5 Reasons I Haven't Bought a Video Game in Years

   So, I'm pretty sure its been awhile since I've purchased a video game. And I can't count things like last Christmas where my wife got me a bunch of discount games or the year before she got me a couple of games for the PS3 she got me. That was pretty outstanding. But seriously, its been maybe 3-5 years since I've actually seen a game I was interested in, gone out and purchased it. Perhaps the last one was Baten Kaitos, not the Origins game but first one with the horrible voice acting that sounded like everyone was talking into one of those super old mics you hooked up to your PC and recorded on Sound Recorder. Don't get me wrong, it was still an awesome game, mainly for story and gameplay. Of course the game was made in the first half of the last decade, not that last. So I'm not sure what to say about my last game purchase being a retro game. Regardless, I digress.

   In the last few years I've simply felt distance and disenfranchised by the games that are coming out. They don't appeal to me and aside from the classic excuse that I'm getting older and finally growing up, I should retort that I went through that twice already and picked games back up for their a)social benifit, and b) entertaining medium for literature. Seriously, its like reading a book only fun and requires less brainpower. I like slowly killing my intellect with the best of them thank you. So what is it about video games now that is missing me? For starters their all lacking both of those things I mentioned before in some form or another. I shall explain.

1. World Exploration

   So ever since the success of WOW (That's World of Warcraft for all of you non-gamers), it seems that every single game maker on the planet has suddenly had to create vast explorable worlds with billions of boring side quests and objectives that involved running through scenery for hours before you can do anything. Seriously, how can you people stand this! It's insane! I used to be able to sit down and finish an entire adventure in an afternoon, now I have to log hundreds of hours just to get to the level necessary to start doing cool stuff, and then all the cool stuff involves meaningless expanses of worlds with nothing to do but wander.

There's something out here to do, I just know it!

   There's a reason why vast explorable worlds are entertaining in real life. It's because it's real life and you never know what is going to happen. Every new town or city or nation is different and in one you could be solicited for a casual hook up for the way you look while in the other you can be casually approached with a machete with your name on it, also for the way you look. There's a different language, different culture, and different history or legacy behind every place and new person you meet. But NOT in video games. Every person in every town looks the same, every building set is the same, every quest similar, every road just as long and every person understandable and equally boring, non-interactive, or forgettable. Do this quest, get gold, buy an upgrade, do this quest, maybe increase a level. Talk to this guy who says go back to this guy who says get this thing, only to find out that in order to get it you have to go back to the first guy...and every objective is three or five worlds apart...For the love of humanity stop rewarding this horrendous behavior!

2. It's all about Money, Money, Money and getting you hooked like gambling

   So World exploration is like a popular idea that takes over the market and forces us to lose all the great alternatives. It's like in the smartphone world where every single marketing team working for every single manufacturer said, "it looks like a majority of people prefer touchscreen phones with large displays. Let's make nothing but touchscreen phones because that's what will sell!" And for a year and a half no one made a keyboard smartphone, horizontal, vertical, or even whimsical. Everybody would constantly go to their carrier's store and say they had to have a keyboard for their phone. But unless they wanted a messaging phone they were going to get a candy bar 4G phone with a big display.

That's world exploration games. But theirs another trend hitting the game market even more insidious and destructive to gaming than the reign of marketers. Game companies have market researchers too and they  are taking notes from casinos and following a carefully laid out system of reward and time investment dynamics have begun to create games where you get hooked and then get suckered into buying upgrades with REAL MONEY. That's right. It's not good enough anymore to put 500 man-hours into a game (seriously that's around $3500 working at McDonalds after taxes you're giving up), only to be asked to spend more money in order to "enjoy" the game further.

Well, I suppose people spend tons of money on wedding dresses

and they only wear them once. Why not just buy something you'll

never actually wear at all?

 Even then all you're getting is some new upgrade or feature that barely changes the game at all. I'm sorry but if I want to mindlessly blow my time and money on a frivilous activity I'll just stay at the casino.

3. Sex Appeal/Violence

   It's been said before but sex sells. And unfortunately, this is another one of those areas where consumers continue to half-mindedly gravitate to sex and thus reward its inclusion to greater and greater extents. It's like how Christmas stuff and Black Friday deals keep creeping forward every year. It used to be you would only see Christmas stuff in stores the week before Christmas Day, then it slowly began creeping up until this year when I saw Christmas stuff up the week before Holloween! No joke, the second to last week of October. That's just senseless. But people respond by going, "ooh, Christmas stuff, guess I'll buy it." And because its easier to just buy than to voice concern or boycott a favorite place to shop, the buy crowd always wins and thus pushes Christmas up every year. Same with Black Friday, it seems every one of us got in a huff over Wal-Mart opening their Black "Thursday" Deals at 8pm on Thanksgiving Day. But sure enough people lined up in a mob to get in on it. In doing so they reward bad behavior.

"We're really mad at you, and we'll let you

know just how much as soon as we get done shopping!"

   In the same way video game makers continue to push the boundaries of including sex and sexual imagery in games. We can all say, "that's a little too far," when we see someone half naked get raped or seduced graphically, but people end up buying the game and its next production anyways. It's easier to let it go and to buy it, saying we'll ignore that part. But we can't because the game throws it right in your face. We feel too lazy and comfortable to fight it. Not to mention maybe a little indulgent. Soon enough what used to be horrendous is now perfectly acceptable. Its not uncommon to see scantily clad women or men, fully sexualized, be put in fully compromising situations or be brutalized in horrific ways in the newest games. How on earth did we ever think it was a good idea to give that a pass? Heck, I still remember a time when it was a terrible thought to publicly speak of physically harming a girl. Now look where we've come.

This screenshot would have been illegal 20 years ago. 

(And by the way its the mildest I could find.)

   I am not one to overreact. I don't like blaming everything on media and entertainment. I will qualify my argument with the sub-argument that games and images don't create motive or the emptiness that gives rise to violence or sexual promiscuity, or abuse.In the end, they are forms of entertainment, not crisis invoking life events. But it sure as hell normalizes it, and when the situation comes where the motive is ripe and impressionable people are faced with how to respond to misfortune in their real life, those acts and those concepts are suddenly perfectly normal and tolerable. So no, playing GTA won't make you wan't to go out and kill a hooker, but it will slowly normalize sexual and senseless violence to the point where the mind digresses into apathy towards it and eventually openness to accepting enjoyment from it. And keep in mind it wouldn't be a feature in the game unless people subconsciously or without saying were enjoying emulating the things done in the game. This is basic human psychology here.

   That being said, no, I don't care for your over-sexualization. I have intentionally refused to buy games for years based solely on the level of sexual suggestion or imagery and I will continue to do so. And lo and behold, it just happens that more and more games forfeit their ability to market to me every year.

4. The Marginalization or Demonization of Americans

   I can say there was a time when video games were marketing to Americans by making them the heroes, the good guys, and the cool looking guys. In some instances being downright over the top in marketing to the American demographic. They knew we wouldn't buy a game that insulted us or made us feel like crap. So they made the game to make us feel good about our American identity. But slowly, as the self esteem and respect earned and demanded by American's has dwindled, that's begun to change. It's gotten so bad that its almost a cardinal rule that every new game with an international cast has to have at least one or more Americans who is either a) a laughable joke, b) a villain, or c) ignorent or stupid.

    A perfect example of this is the transformation of one of my favorite video game characters of all time. From the Tekken series, Paul Phoenix.

Paul Phoenix

   Paul started as a street tough biker with attitude. Extremely powerful and enormously self-reliant, driven, and independent, he was a charicature of what American boys thought was cool at the time. In Tekken 1 and 2 Paul nearly defeated the game's chief boss. By Tekken 3, Paul had successfully defeated the game's boss and been the unofficial champion of the tournament, besting Ogre, the newly arisen god of fight. But Ogre transforms and the Mishima Zaibatsu continues on with the tournament as though nothing had happened, leaving Paul without his due winnings and respect. Jin, the series' poster boy, will spend the rest of the series being set up on such a pedastool of coolness and awesome he might as well be a Japanese Edward from twilight. Just as laughably overdone with a ready-remove shirt to boot. Paul, not believed by any one is bitter.

   In Tekken 4 he comes back to prove he's the best fighter in the galaxy, and in his cutscene for winning the tournament realizes the folly of the fame and fortune he missed out on the first time around anyway. In one of the most awesome fighting game moments he leaves it all behind to live a life for something less material, something that fulfills his heart. It's freaking awesome.

And If I sound like a teenager, that's the 

part of me that remembers this so deal with it!

   But in Tekken 5 the guys at Namco decided having a cool American was crowding Jin's shirtless time in front of the camera and stealing his thunder. So they made him a joke. Verifiably insane after the 5th, seen taunting aliens to come and fight him for mars or something, you learn in the story that he actually lost to the stupid bear in the 4th tournament. It gets worse from there, by the 6th he's merely a comic relief. They even lower his eyebrows, give him wrinkles, hunch his back a little, and broaden his jowls to make him look like some neanderthal hybrid. It's a laughable plot line for such an awesome character.
   Other American characters went through this too. Brian Fury went from unbeatable cyborg to very beatable single-minded killing machine that is evil incarnate. Now you have Bob, an overweight buffoon as the newest American, as if we don't have enough people making fun of those who are overweight, and even the Chinese American, Law, who was based off Bruce Lee, also being a comic relief with no real role in the story.
   Tekken isn't the only one, Street Fighter, numerous action shooters like GTA, and countless RPGs all feel the need to have some kind of ignorent, arrogent, or evil simpleton from America. Every other culture is represented without such insult.

   Now, as an American I can't expect a game making fun of other cultures, and I don't. I hate that too. But how do you expect me to buy a game where you make someone like me the joke and someone else superior in every way? Do you really think I'm going to buy your stupid game?
The very last Tekken game I bought with my own money was Tekken 5. Enough said.

5. The Social Aspect is Removed

   Marketing studies show that producing a game groups can play is a lot of fun and actually improves social interactions and social skills among people. It also has a hand in redeveloping community and group friendships among mainly young men, something lost during the rise of television. It also creates better atmosphere and forges valuable lessons in relationships and friendships. It also makes less money because 2-4 people can play off the same game or console. So...yeah...the gaming world said goodbye to multiplayer games.
   Now you can still play multiplayer, but more and more only online. Because heaven forbid everyone play on the same game. That's less money. 4 guys playing online in 4 different locations with 4 different versions of the game on 4 different consoles are spending more and that's all there is to it. And because market research drives everything now, that means every stupid game is the same, and turning everyone into little hermits. Thank God for Nintendo keeping alive the idea of group gaming, but as for the rest of them, its so dead it's never coming back.
   I don't own a Wii, and that hurts me here because they don't deserve the same criticism, but for PCs, the XBOX 360 and the PS3 it seems that every single new game is exactly the same and none of them are mulitplayer on the same console.

This screenshot can double for more than two dozen games.

    I remember opening Unreal Tournament for PS3 way back and being so happy because I remembered all the fun times in college playing that game with other guys. Then I was furious to learn there was no multiplayer except online. What's the point of having a game if you can't play it with someone else? Yes, I like my social interactions, I'm not a complete matrix plug up yet. So as long as every new game is the same stupid thing, I'm not buying any games. And it's all well and good since my down time is honestly better spent doing just about anything other than turning into a vegetable in front of a light box for several hours of my life.