Video Game Malaise

Have you ever looked at your pile of video games and said to yourself — I don’t want any of these right now.

I have, many times.

Right now:

These are all good games. Some of them could even be considered great. I won’t begin discussing these games and their various qualities right now. I’m only discussing logistics. I am in a period where I feel nothing towards gaming. In years past people would call this a sign of depression. But I think its burnout at seeing how little the industry changes.

All of the games I’ve mentioned above are full of padding. As great as each game CAN be, they are loaded with sections and mechanics purely intended to keep you playing longer to artificially inflate playtime at the expense of respect for players.

Sure, playtime can be a good measure of a games ‘quality’, however you define that: an hour per dollar ratio can tell you lots, but it can’t tell you how long that game will stay with you.

A 40-hour RPG might have 10 hours of story for you to chew on but hours and hours of grinding you may or may not like. Dragon Quest 8 is loaded with long sections of grinding for the sake of grinding and yet in the newer versions (the3DS re-release for instance) its less of a drag than you’d expect.

Not every game can absorb padding well. In fact, the vast majority of games ought not have any padding whatsoever, but they do. Bethesda games (and most western RPG’s) tend to suffer from padding issues. Much of the time they get hand-waved as side-content, but without doing a lot of those quests you lack advancement for skills/perks/gear

It’s hard to find a AAA-developed game that isn’t loaded with padding. A rare example of padding that doesn’t feel excessive is Spider-Man by Insomniac, and even that goes a bit past my personal taste. Its rare to find a game that qualifies as epic, but so many try in such contrived ways, that we end up with vastly inflated playtimes.

Replaying a game now is harder, as an adult with less and less free-time due to various things: family, work, hobbies. I have creative projects that take away from my gaming time as well. Games that are full of ‘excess’ quickly lose their flavour when replaying.

I think this is a big reason why most games never get finished. People don’t play through, because they get that malaise. Nothing is going to be different with this session so I may as well play something else.

‘Video Game Malaise’ is that ‘I’ve-had -enough’ over-satiated feeling of sameness that only comes with video games. That’s the thing everyone expects to have happen with the Marvel movies. Superhero burnout. But that sameness isn’t REALLY present within the movies, not in the way detractors see it at least. Fans and the semi-interested see fun action movies in the way that the 90s did blockbusters. Yes, even then people saw those as ‘same’ but for everyone interested, they were not.

Video games do not have this defence. With movies and tv, the passive action of watching allows more room for repetition because you can be distracted from the same elements over and over. Supernatural is a TV show that has lasted a long time despite its premise rarely wavering beyond “two handsome brothers chase monsters and look beautiful doing it” and yet its been running for a decade now. I assume part of that success is because while painfully derivative of itself, the show keeps twisting things just enough for its fans to stay engaged. Good for them I suppose.

Video games cannot really do this. They are far too expensive to continue the repetition before costs outweigh profits. And while that ought NOT to factor into how a game is considered, but it must. If a game’s concept is interesting enough for me, I would like to see several iterations that work these ideas out. If I see a game wasting its time and resources on content that is pointless or padding, and those resources could have gone elsewhere, it is more than fair game. It would be akin to judging a film director, or the prose of an author. If I am noting loose threads, those loose threads are part of the game to be commented on.

In future, when I talk about larger games, I will discuss main game versus side content. I will give my approximate playtimes for each and discuss how much is added to the detriment of the game. I fully accept my viewpoints are subjective and I will discuss WHY I feel what I feel. My feelings are generally up for discussion but just like feelings, sometimes I will be open to notes and sometimes I may not.

I want to play something this evening, but I can’t because — malaise.

Related posts:

The grimace of pain. “Surrender” is published by Danny Wu.

One of the greatest mysteries of modern science is the puzzle of dark matter. If you add up all the normal matter making up planets, stars, gas, plasma, black holes, galaxies, and the space between…

Apenas quem vislumbra uma outra vida pode viver uma nova vida. Não existe renovação sem perda. É sempre um pêndulo entre sacrifício e dádiva. Todo ser humano que pôs os pés na Ilha achava que estava…