251: Youth Eternal

[Anticitizen_Two]

That was a really great article, man. I've never felt the urge to "unplay" a game, but I certainly love playing retro games. I still play the NES Super Marios, and they're still a ton of fun for me. I never really made the connection between nostalgia and selling youth. That's very a very interesting point.

 

[The Random One]

This article actually made me sad. Not for the nostalgia part, but because I feel the worst thing about gaming as a subculture is their focus on what, deep down, are glorified toys. It's a longing for a never recovered childhood. While many of us are still waiting for the wave of games that will have adult themes and strike us as mature, changing the face of gaming forever, none of us will deny the childish joys of waltzing around a battlefield firing colourful bullets at everyone or walking around a kobold-infested tomb randomly firing unidentified wands at slugs.

It may not be possible now, but there's always hope we'll get some sort of selective memory cutting technology in the future! Cut out the game experiences, re-play it, and paste the old ones back!

Sounds like something from that movie, "Eternal Sunshine of the Mario 3."

Spoiler: This?

 

[visitingric]

with your comment towards wow and not playing it myself my friend was talking very exitedly about the new expantion coming out that changes the whole mapface including the starting areas. The odd thing about this statement was that he already had 3 lvl 80 characters that were pretty heavely decked out with gear but he wanted to build a whole new character when the expantion came out just to experience the starting areas all over again as a new experience rather then the same old grind to 80 that he has done repeatedly. Really shows the market and how easly it can 're hook' old players into the game by changeing the whole experience just slightly. . .

 

[Boxinatorizore]

I completely agree with the paying WoW as a noob thing. I remember firs playing it the world was so big and wondrous and waiting to be explored, no I've been everywhere and done it all and with that I have retired my WoW career, plus my class sucks now...

 

[thezeus18]

I think that Mr. Main has it mostly right. However, it's not youth that's being sold, but the experience of learning.

I think that a large part of the attraction of the gaming medium is that it provides environments in which we can practice learning, with no real punishment for mistakes. The reason that video-games were popular was because they presented novel problems and situations for people to grapple with. It wasn't because they could tell a story, or because they were pretty. The "Fun!" came from the learning that was involved in playing the game, and the temporary fulfillment of our needs for achievement and mastery. We could practice working the mouse and keyboard interface without fear of accidentally deleting or copying anything important, and there was a built in scale telling you how well you were doing, how far you had come. The reason that modern mainstream video-games are less popular with me and others of my generation, giving rise to articles like this one and "Videogames: A Modern Folly", is that in most there is either no new material to be learned, or so little that we quickly become bored. And yet, the reason that these games survive is that there's a new generation that doesn't know this stuff, that doesn't know that you right click to move units, or that you can jump further by double-tapping the spacebar or shooting a rocket at your feet. In the end, it looks like it's about recapturing a faded youth because it was in our youth that we were learning the most, and humans enjoy learning! We have a need for novel stimuli, to integrate diverse and different experiences into the body of knowledge that is our growing personhood. When games feed this, we enjoy them!

Older people ask me how I can possibly be so good with computers ("good" here meaning that I know that the right click menu exists). I give the usual answer, that I've grown up with it and they haven't, etc. But when you really look at it, an RTS game is what? It's a fun trainer for the Windows GUI. I've spent a good portion of my life trying to get better at something similar to actual computer systems, and having fun doing it.

The exciting thing comes from looking towards the future. The boring retreads you see today are a portent: the material that games teach is going to have to expand in order to hold the gamers' interests. A game made today that tries to teach me the lessons I learned in DOOM and Quake, ten years ago, that just isn't going to be interesting. If the games industry wishes to maintain its relationship with gamers like me, they're going to have to draw more and more often on the real world for inspiration, and on areas of that world that are not already understood by the majority of gamers. Games are going to teach. They're going to prepare us for future careers, augment our knowledge of biology and chemistry and all the other sciences. Games will have to evolve this way to retain their value for us. The surgeons of 2070 will make their first cuts with virtual scalpels, the general practitioners will start out diagnosing npcs. And it will be fun. And there will be much rejoicing.

 

[kirok]

great article.

 

[House_Vet]

One of the best articles I've read on the escapist - top marks! And yeah, I'd give anything to play things like Ocarina of Time the first time again, or WoW, MGS3, FFX, and L4D was utterly incredible the first time I played it...

 

[Sjakie]

Now this was a very good article. probably the best i read since i joined here.

 

[Kiithid]

This article actually made me sad. Not for the nostalgia part, but because I feel the worst thing about gaming as a subculture is their focus on what, deep down, are glorified toys. It's a longing for a never recovered childhood. While many of us are still waiting for the wave of games that will have adult themes and strike us as mature, changing the face of gaming forever, none of us will deny the childish joys of waltzing around a battlefield firing colourful bullets at everyone or walking around a kobold-infested tomb randomly firing unidentified wands at slugs.

As long we enjoy ourselves while doing so, since the Mortal Kombat days (ah good days when my parents wouldn't let me get near any arcade) our entertainement of choice have been chasing some maturity, however if the source of inspiration is relying on childish fantasies I don't see a problem.

Life does suck at times but the moments you catch yourself lost in wonder are really unreplaceable, at least with videogames we have a chance to revisit it a second time, the sense of wonder will be probably lost, but it's part of the game. Now if I could get back to that first kiss.

 

[CronoDAS]

You're only young once, but you can be immature forever.

 

[Lusulpher]

So we've stumbled upon the true addiction towards gaming, Humanity's drive to challenge a Learning Curve.

You can't unmaster a game, just fumble it or quit playing. The next generations of games are going with procedurally rendered objects and art, but if they move more of the replay value there too, then the limits can be undone.

Think about playing Thief in the stealth aspect but after winning the game you can play as the law trying to stop NPC Theives that have learned to play FROM your input! Now, think of that for all games! You could play RPGs from the perspective of the Villain by mastering the Hero, and then afterward try to survive the conflict as a Civilian. And then you could add the Mass Effect 2 approach onto THAT.


Only takes fleshing out an IP to include some actual background, instead of just Boy is Hero, Boy get Girl, Boy Can't Hump Girl due to FCC, At Least Boy Butchered Villain, Replay?[ICO broke the mold on that one btw, just wish I could own a copy for PC]

Really hope Developers see the leap is right there and actually invest in their franchises, or else, it's more of the same. I think Oblivion got closest.[But I hate elf games]

Eternally discovered gameplay, I think I'd pay above current game prices for that[suck mine Kotick]. As I would be buying at minimum, Art, at best Fountain of Youth.


Also, have you tried EvE Online? The curve is near-Curiosity-shriveling. But you can't master a Persistent World Sandbox, too much competition from other "master players", you can only keep playing. Best fun I've had in years!]-

 

[GodKlown]

I am certainly not against the concept of "retro" gaming, the likes of which seem to be gaining some popularity on Adult Swim games. Re-skinning popular titles today to an older 8 or 16 bit style look different, but don't really make me think of the old NES days of my youth. It seems to me that Nintendo takes an entirely different approach to this by re-skinning old 8 bit games into a more modern visual display on the DS with Mario and whatnot... but I can understand them wanting to showcase "old school" games for a new generation so they can experience the games some of us grew up with when they were new.
Occasionally, you run across one of these remakes that reminds you of why when they remake old movies that it turns out terrible. Slapping a new skin on an old title doesn't always improve the memories you had, just makes you want to play the original instead of a dolled-up version. We didn't care that much about how the games looked back then... it was more about the actual story or situation the game put you in that gave it the fun element. There are already plenty of games out there that look nice but suck, and I'm sure this community would have no shortage of suggestions to that end. Did the Wii have some emulator ability where you could buy "vintage" titles and play them through the Wii? (I ask because I do not own a Wii or have access to one, but I haven't heard about that feature in a long time)

 

[Delock]

One of my biggest problems would be that not only would I have to forget about a lot of games now days to get the same enjoyment I did as a child, but I would also have to have friends around who had done the same. The enjoyment wasn't just from playing for me, it was from being a part of the group who was in on it. For the reference, there was 1 NES in my childhood that was shared beteen kids, and we all tried our best to beat Megaman 2 or 3. None of us got close, but it was exicting to see how we got closer each time, sometimes even beating a boss to the excitement of everyone. In addition, Pokemon wasn't about playing, but rather about playing with friends, trading and battling as well as giving tips to each other. My PS1 was when I played alone, and that's only because most of the games were JRPGs, but even then my little brother watched me play sometimes. Now days, I've got less people that I can actually play with, and lots of time everyone wants to play their own game. In addition to all that, nostalgia about the first time playing, when everything is strange and new is what stops us from seeing that a few of the games we play weren't as good as we thought they were. I'm not saying all of them are like that, but I know quite a few games I played as a kid (some were movie liscened) that given much better games around now days, I would never want to play. What I would really like to see though is another round of the crazy/fantasy focused games like the last gen had (Jak, Ratchet and Clank, etc.) stuff where it's not trying for realism, but rather fun. I'd like to have the humor that I used to get such as "Why is Billy Sad?" advertisment in R&C, or Daxter's quips, or Katamri Dynasty. Adventures of the likes of Okami, Ico, or Kingdom Hearts. Or at the darkest, have stuff like FFX (hey, turns out that the main villain created a monster and the religion that will "save" you from it, making things slowly turn into the current era where the world can't live without the church but you still have to break the cycle. By the way, to do so will null your very existance), Shadow of the Colossus, or MGS3 (turns out that this was actually all a power struggle over cash that goverments turned out to use its most loyal soldiers as disposable pawns to get it). I really miss the cartoonish graphics that were used to compensate for the 3D, but were much more fun to look at rather than realistic people. This was the era where I carefully chose which games I wanted to keep the saves of, and which I would reluctantly sell. I wouldn't want my childhood back, but could I atleast have my teen years?

 

[superdavo]

I totally agree with one section of this article;

When discussing the particularly adept World of Warcraft player that the author knows, I couldn't help but feel a rather large pang of empathy. Although I am no longer a hardcore player, I often wish I could enjoy the game with the same childlike enthusiasm that I had when I first booted the game client for the first time.

Being able to capture those first, brand-new experiences and somehow renew them for re-use by those grizzled and hardened gaming veterans has got to be some sort of gaming equivalent to the fountain of youth.

... See what I did there with the fountain of youth bit? Boom.