I have killed countless innocents including women and children. My decisions have sown genocide across worlds. I have betrayed my closest allies. Worst of all, my atrocities amused me.
Fortunately, however, every one of those sins occurred digitally. After all, playing violent games is fun. Hitting pedestrians with my car in Grand Theft Auto V frequently makes me crack a smile. What worries me more is when video games bore me.
Gaming has been a passion of mine since I first picked up the controller. In middle school, my afternoons were spent playing Super Smash Bros. Melee. Rather than talk to girls, my high school years were dedicated to Halo 2. The majority of my free time this past weekend was spent playing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Yet despite this longstanding fascination, I find myself frequently bored with video games since I reached adulthood. Oftentimes, I will pick up the controller, play for less than half an hour, and then step away.
1. Content Bookshops have a certain romanticism. You walk in, and the smell of new paper and fresh coffee from the attached café hits your nose. The store is cramped yet cozy. The shelves are filled with a wide variety of books across dozens of genres. You pick up a Haruki Murakami novel and strike up a brief but engaging conversation with the clerk when you check out.
GameStop is the exact opposite experience. Upon entering, your eyes are immediately assaulted by the harsh fluorescent lights and bright plastics. The only other customers are a group of teenagers, an annoying child, and his mother. You bring your selection to the counter, and the clerk bombards you with a hundred questions: “Do you have a PowerUp Rewards card? Would you like to buy the extended warranty? Anything to preorder while your here?” No. You only want to exchange currency for your chosen product, but that is too simple of a transaction for this late-stage capitalist hellscape.
But where GameStop is most lacking is in its selection. Its shelves are filled with similar looking titles featuring buxom babes and manly soldiers. Only the occasional sports or racing game breaks up the monotony. Most games are fundamentally about hitting something with your fist, sword, or gun.
This lack of variety is due in part to the industry’s target demographic: teenage boys and twentysomething men. Action titles naturally appeal to this group, yet the problem is far more than a business decision.
Compare video games to movies. With film, a basic monologue or dialogue scene can convey a variety of emotions: humor, suspense, romance, and so much more. While action scenes can make a film like Kill Bill great, they are often prohibitively expensive. On the other hand, directors of large and small productions can pull off an engaging scene by having only strong writing, acting, and cinematography. Cost is not prohibitive to most of what film can achieve.
With video games, this relationship is flipped. Game designers have known how to make an engaging action game since Space Invaders. But what is the video game equivalent of My Dinner with Andre or Twelve Angry Men? Many games exist that cover subjects like interpersonal relationships and ethics. But even the Mass Effect series, which is revered for its dialogue system, is still fundamentally about shooting aliens in the face. Given that the design for non-action titles is far less established, game developers naturally gravitate to the more well-known action genres.
2. Length The Witcher III: Wild Hunt is one the greatest RPGs ever created. I recently completed my second playthrough, nearly a decade after its initial release. A third time might never happen. CD Projekt Red’s magnum opus takes more than a hundred hours of playtime. Finding that much time is challenging.
RPGs are well known for their length, but other genres are not a small time investment either. The Last of Us Part II is 25 hours long. Horizon Forbidden West can easily take more than 60. Even games that are derided for their short single player experiences (such as first person shooters like Call of Duty) usually make up for their shallow campaigns with deep multiplayer modes. Getting good at online multiplayer may take hundreds of hours. Games are frequently huge time sinks.
Because of this, indie games can be appealing to busy adults. Due to their smaller scopes and fewer development resources, independent releases may only be a handful of hours long. About half my gaming time is spent with indie games. Yet often I want a AAA experience, not yet another puzzle platformer.
Many gamers including myself would pay a premium for games like this. A 5-hour, $30, AAA experience often sounds more appealing than a 20-hour, $70 one. This seems like a good deal for game developers on a cost per gameplay hour basis. However, the reason this market is untapped is due to the realities of game development.
Writing the first page of a novel takes roughly equal time as the hundredth. With movies, where a scene falls in the narrative or shooting order has little impact on its cost. The content of a scene has far more of an influence on the budget. For most artistic mediums, the relationship between the effort input and the content output is fairly linear.
Video games, on the other hand, are different. Imagine everything necessary before a single minute of gameplay can exist in an FPS. You need an engaging game design, a 3D graphics engine, a variety of enemies and weapons, either multiplayer networking or AI systems, a QA process to find and fix bugs, and so much more. Some of those aspect have a more linear relationship between cost and output. The third level design or 3D model produced will take roughly as long as the thirteenth. However, the core game engine and design need to be at least halfway done before a gameplay experience can truly exist. With video game development, producing additional content gets easier as the project progresses since a lot of the work is already complete.
Because this input-output relationship is nonlinear, game development gets significantly cheaper per gameplay hour as playtime increases. This is why developers make DLC expansions but also why making shorter standalone games would be so expensive. Smaller, cheaper games may be desirable for consumers, but they do not make financial sense for game studios.
3. Hollow achievements Video games are often driven by a sense of accomplishment. Players face tough challenges and obstacles, and beating them provides bragging rights and a digital reward. As a child, one of my fondest memories was beating the Elite Four in Pokemon Yellow. I spent an entire summer trying to earn S-ranks in Sonic Adventure 2: Battle to unlock the Green Hill Zone. No girl was ever impressed by my Warcraft III ranking, but that never stopped me from trying throughout high school.
Yet as I have gotten older, those digital accomplishments have become less enticing. Easy mode often calls out to me. The thought of earning a platinum trophy on PlayStation is terrifying. No matter how much I respect the design of Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring, I have never beaten a single FromSoftware title.
When you are a kid, life feels like a tutorial level. You have limited control of your actions until you reach the age of 18. Extracurricular activities and your social life are important, but you are waiting for it all to be reset when you finally leave home. The majority of your time is focused on academics, but learning for its own sake does not seem to be the point. Instead, the goal is to score a high grade and outperform your classmates. Your life feels like a video game.
Naturally then, the hollow achievements that video games offer do not feel significantly different. Getting good grades may have a more tangible benefit to your future, but doing so does not feel categorically different nor any less arbitrary than beating the next title on your backlog. Because of this, I and millions of other students have each dedicated hundreds of hours to playing video games.
Nowadays though, I usually feel like I have something better to do. Rather than play games, I want to create them or focus on my other hobbies like cooking or writing. The house always has plenty of chores that need to be complete. I want to earn my master’s degree, get more certifications, and learn new skills. All those activities seem far more valuable than gaming.
Other mediums would seem to have this problem as well. Consuming media is not productive regardless of whether the time is spent playing a game or reading a book. Video games, however, require active participation. Though the challenges they present are virtual, games still require some level of effort and discipline. Using that resource up means it is unavailable to be applied to other tasks. After defeating a difficult boss, rarely am I excited to get off the couch and go do more hard work. Reading a book or watching a film allows you to recharge your self-discipline, but video games eat it up. When this is coupled with the arbitrary, hollow achievements that video games provide, gaming can leave us feeling unfulfilled.
Those three issues are not specific to a few games or even the industry. Instead, these problems are endemic to the medium itself. But those challenges are not impossible to overcome. Every once in a while, a game is still able to grip me in adulthood. The most recent such experience for me was playing Tetris Effect.
I never enjoyed playing Tetris when I was younger. My first experience with the game was on a family roadtrip. A friend had let me borrow his Game Boy alongside a few cartridges including Tetris. The game already felt ancient by the mid-nineties. The falling tetrominoes could barely hold my attention for fifteen minutes. I soon swapped over to playing Mortal Kombat on the Game Boy with its terrible graphics and even worse controls.
Two decades later, I was reluctant to pick up Tetris Effect, but the game had been so highly recommended I gave it a try. Immediately, the graphics, music, sound, and gameplay drew me into a trance-like state. I had fallen in love with Tetris, but I could not understand why.
The reason came to me while I was playing the final level of journey mode. Even on easy, this is a challenge. The player has to clear 100 lines at a breakneck pace. I tried a dozen times and could not beat it. Midway through my thirteenth attempt, I learned what Tetris was about: Mistakes compound.
A misplaced tetromino results in a row being left uncleared. The available play area becomes smaller. Less time exists before a block snaps into place at the bottom of the stack. With each mistake, the game gets harder. By the end, the player completely loses control. Your loss feels inevitable long before the final tetromino falls into place.
Many games feature rubber banding where the game gets easier as you struggle. In F-Zero, AI opponents slow down as your position decreases. Mario Party has numerous mechanics to stop the first-place player from running away with the game. Tetris, however, is far more cruel.
This lesson taught by Tetris is mirrored by the real world. Mistakes usually make your life harder, not easier. A single screwup can start a chain reaction. You slack off on studying for a midterm and get a C. You vow to do better next time, but now you have to learn both new and old material. On the next midterm, you get a D. Soon after, your poor performance is affecting multiple classes. You fail out of college and get stuck working a boring retail job.
But the corollary to the lesson of Tetris is that mistakes can also be overcome. With less time available for each tetromino, it is difficult, but never impossible, to clear those left behind rows. Doing so is far more rewarding than if the challenge was lower. From a halfway filled Tetris gameboard, you fight your way back down, beat the level, and complete journey mode. Likewise, you work hard at your retail job and build a career in management. Meanwhile, you go back to school and earn your bachelor’s degree. Your full strength and potential have been unlocked. You have become what you always been but never dreamed.
Realizations like those are why I still love video games. I am never going to care about video games the same way as when I was a kid. But as an adult, I can love those experiences in different, deeper ways. You can never go back, but maybe you do not want to.
