s the cause? I’ve had a good think about this over the past few weeks, and the only thing I can think of is that game-design patterns just haven’t changed. It’s still the same mechanics, albeit with different stories/heroes/ heroines/insert-tweak-here being made. There’s just nothing new any more.
Maybe I’m now just a grumpy old man already. There are signs of a slow recovery, though. I fired up the Wii the other day for my two young daughters. Playing golf with them was quite good fun. But I want my passion for games to be reignited – and every month I await Edge with eager anticipation for something that might just do that. But I’m still waiting. Someone, somewhere – please save me from this well of gaming depression! Tony Bolton We all go through these little dips, Tony. In our experience all it takes is a single game to snap you out of it. If this month’s cover game doesn’t do it, we’re not sure what will.
Legacy code
This week I was watching University Challenge while flicking through the 25th anniversary edition of Edge (congratulations). My ears pricked up when I heard Jeremy Paxman say that the next set of questions would be on Bafta-winning videogames. Paxman gave descriptions of Bioshock, Portal 2 and The Last Of Us and I, along with the team from Darwin, Cambridge, answered these fairly easily. My joy at getting some answers right, and proving how smart I am, soon turned to annoyance.
What irked me was Paxman’s response to the ease with which the Darwin team gave their answers. In a patronising and sarcastic tone, he said, ‘What do you spend your time doing?’ It seems that, in his opinion, the playing of videogames is not a worthwhile use of a university student’s time. There was no such rebuke for contestants answering questions on characters in Dickens novels, nor was there any questioning of the value of one of the students’ degree in global cinema. It seems that the cultural and academic value of videogames still falls way behind that of literature and film, at least in the eyes of the older members of the academic establishment.
Obviously, it’s acceptable for a student to have spent their time learning Latin, but spending some hours playing your way through a beautifully crafted videogame narrative is a complete waste of life. Games have come a long way in the 25 years since E1, progressing exponentially faster than literature and film. To completely dismiss these games, which are the culmination of thousands of hours of creative endeavour, touching on themes such as philosophy, politics and the human condition, seems totally ignorant. Surely for today’s students Mario is as culturally relevant a Martin Chuzzlewit. I hope that one day interactive
“Someone, somewhere – please save me from this well of gaming depression!”
entertainment will be as equally revered as other art forms, although I am unsure when, or even if, this will ever happen. At least I know the medium will be given the appreciation it deserves within the pages of this magazine. Alex Evans
This is a) Paxman and b) University Challenge, where the ‘popular music’ round rarely makes it beyond Bill Haley. Change will come, but don’t hold your breath. Update failure
Growing up playing videogames in the ’80s and early ’90s, there were always two pillars in the world – console gaming and PC gaming. Over the last decade, a third pillar was added in the form of mobile gaming, and while I have remained a staunch console gamer in that time, I have never had any issues with the other platforms that make up the industry as a whole. Sure, PC gaming always felt like hard work and mobile gaming was often too simplistic to hold my interest in the long term (I appreciate I am being somewhat reductive here), but I have always seen them as a natural extension of the industry as a whole.
This new fourth pillar though, well, that’s a different story. Games as a service, rather than a unique platform to itself, is a design ethos that has bled into every facet of gaming. Sure, the extended support of games can be a great thing (see Rainbow Six Siege et al), but the current obsession with this trend could prove very dangerous for the industry as a whole. Despite the claims that single player games are dying, we have been treated to the likes of Breath Of The Wild and God
Of War in the past 12 months, but while I believe that singleplayer games are in better health than many would have us believe, I do fear that the immense success of games such as Fortnite and PUBG could not only lead to a severe reduction in narrative evolution within the industry, but could also lead to a decrease in genre diversity in the same way that the success of superhero movies have arguably done for cinema. Liam Pritchard
The GaaS thing has been somewhat overstated, but the superhero-movie analogy is a fine one, and enough to earn you this month’s PS Plus subscription. Enjoy your year’s worth of free games, and stay off the microtransactions. Predictive text
Steven Poole’s column in issue 323 was great: I agree that the ‘real’ world should be more like a games, where rules are stable and trustworthy. But there’s another way of looking at things. Poole laments how football and Twitter are now described as being ‘fake’ like games. I believe this instead has to do with a saturation of stability, leading to predictability.
I often wonder why few of my friends play games. The main reason has to do with how predictable they are. A road trip through the Fertile Crescent is a lot more adventurous than Hyrule Field. Building your own festival at Burning Man is more interesting than a game of
Theme Park. And don’t get me started on human-based endeavours like intimacy, caretaking, and gossip. That isn’t to say that games have to be unpredictable: mastering a game’s consistent rules is one of its greatest perks.
Going to a live match shows us little details we don’t expect. And as for Twitter: the fakeness of the social media probably has to do with how predictable political arguments have become. The issues might be real, but the fact that we already know how everybody is going to react gives it a stage-like quality.
Real life has not only lost its realness due to getting lost in spectacle, but is also losing realness due to becoming a predictable commodity. Games, on the other hand, have always been excellent at being commodities. In order for our favourite medium to get more credit in society, we have to show its ability to make real experiences. Like Daigo’s comeback, finding ways to sequence break in Metroid, or that first trek from the Barrens to Gadgetzan. Robin August de Meijer
We can only admire how frequently you manage to make a missive about Metroid, Robin. If only it were Puzzle & Dragons instead, we’d hire you on the spot. Flush IP
After getting caught in a sudden rainstorm, I pulled my Edge (#323) copy out of my nonwaterproof bag to find it soggy, creased, and all-round ruined. The 25th Anniversary Edition no less. I was gutted.
But upon reflection I don’t feel too bad. I had already read it cover to cover. I’d already had my fill of previews and reviews and I had even (fleetingly) attempted to solve the cover puzzle. Even with a waterlogged copy of the mag, I had been able to enjoy its seminal celebration. (Huge congratulations, by the way!)
Which is why I’m so apathetic to the current emulation debate that sparked up with the pseudo-closure of EmuParadise. I understand the pain of watching these beautifully articulate strings of code disappearing forever, but for me emulators can never emulate the essence of any particular game. Because that ‘essence’ is always tied to the time and context in which it was originally played.
Take a look at the new WOW expansion. Even if we etch that code into a stone tablet for future historians to study, they’ll never be able to emulate the ‘event’ of the game. Finding new secrets with friends. Unlocking previously unseen armour sets. Races to World First raid completions. That stuff is necessarily transient. It’s what gives the expansion its power. The code isn’t the important part. The interaction with the code is.
That’s why remakes always seem more potent than rereleases. Dark Souls Remastered not only reworked the code for current-gen consoles, but reworked the experience for current-gen players. It made the game feel alive again. Emulations seem simply hollow in this regard. Conor Clarke Sorry for the soaking – give us a nudge, and we’ll get a replacement in the post to you.