I’m not even talking about that one muscle in my lower back that pops on a semi-regular basis (I swear I’ll start stretching real soon now). And it’s not that I don’t follow pop music that closely anymore and don’t even recognize a lot of contemporary artists.
I mean, the music thing is somewhat related to getting older, as music trends shift from generation to generation. My musical tastes were locked in before rap or hip hop hit the mainstream, for example, so I never really adopted either, though I enjoy certain some of it, the same way I can enjoy some country music before running screaming from the room.
No, this is about something I grew up with, still enjoy, but has changed dramatically in ways that I am ever-increasingly out of touch with.
Video games.
Although technically not the first video game, Pong was the first mainstream game, one that the public could actually play. It came out in 1972, when I was 8 years old. By the time I had an Atari 2600 in 1980, I was the ripe old age of 16. This is to point out that while my earliest experience with video games was when they were in their infancy, I still pretty much grew up with them. I had most of the home consoles and would spend hours at the arcades in Duncan and Victoria. My first full-time job was at an arcade.
Through the 1980s I endured the video game crash, then moved to computer games over home consoles. My Commodore 64, purchased in 1984, was mostly a gaming machine (I did use it to write, too–the word processor I had could create documents up to about four pages long, which taught me brevity, if nothing else). The C64 gave way to more advanced computers like the Atari 520ST and Amiga 500 before I finally went PC in 1994.
I came back to home consoles with the original Xbox in 2002 and have had an Xbox model ever since (admittedly, the Xbox One serves more as a media center for me than as a video game unit), but continued to play computer games, going online in a big way in 1998 when I got my first broadband connection.
I cut my multiplayer teeth on games like Quake, Unreal Tournament and Tribes. I explored mods, joined a gaming group (clan/tribe) and experienced the joy of piling onto a sever with friends and blasting away for bragging rights on the scoreboard at the end of a match. We eventually ran weekly competitions on our own servers. It was fun and it went on for multiple years before marriage, kids and life in general cut into our gaming time.
So that’s part of it–the group I gamed with scattered and there was no natural replacement. Although I had a persistent connection, my online gaming was mostly coop with a friend or two in games like Diablo II or a coop shooter. I went small.
I went big again, in a manner of speaking, in the middle of the first decade of the 20th century, playing MMOs like Everquest 2, City of Heroes and, of course, World of Warcraft. The clan was back and for a time we all played together again before inevitably drifting apart. But the gaming experience was still pretty free-form. We’d log in and do some quests, or if we had a big enough group, a dungeon. We’d get our loot, be happy (for a moment) and log off.
Today some of these MMOs still exist, but I am not playing them. The games I grew up with are mostly gone, though some, like Quake, still weirdly exist in some form. But when you look at games today, there are things I see that were never part of the games of yore I played:
- The season pass. We used to get free expansion packs from companies like Epic, or sometimes a paid expansion pack. A game might see one or two and they’d be released a year or more after the game. Now we have season passes, which are basically paid content dribbled out over a specified period of time and is often ready at game launch–meaning the content has been built alongside the game specifically to be a paid extra.
- The general concept of seasons. Diablo 3 has seasons. A season has specific rewards and runs for a limited time. Almost every online shooter now offers seasons of varying lengths, enticing players to keep logging in to keep getting newer, shinier rewards. It’s GAAS–Gaming As A Service. And it kind of gives me gas.
- Unlockables. There was a little of this back in the olden days, but in a game like Quake, the best players ruled, not just due to superhuman eye-hand coordination, but because they learned the maps, particularly with regard to the placement of weapons and power-ups. Everything was there for the taking, nothing prevented N00bGam3r from getting the rocket launcher, except for L33tBro knowing the fastest route to it and grabbing it first. Today, many games will give players a few basic weapons and require them to hit certain achievements to unlock others. The achievements can be anything–time played, kills, and so on. If you start playing a game well after launch, you will be playing on servers filled with players who have unlocked nearly everything, while you have to rely on your meager skill to survive long enough to get something better. But then there’s always…
- Pay to Win (PTW). Want a snazzy, powerful weapon? Is it worth $5 in real money to you? Maybe more? Buy it and boom, instant power! Fortunately, most games aren’t doing this much now, but it was definitely a thing for awhile. Games like Fortnite (you may have heard of it) now give away the game and generate revenue through cosmetics–charging the player to add new costume bits and skins. And it works! It’s hard to get upset about, because if you don’t care about the frippery, you can play the game for free.
- Streaming. A lot of people don’t even play games anymore–they watch other people play, with “witty” commentary. On the one hand, I kind of get this–it’s like TV, but somewhat less passive–but on the other, watching someone else play a game is just weird. At least it saves on developing carpal tunnel.
All of these things add up to an online gaming experience that feels very different than what I was used to ten or–gah–even 20 years ago. I’m not sure I would ever be comfortable jumping into a multiplayer game today, unless it was built around coop. It feels like the gaming scene has changed, but I haven’t, and I want to go back to playing weird UT levels, but UT is pretty much dead.
I am old.