How far do we want videogames to go?

Posted on April 20th, 2008 in Video Games by Sergeant JoKer

Day by day, video games continue to innovate and surprise us. Gone are the days when it was mind blowing to be able to save your game (even though some companies still can’t get the saving games part right, at least on consoles). We are entering the age of video games, where the sky is the limit. The question is how high do we really want to go?

In the early days of video games, video games mostly centered on run and jump type games, with many Mario iterations and knock-offs. You had sports games, where people would spend hours just changing the names of the players to match their friends or actual rosters of the teams. You only really needed 2 buttons in order to play a game and those buttons made your character jump and maybe shoot something, whether that was a fireball, a claw, or a punch. To beat a boss, all you had to do was play it enough times and figure out the pattern to their madness.

Flash forward to 2008, and some games look almost photo-real. The graphics are amazing and the environments, many times, are destructible to a point. Boss fights are epic; there aren’t patterns to memorize and little quirks to look for; you have to outthink and outfight the boss. Sports games feature actual teams that play like their real life counterparts and its easier then ever to update the rosters to reflect them. Controllers have more buttons then you do fingers and are capable of making your character move in ways that were never dreamt of in the day of Super Mario Bros. The stories have gone from the simplistic, save the damsel or brother in distress, to epic stories that rival the depth and scope of the biggest Hollywood movies.

The real question is: How far do we, the gamers, want them to go?

I, for one, play video games to escape reality. It’s nice to sit back and lose myself in a game, just as it’s nice to lose yourself in a good movie or book. It’s entertaining and fun to be able to pretend you’re somebody else, capable of extraordinary feats on the way to solving some conflict.

As games become more realistic, they will become more like real life in ways never imagined. Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) will become more cunning in how it reacts to you. Graphics will be indiscernible from real life and the stories will be told in ways that will really hit home, whether or not they are realistic.
One of the main reasons I don’t play Condemned that much is because it is really close to reality. Your character doesn’t have some abnormal super powers, ammo is limited, the graphics are disturbingly great and it just sucks you right in. For me, that’s not enjoyable. I don’t want to feel all the angst and fear of the on-screen character; I don’t want to be made to feel like a regular guy in a horrible situation. If I want that, I can join the Marines and ship out for Iraq, where normal people are put in horrible situations. I want to escape from reality; I want to be the super soldier capable of taking down an entire terrorist cell with a pistol and knife. I enjoy medical packs to heal my character completely; I enjoy crazy weapons with lots of ammo; I enjoy escaping reality and enjoying myself in a good video game. Don’t get me wrong, Call of Duty 4 is spectacular and I love to play it, but it’s storylines, at times, like when you are in the shoes of the man about to be shot or where you’re the soldier crawling around a wasteland on his last dying breath, are too real. That is realistic to the extreme. Why would anybody want to feel what it’s like in a situation like that?
In the end, this is my opinion, nothing more, nothing less and I am open for all constructive comments, as always.

I also want to say thanks to Eoco, over at OpinionDebug, who wrote the great story on videogames getting boring, for giving me a little inspiration to write about this.