Reading05: Gaming Gimmicks

Not all games are played on a sofa or at a desk. Electronic entertainment has grown to have a plethora of ways to interact. Motion Detection, Dance Pads, electronic instruments and other forms of control have found some serious success and carved out a decent chunk of the market with these titles. Just like how a lot of "passive" games were first developed to showcase the computing power of new machines, a lot of games have been made and many have found success showing new technologies, in particular motion detection. So, let's get personal.

Personally, I hate this stuff. I do not enjoy playing games on these sort of systems. On the Wii, the titles always felt silly to me, and things like Wii Sports and Mario Kart are for a different sort of person than myself. The Kinect was pretty bad at doing most things, and required obnoxious amounts of space to function at all. Guitar Hero and their many variants and Rock Band spin off things I never had any reason to play. Just like with Wii Sports, I can just as easily go out and do the real thing and enjoy it much more than what can be done with games. If I want to golf, I would rather walk down to the driving range or even just take plastic practice balls out to the yard. When I want to play the guitar, I take out one of the several real instruments that I own and play. When a group of us want to get together in a band, we just did that with our actual instruments in a buddy's garage. So, these things never had much appeal to me. That doesn't mean they are useless, though. I know a lot people really enjoy all these things, and that is great. My family members have always loved being together and playing Just Dance games on the Kinect or Wii, and there are good things to be said about things that can bring groups of people together. But I personally would rather not ever play them. So I do not.

Different ways of interacting with technology a bit of buzz, especially since different people are different and enjoy different things. I hate Guitar Hero, but I know there is a group of friends of mine playing Rock Band down the hall right now. And that is great, there should be these options and different experiences that people can have. Looking forward, the push seems to be for Virtual and Augmented Reality systems. Developers want to bring users even closer to the experiences than was ever possible before, physically bringing people into the action, and surrounding their senses with it, in the case of VR, or bringing the virtual world into one's perception of reality with AR. I have never used any sort of VR thing, but I am sure there is potential for great success with it. But, seeing as I know nothing about how it works or how it feels to use, I will say little if anything more on the subject. AR, on the other hand, is something I do have some admittedly limited experience with. This comes mostly through Nintendo and Pokemon Go and some simple titles on the 3Ds. It was really awesome to see Pokemon appear out in the real world on my phone's camera. For about 5 minutes. Just like with motion detection and rhythm games gimmicks, when the novelty of the new technology faded, I lost pretty much all interest in using it. It makes for a few interesting and unique moments but honestly did not add anything exceptional or necessary to my gaming experience. The uniqueness of the visual quirks that this gave did not change the fact that what I was playing was not a particularly engaging experience, and I often felt that all of these things rely on the technology to make people interested, and do not do as much actual work giving an entertaining product that utilizes these new technologies to enhance the experience. The games should be using the fancy new tech to enhance their ability to tell their story and engage the audience, rather than just being a skin plastered on a sort of toy. Well, I guess that is just if the companies want me to buy in to this stuff. Clearly they do fine without my personal support, and as long as they stay successful they will continue doing what has made them so.

Reading04: Gaming in the 90s

According to my Steam Library, I've put an absurd number of hours into prepping for this weeks assignment. And that is just on the HD remaster of one of my favorite games: Age of Empires II. This is a game that I have been playing since I found the Age of Empires Gold 3-CD set at a Staples, and got the original Age of Empires, Rise of Rome expansion, Age of Empires II and the Conquerors expansion. I have spent literal weeks of my life meticulously developing my bases in this fantastic world. I never even played the game right, and I only played against other human beings on three or four occasions (which involved some buck-wild third party setups as the remaster did not yet exist and the official servers had long been shut down. Such were the days of middle school). When I handed down my old laptop to my younger brother, the very first thing we did was LAN party some AoE. I took the soundtrack files off the CD-ROM and put them on my iPod Nano. Seriously. I found the thing a few months ago and the Age of Empires II theme is the most played song on the thing. Well, the album is actually second to the Pokemon Gold and Silver soundtrack, but those are shorter songs. But I digress.

These are RTS games: real-time strategy. Until I found the Elder Scrolls series, these were far and away my favorite games to play. My first multiplayer game experience and game development experience came with Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne one summer at iD Tech Camps. I really started down computer science because of these games, not just what they were in gameplay and the memories this has given me, but also in their fantastic modding support, with full scenario and level editors that I used at least as much as the games themselves. With all of these games, I could literally write thousands of words as to what makes each one great, objectively and personally in my life, but I have now actually read the prompt and see that the reflection is more about games and I should stop ranting on about Age of Empires. The faster I get this thing written, the sooner I can go back to procrastinating my machine learning assignment and hit up another round. But one more clarification, in case P.Bui is curious. When I say I never played the game "right," I didn't play any of the "story" scenarios until last year, and I never rushed developments and tried to crush the CPU players in record time. I played the game where my base was not a base but a city, and built it up like one would in an empire building title like Civilization, with an excessively elaborate defense structure and ridiculously over-the-top invasion strategies that involved conquering opposing peoples with only 1 builder, 1 monk, and 1 trebuchet. Build a square of wall, build a tower, monk convert any opponents, trebuchet castles and town centers. I would drag games out to take 6 or more hours. The minimap would be just my team color in every single pixel with the number of outposts and walls all over the place. Age of Empires is one of the greatest games ever made. But anyway, on to the actual thing I am supposed to address.

So, consoles. Above is the first console I ever got. It was passed down to me from my cousin Tyler as a Christmas gift in 2003. It was one of the most vividly happy memories of my life, and one of only maybe two things I can recall to still even literally right now as I am typing this thing make me tear up from joy. The original system saw its time come to an end, but I do still proudly own one of these and many of the same games from that day. The same discs. In the same cases. Since like 2000. Spyro the Dragon, Crash Bandicoot, Crash Team Racing, Madden 2003, and Gex: Enter the Gecko. I have kept these, and will continue to hold onto them. The first game my kid will play is going to be that same copy of Spyro the Dragon. No joke. The point of this story, though, is to say that I did not choose the console, it chose me. I did not ask Santa or my parents for this, it was given to me and it changed my life. I couldn't tell you a darned thing about why this is better than the SEGA genesis (but it is) or the N64 (but it is), but I can tell you there is nothing you can tell me that will make me think anything other than this. My favorite console ever is the PlayStation2. I still have one, and I still play it every time I go back home. For me, a big reason for this is probably nostalgia. I love going back, turning the thing on, seeing the old blue cubes floating in space, and being 7 years old again. My favorite thing about it was that not only can it help me relive the glory days of Madden 05 and Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal and literally dozens of my favorite games, but also lets me keep playing my Spyro and Crash. Backwards compatibility is my favorite thing in the gaming world, and I am sad that it doesn't really seem to exist much anymore.

I guess the most important things to me about a console are the games that it lets me play, as a lot of my favorite games are exclusive to the PlayStation, but also the reason they are my favorite games is that I have had them for literally almost 20 years. And that isn't even just Sony PS1 stuff. The desk drawer to my left has the same GameBoy Color I got in 2001 and the same Pokemon Silver cartridge from the following year. My favorite games and consoles are the ones with which I have the deepest emotional connection, because I am just a great big ball of feels. Maybe there are technically better things out there, maybe I just missed out on playing all these greats, but that's fine. I wouldn't trade my purple dragon friend for anything.

Reading03: Political Correctnesses (Or some other PCs)

In the world of gaming, there is one power that has risen above all others. One way that has made itself seem the truest way to experience electronic entertainment. I am fresh out of fun being had make this seem like more than it is so here is a little bit of a goof instead of a proper formal introduction to the bulk of this entry. Wow, that went longer than it probably needed to. That is quite odd, as I certainly do not need to be padding to hit the word count, I actually have things to say on this subject. The subject in question is the rise of the personal computer and its impact upon the gaming world, and the introduction here instead of a ramble was meant to come to a climax with a joke of some sort about the culture of the PC Master Race subset of the gaming community but I could not think of anything that I found particularly funny.

The 1980's saw the rise of personal computers in the home and workplace, with Apple and IBM waging a sort of hardware battle to put these machines in every home. This brought about a new way to play games. Whole libraries were created for the Apple II, the Macintosh, and the greatest of all MS-DOS. Playing games on the computer offers a few different things that are not available on consoles, such as more robust control schemes using full keyboard and mouse inputs, and access to greater quantities of memory. Gaming on the computer leads to fully different experiences than those given on the console. As a general rule, especially in early days, a lot of the interaction in computer games is between the player and the computer, while a lot of especially early console games focused on a cooperative or competitive experience. Instead of providing a way to prove your superiority over a friend or family member, playing these early computer games tend to be more about solving a series of puzzles or otherwise showcasing the technical greatness of the machine.

In the last reading, you may have noticed I talked at relative length about my time playing the Oregon Trail on DOS, so I won't dive much more into that particular title. Instead, I will go farther back into my childhood, to the only reason I have any understanding of world geography: Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? This is a franchise which has had a multimedia cultural influence on me. I grew up not just playing the computer game (the one pictured here, and also a later edition), but also the board game, watching the television show, and most importantly through the musical stylings of Rockapella on the album of the same name. But this game is actually the first in the franchise. released by Broderbund in 1985. Fun fact, the game was originally released with a copy of the World Almanac and Book of Facts. In the game, the player character, a rookie in the ACME Detective Agency, must track down and apprehend criminals of the V.I.L.E. organization and their leader, the titular Carmen Sandiego. Gameplay consists mostly of menu navigation, using the graphical interface to investigate different locations, gather clues about the suspect, filing for an arrest warrant when enough information is gathered, and flying to different cities around the world. By solving enough cases and returning enough artifacts to their rightful location, the player ranks up, given more challenging cases until you eventually come face to face with Carmen herself. I went back to play this game, and honestly it is still pretty great. The only thing that doesn't fully stand up to the test of time are the actual geo-political factoids that fuel the game, making a few thing more challenging as references and hints do not hold true in the modern world.

Carmen Sandiego is one of many games that I feel would not work on consoles. These sorts of strategic games, ones for which more thought and more intricate variation of input is needed, do not work well on consoles. Consoles, and their ergonomic controllers and emphasis on graphical flashiness, are excellent for action games and sports, adventuring and immersion, but not for every style of game. Strategy games, I think are the best example of something that does not translate well to a controller. Not that it has not been tried, but it is a much smoother experience to command armies and control civilizations with the full capabilities of a computer over the specialization applied to game consoles.

Reading02: Golden Oldies

As a general rule, people love to glorify our past. The fallacy of Golden Age Thinking leads many of us, myself often included, to believe a previous time was better than the world they currently live in. To many people, an example of this is the era of arcade video games. The days of Pac-Man Fever, Space Invaders, Galaga, Pole Position, and others. This was the time when video games became relevant in the mainstream. Atari and others brought the possibility of games into every home, and we look fondly upon this time.

I have my own memories of these games, despite being removed from their creation by a number of decades. Growing up, the first video game we owned was a plug-and-play Ms. Pac-Man unit, with the titular classic as well as Galaga, my personal favorite, and Pole Position. My sisters and I would sit in front of the 20-some inch CRT screen and try to best each other's highest scores. Except Pole Position, which was mostly a test of how far off the map the game would let us go before we exploded. I don't remember what happened to that old thing, sure it was thrown out or broken at some point but it provided considerable joy for the three of us, and so I always believed that I was a big fan of the games of the classic era. This made it especially exciting in high school when we moved across town, and I found an old Atari 2600 in the basement with a handful of cartridges. Getting the thing up and working was not the smoothest experience, having to replace a few missing wires and such, but eventually we put it together enough to get the thing working. While admittedly these titles were hardly esteemed classics (I did not recognize nor do I currently remember any of the titles) it was a pretty brutal experience. Having spent several years at this point with modern consoles, the difficult control schemes and virtually nonexistent graphic quality were significant steps down, and the lack of compelling narrative left me questioning why I was struggling through these games. I began to believe that perhaps the era was not everything we had believed it to be and the greatness of the time was all in nostalgia.