As a child of the 1980s, I was among the first generation to truly grow up alongside video games. Sure, those born a few years earlier may have a few fond memories of shifting colored blocks around on their Ataris and Commodore 64s, but my generation got to jump right into the full-blown Nintendo age without ever knowing a world without a Mario. Video games have been maturing at such a similar pace to ourselves that each new development has seemed as natural as sprouting pubic hair. We were the first who couldn't help but take them for granted even as their technical complexity, artistic design and graphical beauty steadily multiplied to the point that would've blown our minds straight out to witness mere decades earlier.
    And in another decade, what wonders will bore us then?
    I've played video games on and off most my life ever since my first console, the classic 8-bit NES. I was so young, I can't remember even getting it. Possibly because I was born and raised a colossal geek, I always approached games with the same attitude as books; I was impatient to devour the story as quickly as possible. Granted, games like Legend of Zelda or Mega Man are pretty slim pickings narratively speaking, but what little there was gestated into sprawling epics in my gushy young head as I lead my avatar sprite to his explosive doom ad infinitum.
    (I wonder if anybody else has had the nightmare where you're trying to get Mario to jump onto a block and you keep missing over and over until you wake up?)
    Unfortunately, after my Nintendo fixation burned out around Mega Man X2, my tastes started to narrow. I played GoldenEye on the N64 because everybody else did and after that it was just the Silent Hill and Resident Evil series' until both stagnated. After blowing through the story mode of whatever game in a few days, I'd be unable to muster any interest in playing the game again just for the sake of playing. So although video games have always been around, I've had an increasingly sporadic and narrow sampling.
    Things recently changed somewhat after I got a Sony PS3. My primary interest in it was as a Blu-Ray player and surprisingly it's still the best one out there for the price. There weren't a lot of games that really piqued my interest initially so I didn't play any for over a year. It wasn't until after a series of moves that finally landed me into a comfortably hermetic lifestyle in Oregon that curiosity drove me to sign up for GameFly, a mail delivery video game rental service. It's been a real convenient way for me to try out a bunch of games I never would have bothered with before.
    Still I find myself less interested in what's out there now and more interested in what could be soon.
    Like:

10. Social Experimentation
    Grand Theft Auto IV is the game I've been the most impressed with so far in terms of both quality and ambition. No other game crafts such a believable, fully realized environment and imbues it with so much detail, character and satire. One of the secondary elements of the game involves maintaining relationships with the various characters the plot involves you with as well as optional relationships you can pursue on your own through dating sites at internet cafes. Granted, there's really not much to this part of the game; taking certain people to the right places or wearing the right things will make them like you more, neglecting them for long stretches of time will make them like you less. When you think about it though, how different is it from real life? And if a game were to devote most of its focus toward this arena, how much more detailed would it need to be before it became genuinely interesting?
    We haven't even brought up the additional component of other human players interacting online. Already there are massive multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) like Everquest and World of Warcraft that people play just as much for the social aspects as they do for the actual gameplay. Second Life is another, only this one's entirely open-ended, allowing users to create whatever they can program and share or sell it among other users.
    Imagine an MMORPG designed solely around relationships. Or politics. Or economics.
    Throughout history there have been people who have experimented with alternative forms of government. Why not do it in an MMORPG? See what, if anything, could be learned by just trying it out in a game. Obviously there's a massive difference between the way people will behave in a game with no consequences and in their life full of consequences, but hey, if we can learn something from putting rats in a maze, we should be able to get plenty more from putting ourselves in a maze.
    A maze with f***ing awesome graphics.

9. Inevitably Insane Wackiness
    There's a steady stream of new game releases and it's easy for an unknown title to get lost amongst all the big-name sequels and movie adaptations. The best way to stand out is to innovate and explore uncharted territory. The Playstation Online Store has a bunch of low-price games with unique, artistic premises and simple, addictive gameplay (and best of all you can download a lot of the demos for free). There are still relatively few games out for the next generation systems and I believe as more and more of typical genres are flooded with so many titles that even the classics feel tired in the crowd, we'll see a lot more flat-out strange stuff come along. Like that game where the little alien guy rolls everything up into a giant ball of stuff. We'll not only see more stuff as bizarre and innovative as that, but I also mean that it's a metaphor for how all the strange stuff will accumulate into a giant ball of strange stuff that will roll over cities and grab puppies and cars and trees and things.
    You know? Like that.

8. There Will Always Be Another Mario
    And another Mega Man. And another Street Fighter. Pretty much any game you really liked that they've already made a few of, you can be pretty confident they'll return to the well in due time. Even if the last one sucked. And who knows? The next version just might be the most perfect version yet.
    The first game I got for the Super NES was Street Fighter II. That was my game. Ryu was my guy and I can still do hadokens and shoryukens in my sleep. Chun Li was probably my first crush. It was the only two-player game I had and the only person who could ever beat me was my sister with her damned button-mashing. When I got the chance to play the recently released Street Fighter IV I was thrilled. It's a good game on its own but I was mostly just stoked to be playing with all the familiar characters again with a shiny new polish.
    The one great thing about franchises is that many different people can get many different chances to get it right.

7. More and Better User-Created Content
    I currently have Little Big Planet checked out from GameFly. It's a game I'd heard a lot of hype about. It's certainly one of the cuter things I've seen in awhile. One of the more interesting features is that you can create your own levels and other content and share it online. Unfortunately I've only seen one or two user-created things that were really that interesting, but as time goes on and this kind of function becomes common, I think we'll see more people stepping up their game and contributing more interesting and diverse material. As online gaming grows over time, maybe we'll see YouTube-esque sites where large numbers of people submit and rank content.
    And also maybe YouTube will produce the next Orson Welles.
    That'd be swell.

6. All-Audiences
    Another neat thing about Little Big Planet is that it genuinely feels like it's suitable for any kind of gamer. It's one of the few games that all my roommates (including The Girl) can enjoy. Part of what makes it great for just about anybody is that there's a lot of stuff you can do besides the story mode. Some people might just like dressing up their character, messing around online, or creating their own levels. Like Grand Theft Auto IV, the strength of the game is its open-endedness.
    Last time I visited my grandparents I learned that they'd bought a Nintendo Wii. My grandfather's playing Nintendo now. That's girls and old people playing video games, for the record. This also increases my optimism that more ambitious and innovative games are inevitable; the audience is only getting bigger and more diverse.

5. The Neverending Store-y
    Something I was initially really stoked about was learning that many games would offer downloadable extras from the Playstation Store, thus potentially increasing their replay value. I spent a few bucks on a costume pack and bonus character for Soul Calibur IV but in the end it didn't feel like enough for the money. I keep checking back at the store to see if something really interesting comes up but so far nothing that grabs me. I've seen that they sell new songs for games like Guitar Hero, and I suppose that's great for people who dig that.
    More exciting to me is that there's a new Grand Theft Auto story mode downloadable from the X-Box store. That's the kind of thing I want to see: more story. I'm interested in extra chapters, alternate character playthroughs, prologue/epilogue levels, stuff like that. It seems there's a lot of potential here that's barely been touched upon for game developers to not only expand the longevity of their games and make some extra money but also expand the gaming experience.

4. The Medium for Massive Storylines
    Getting somebody to sit for more than three hours through a movie is hard. Getting somebody to sit for more than three months through a video game is decidedly less so. Metal Gear Solid 4 was one of the first PS3 games I played through, and as great and weird a story it was, oh my good sweet lord did it take forever and years. There's a cutscene that's literally 45 minutes long. That's 45 minutes where you're just sitting there waiting to play. But you do it. Because you've already been sitting there for days anyway.
    So it should be clear to any writer interested in telling a long, epic story where the most captive audience can be found. The concept of video game as artistic endeavor isn't new but it's yet to spread to enough of the artistic community. I hope that when talented creators and ambitious developers seek each other out we may see some of the first truly original developments in modern storytelling.

3. Universal Avatars
    My favorite thing about the fighting game Soul Calibur IV is the character creation function. They give you a lot of options to play with and unlocking new costume items in the single player challenge modes gives me a reason to come back to it. This is the kind of feature I would like to see become not only widespread but universally applied. In fact, I hope that in the future each game console will allow the player to create an infinitely customizable avatar that can be used in any game on the system (or can be converted to something equivalent to the game's style). It's a fact that at least in American culture, people love personalizing their stuff and the more a game allows the user to make it their own, the greater the emotional involvement they'll have with the gaming experience.

2. Virtual Reality, Take Two
    Come on, what are we waiting for? Sure, back in the nineties it was just a really expensive way to translate polygons into headaches, but just think about the technology that exists right now at this very minute. Imagine VR goggles in Hi-Def 3D with bi-aural sound. Give me three reasons why those aren't for sale at Best Buy right now.

1. Video Games Kill War
    Did you hear the Army hired one of the major game developers to create an Army simulator video game to help them with recruiting and training youngsters? That bothers some people. Not me. I think they should go further with it. I think the military should be funding virtual reality gaming for military purposes. Then they should sell the technology to every other country. Then they should enact video war game tournaments. Gradually transition the entire war industry into a war game industry.
    And then world peace. Done.
    So let's get on that.

Labels: games