Survival in numbers

I just started falling back into S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat. This past year has been a wonderful kicker of amazing open world gaming for me. I finished last year with Clear Sky (the prequel of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series), played through half of Hitman: Blood Money, moved into Far Cry 2 via recommendation of the Idle Thumbs podcast, and most recently laughed myself sore with my friends in Dead Rising 2 co-op.

I find games like these are rare. They’re free-form, unforgiving in a sense, and do very little in explaining how to tackle a particular situation. More importantly, they have a sense of discovery that requires an open mind to progress through the game at the cost of a high barrier of entry. I think it comes from requiring a quick mastery of fundamental mechanics while expecting the player to understand a level of the depth presented to them through the game’s mechanics by leaving him/her to their own imagination to approach a given scenario. A person who has never played game before is very unlikely to achieve all of the above, especially when focus testing reveals someone can screw up driving a tank out of a garage when all it required was hitting the accelerator. With games getting more expensive, companies can’t rely on just the hardcore. They need to reach out past us “old timers” and cater to the new comers are what’s going to make a game profitable.

That said, these games I mentioned were not cash cows. The majority of them have a cult following at best. On a level it makes sense, because all of them are flawed in a major way, but offer experiences that a gamer like me, someone that has played a thousand-plus games over the course of twenty years, could consider new and exciting. That feeling is my drug and I am in constant withdrawal. When playing mainstream titles these days, I feel like a literary scholar cursing over the success of the Twilight series. I share less and less excitement for upcoming titles, because everything is starting to feel the same. I foresee this No Country For Old Gamers plot living itself out because I’m going to become obsolete to developers, and with good reason because my “kind” make up such a small number of the market share.

It’s reassuring, I guess, to know I’m not alone in this thought. A college professor by the name of Michael Abbott, wrote a wonderful article about his student’s experiences when they were assigned to play Ultima IV. (http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2010/09/unplayable.html) I’ve never played it myself (new to PC gaming since 2008), but I know it’s heralded as one of the greatest games ever made because of the ground it broke by providing the player with an extreme depth of choice you have in each action. His class had to play the game over the course of a few days, using provided PDFs and game manuals as source materials. Abbott found the majority of his students deemed the game unplayable. Their reason: it did not teach them how to play. They had ignored the reading material, and relied on the game to log all the information given to them. One student assumed the manuals as, “... stuff [the developers] put in the box” said, “I’d say for gamers of our generation, an RPG like Ultima IV is boring and pretty much unplayable.” Abbott concluded that his students didn’t want a game that felt like work.

In the right environment, that “work” often underlines my love for a game. The idea of entering a world that doesn’t ham fist a direction, a specific way to play the game, or reveal it’s main storyline is not obvious from the start is exciting to me. That level of complexity applied well-thought mechanics allows me to create personal adventures within the world I invest my time with. In an industry focused on making the experience of a game equally exciting for everyone, something important to gaming is lost. To draw a comparison, games today feel like an overproduced album versus the energetic, raw, or inventive indie music I seek.

This quest of mine has been best served by the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. Its setting, “The Zone” is a mysterious dystopia filled with paranormal activity, mutated animals, and mercenaries that are one bullet away from becoming hostile. My first experience in Shadow of Chernobyl, the flagship title of the series, thrust me into this world with little to no knowledge of the dangers that awaited. The uncertainty, unease, safety, and achievement I experienced allowed me to attach emotions to my avatar to the point where I’m looking out for his well being past the disappointment of having to reload a previous save. It was as if I were playing a survival simulator for an alternate reality. I was hooked.

The concept of being weak doesn’t make its way into a lot of first person shooters. Typically, I am a one-man army blasting through hundreds, sometimes thousands of antagonists. In S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I feel like I’m barely surviving each encounter. When I kill a group of mercenaries or a rare mutant, I feel lucky. When I first started, I dreamed of exiting encounters unscathed. Instead, I found myself limping my way back to a safe area, conserving ammo, and tying to sneak past the random dangers that populated the landscape. Most of my anxienty came from my inexperience within the world. However, with enough time, I became a seasoned stalker by using my gained knowledge to traverse past anomalies mapped to memory, identify the various territories of the armed and dangerous, choose the proper travel gear for a particular excursion, and avoid danger when I could. The “learn by doing” approach allowed me to fail, and identify why I failed, which made my victories that much sweeter.

It kills me to know games like these are numbered. I expect that they are going to disappear entirely, or at the very least dwindle to an audience that can only support a few releases per year. It’s a painful truth to not be the majority and thus, I expect to be neglected as time goes on. The idea of a triple-a game that requires players to go through the rigmarole of failure is stupid, because it’s unapproachable and unprofitable. At least in the US.

I should note: each title I mentioned was developed outside of the United States. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. team is out of Ukraine, IO Interactive is a Danish studio (please make another Hitman), and both Dead Rising 2 and Far Cry 2 were made by Canadian studios. There seems to be a huge Russian following behind the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. It’s my take that people look for that hardcore experience. With the amazing region support of services like Steam, I at the very least have a glimmer of hope telling me I’m not obsolete just yet. I will enjoy the hell out of it while it lasts.