This is old news by now, but I was shocked when I saw that article claiming that the average gamer was "35, fat and bummed." Who doesn't remember this guy from the famed South Park episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft"?
There are a lot of reasons to take that report with a grain of salt, but one thing that does seem undeniable is that the average gamer is getting older. When I was growing up, video games seemed like they were the domain of kids -- or, at the most, teenagers. Super Mario World and Mortal Kombat are incredible fun as an eight-year old, but not exactly the kind of deep, sophisticated franchises we have today that cater to, and arguably can only be appreciated by, older gamers. The most important video games of the new millenium usually tend to be "Mature" titles -- Grand Theft Auto and its successors, the Halo or Gears of War shooter franchises, or the serious-minded Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell espionage-themed games.
A parallel social trend is the tendency towards an extended adolescence of period of "emerging adulthood." Interestingly enough, this was a hot topic during the last recession, and it may be rearing its head again now that we're in an even deeper one. The basic idea is that people are finding permanent careers at a later age, marrying and having children later, and generally spending their 20's in a way not significantly different from the way they spent their teens -- by thrill-seeking and having fun. Is it any wonder, then, that gamers stay passionate about the hobby for longer than ever before?
Too Old for Games
Yet by and large the default assumption remains that sooner or later, we're supposed to "grow up" or "grow out" of games: "Isn't he (or she) a little too old for that?"
I've started asking myself this question lately. I'm 22, and the vast majority of my friends play video games far more infrequently than I do. I'm not a huge player by any means -- on an average day I'll put in an hour or two. It's definitely a hobby of mine, but one which I've found is more of a solitary rather than a social pursuit. When I'm playing video games, they tend to be of the single-player variety, and I usually do it when burned out of work or extracurriculars for the day. When I want social interaction, I put the video game controller down rather than picking it up, and go out to a bar or call up some friends and watch a movie.
I've also started thinking about it more because real-world responsibilities are looming large. I'm currently in law school, and we just hit the season to begin hunting for summer jobs. With all these simultaneous obligations to juggle, gaming's definitely going to be taking a back seat for the next few months.
Robert de Niro's character in Heat has a pretty ruthless philosophy: don't do something unless you can walk out on it in 30 seconds flat (when you feel the heat coming around the corner). Now, admittedly, he thinks this because he's a world-famous criminal, and you'd better be willing to run away from the cops if you want to survive in that business. But it seems oddly applicable to my attitude towards gaming nowadays: I enjoy games, but I can rarely afford to let myself become immersed in them the way I could at 12, or 16, or even 20. I can't help but nostalgically remember the year when Knights of the Old Republic came out -- I think I put in eight hours a day into that game for the first week or so I had it. I was completely enthralled by Bioware's masterpiece; now, if I pick up a game like Dragon Age: Origins, it might not finish it before next spring. And it's hard to be absorbed by a game knowing you have to be ready to walk out on it at the drop of a hat.
The Maturation of a Medium
Of course, I'm not the only one growing up. The video game industry is as well. From my childhood to the present, gaming has grown into a bigger business than film (by raw revenue numbers). Where once the huge summer blockbusters were unmatched entertainment events, now the launch of the next Halo game is the biggest multimedia debut of any year. And as gaming has grown astronomically more popular and more lucrative, it has matured from a fun diversion into a more serious medium, one which delivers its share of meditative, socially conscious experiences.
Perhaps that's why it's so hard for me to simply cut myself off from video games. Quite often, I find they provoke my thought or hold my attention more than the average page-turner on the New York Times best-seller list, or the random film debuting on any particular weekend. Certainly I'd rather spend a weekend being dazzled by Uncharted 2 than watching studio drivel like Michael Jackson's "This is It." In the battle for an adult's increasingly limited entertainment time, games -- rather than movies, television, or books -- may be the last to go.
I hate zombies. I get really annoyed with them in almost any media, but - like a zombie infestation - it seems that the zombie as a trope is impossible to exterminate. And just when it seems like I've escaped pop culture's attempt to force-feed me some more zombie flicks, they come roaring right back. At that's when I admit defeat: our culture is obsessed with zombies.
The big box office hit from last weekend? Zombieland, a zombedy (zombie comedy) that reminds us that zombies are actually as funny as they are terrifying. In that respect, it reminds me a lot of Shaun of the Dead, a movie even I have to admit I loved.
The big Xbox 360 exclusive on the horizon? Left 4 Dead 2, a quick and dirty sequel to an addictive but simplistic zombie-survival game that earned rave reviews in its first iteration.
Then I look on Xbox Live Arcade or Playstation Network: Burn Zombie Burn! is only one of the many examples of downloadables that have happily taken up residence in this tried-and-true genre.
Get me out of here.
You Must Have Zombies
Disclaimer: I'm probably going to spoil a few games' plotlines here, so please avert your eyes if you don't want to hear about the plotlines of Halo, Half-Life 2, or Uncharted.
My big complaint with zombies in games and movies isn't that people overuse the premise. They do overuse the premise, but at least I can avoid it. Dead Rising, Left 4 Dead, and Resident Evil 5 are theoretically on my "to-play" list. But somehow, they keep getting bumped down the queue by newer releases. To be honest, I just can't muster enthusiasm to run out and get a game when I know that the next 8-10 hours will be spent shooting enemies who mindlessly stumble forward and attempt to claw at you. Looking at the RE5 videos, it seems they made the zombies so stupid because they were too lazy to add run-and-aim functionality to the game. Somehow, that sort of reliance on old-school mechanics just emphasizes to me how little innovation and creativity you have to put in to a zombie game (or movie, or book, etc.).
What you can't avoid, however, is the fact that a ton of epic releases seem to have zombies or zombie-like creatures. What else are the Flood in Halo except a crude space-age imitation of zombies - a parasitic organism that takes over every organism and renders them into mindless, savage beasts? And Halo itself can be accused of ripping off of the Half-Life series, whose headcrabs and headcrabbed soldiers are clearly the inspiration for certain types of Flood.
The worst, however, hit me recently while playing Uncharted. I just got the game a few days ago and have been really digging the combination of third-person combat and third-person platforming. When everyone says it's Tomb Raider meets Gears of War, they're right. Unfortunately, they forgot to mention that it also mixes in some 28 Days Later (or, in the case of the ultra-short Uncharted, about 6 Hours Later, when the zombies start popping up).
Zombies Are Lazy
I don't mean that they themselves are lazy. Who knows, maybe there's a strong Protestant work ethic lurking behind their relentless attempts to pursue and infect the untainted human. No, when I say zombies are lazy, I mean that developers are lazy for resorting to them.
Does every "horror" twist two-thirds of the way through a story have to involve the introduction of some sort of virus or parasite that renders your previously intelligent enemies mindless? I swear it's just a way to create a "new" enemy type that doesn't need new or improved AI. The Flood pretty much had one AI routine in Halo: Forward, forward, forward! No flanking, though there was a big of leaping from the agile ones. It's the same with the Uncharted zombies - they rush forward, swipe you once or jump on you, and then race back in a circle. It's pretty ridiculous after awhile, and you realize that they only stop attacking because the game would be unbalanced (against you) if they didn't. After all, two swipes in a row pretty much kill you.
When developers are writing weak AI like this, it becomes somewhat annoying. Granted, Uncharted overcomes this problem by just throwing the enemies at you. My heart was pounding incredibly hard while I was in the level where the zombies are introduced. But in the end, I couldn't shake the niggling sensation that all I got were some cheap thrills.
Zombies Are Dumb (These Days)
The strange thing is that zombies - or rather the "undead" or "revenant" - have a pretty interesting place in literary and cultural history. Without elaborating on it too much, it's worth thinking about the fact that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein (the Romantic figure we've now reduced to a hulking green monstrosity with less brains than coordination) as a profoundly philosophical figure. And we can look even further back into the past, to Christian tradition and the stories of Lazarus and Easter in the New Testament (and even further back into other mythologies and traditions), to see a fascination with the concept. The idea of the undead has historically cropped up as an attempt to deal with some persistent literary "Big Ideas" - death, alienation, sacrifice, the limits or meaning of being "human." Somehow, we went from that to the purple-face people-eaters that you see twice a year in the cinema today.
The review system that the vast majority of gaming websites use right now is broken. Attaching a number to a game is quick and easy, but too often it misses the mark. What does the "score" at the end of all these reviews mean for me? When a game gets a 90, should I construe that as an indication that the game in question is in the top 10 percent of titles in its genre? Or should I think of it as an A in a class or on a test, a standard of excellence that obtains regardless of percentile? In either case, is it worth playing a game rated 80? What about 75?
Game reviews can be hugely important to the sales of a title, since we usually have access to critics' opinions before most (or even any) of our friends have purchased and tried out a game. Take the case of Batman: Arkham Asylum. The game was not marketed or hyped as an AAA title until very close to its release date, when late previews and early reviews made it clear we had a phenomenal game on our hands. If Arkham Asylum had gotten a 75 average on Metacritic or Gamerankings, would it have sold 2 million copies? I sincerely doubt it.
The scoring scale has also led to an unhealthy obsession with reviews in some gamers (check out some of the System Wars threads on this board). Flagship titles that don't score 9.0 or above are "flops," even if they get solid scores like Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, which earned an 8.0 here on Gamespot. Right now, one of the big debates seems to be whether Uncharted 2: Among Thieves will outscore Halo 3: ODST. But does it really matter? By all accounts, owners of the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360 are going to get two great exclusives this fall. How important is it that Metacritic deems the former superior to the latter?
Meanwhile, on the other side of the equation, games that are great fun but don't necessarily stand out from the pack often get 7's. Gamers reading sites like this might easily dismiss such titles as mediocre and elect not to buy them when they would otherwise enjoy playing them.
This brings me to my big question:
What do we want from game reviews?
It's a simple question, really. What does (or should) a gamer want to see in a review for a game? One way to get at the issue might be to explore what we don't get right now. Here are some glaring negatives in the current system:
1) Genre difference and preference usually vastly outweighs a game's score in terms of how much an individual gamer can enjoy a given game. People who hate racing games won't swoon after getting a chance to play Gran Turismo 5, despite the fact that it seems likely to attain a 9.0+ rating at almost all gaming sites. The score simply can't account for these different preferences.
2) How do you compare scores through time? A 9.0 shooter like Quake III in 1999 might be a 6.0 today, given how outdated some of the foundational gameplay mechanics of that decade seem to us. But then think about a game like Starcraft, which was rated around 9.0 at its release and yet is now considered to be the greatest real-time strategy game of all time. How is it that Starcraft, even today, would be rated by those playing it in the same range as its original review score?
3) False objectivity comes with review scores. When people give opinions, they normally don't attach numbers to them as an acknowledgment of their subjectivity. Yet bizarrely, the opinion of a game critic (or those in film) only seems official when a number or letter grade comes attached. And we take that number far too seriously at times. Super Mario Galaxy is the best game of this generation, people can argue, based on review scores. But can you really say that to a guy (or gal) whose favorite game is Gears of War? Does it make sense to say that these numbers represent an objective truth such that Super Mario Galaxy is 97/94 times better than Gears of War (based on Metacritic aggregate scores)?
Of course, it's pretty simple to discern what gamers want from their reviews. Fundamentally, we just want to know whether we'll like a game or not. Going off of review scores, I've bought at least a half-dozen games in the last few years that have just completely flopped in my eyes. I literally can't bring myself to play them to completion. These include Viva Pinata, Project Gotham Racing 3, and Grand Theft Auto IV – one of the highest-rated games of all time!
Beyond the score
Game reviews can never do away with subjectivity problems on both the part of the reviewer and the reader, so they're never going to be perfect. But they could be improved a lot if a few elements were included. Right now, reviews focus almost entirely on three major aspects: story, gameplay, and presentation. I'm not saying we shouldn't value these (see my previous blog), but there are a few more things I'd like to see.
First, all reviews should have a brief run-down of similar titles and the reviewer's take on how those games compare. Interestingly enough, Gamesradar did something like this in their Uncharted 2 review, which you can see here. It's called "Is it Better than…" and compares Uncharted 2 to Tomb Raider, Gears of War 2, and Batman: Arkham Asylum. I thought it was brilliant, but of course they aren't extending this to other reviews on the site.
Secondly, reviewers should have a section specifically evaluating the game's appeal. Halo, for instance, is a mass-appeal shooter in the sense that even non-twitch-trigger players can get into the franchise and enjoy it. It's a bit more forgiving than other first-person shooters in terms of aiming, movement, and even battlefield tactics – at least until you get to Legendary difficulty. On the other hand, a game like Gran Turismo 5 might only appeal to racing fans, even if it is the greatest racing simulation ever built.
These two sections are definitely present in some reviews, but they don't seem as obligatory as the holy trinity of story, gameplay, and presentation that I mentioned earlier. But this attitude should change, since comparability and appeal get us much closer to knowing whether we'll like a game.
As for scores…I admit I'm a bit reluctant to cut them out entirely. Numerical scores have their advantages as well, and I definitely don't want to assert that they are worthless. Here's a possible compromise going back to my point above: give us two scores, one for gamers in general and one for devoted fans of the genre.
This sounds a bit stupid at first, but it can be quite beneficial. Many of the epic Japanese RPGs released this generation have fizzled out with mediocre reviews in the 6.5-7.5 range. But I see a ton of people on the boards who claim that Lost Odyssey, or Infinite Undiscovery, or (fill in title here) is the most underrated title of this generation. To them this may well be true, but if you give an average gamer those titles, their opinion may be much more closely aligned with the professional reviewers. This gap seems to occur most frequently in specialized genres, where its fans might love a game that just doesn't have broad appeal.
Hopefully, we see more comprehensive game reviews in the future. And hopefully I don't trick myself (again) into buying a title that garners universal acclaim, only to remember after playing it for a few minutes that I don't really like racing games all that much. Ah, Project Gotham!
