Casual Gamer: The Transformation is Complete
It’s been a gradual process, slow enough that it almost flew under the radar, but I think it’s a safe call now: I am a casual gamer.
How Could This Be?
I have considered myself a hardcore gamer for most of my life. I grew up on video games and own entirely too goddamn many of them. I currently own several NESs, a Super Nintendo, a Gamecube, several Geneses (plural Genesis?) and variations thereof (including the Nomad), a Saturn, a Dreamcast, a Master System, a Sega CD, several 2600s, a NeoGeo Pocket, too many iterations of the Gameboy Advance, both versions of the DS, a Wii, an Xbox, a Playstation 2, and at one time or another have owned several original Gameboys, Gameboy Colors, Nintendo 64s, a PSOne and who knows what else. I mean, I own a Virtual Boy and five titles for it and, until it broke a couple years ago, was pretty stoked on it. I have boxes and boxes of titles, primarily Xbox and Gamecube (the two systems I played the most while I was working in networking and had nothing better to spend my money on), but am probably pushing 200 NES carts. I have an 80gb drive in my computer specifically for ROMs, which the collection outgrew — I have complete, painstakingly organized digital collections of just about every major cartridge-based system as well as the proper adapters to connect various console controllers to my PC (and my massive X-Arcade arcade stick). I had subscriptions to several gaming magazines and memberships at a couple online forums. If I wasn’t playing games, I was discussing them. My favorite hardcore gamer story took place on September 9, 1999 when the Dreamcast was released: I had broken my thumb skateboarding about a month prior, rendering my left hand — in a cast covering my thumb and wrist — completely useless. But I had been anticipating the release of the Dreamcast for SO long (I had it preordered for months) that on launch date I left school, picked up my shiny new system and promptly headed home, where I cut my cast off with a pair of tin snips so I could play Sonic Adventure. To this day, my left thumb is slightly misshapen since I didn’t let it heal properly and it sometimes still “catches,” preventing it from bending without first producing an off-putting popping noise. Some people might think this is silly but goddammit, Dreamcast was a big deal.
What Happened?
My first real clue was my inability to finish some highly anticipated, high profile titles. I couldn’t have spent more than 5 hours in Metroid Prime 3, despite my desperate desire for a solid new Wii title at the time. Hell, I didn’t even finish The Twilight Princess, though I spent a considerable amount of time on it. While this worried me a little, two other high profile titles sealed the deal. I’ll let you in on a little secret: I never collected all the stars in Mario Galaxy. Mario Galaxy was the most fun I had playing a game in years, and though my roommates seemed to be able to sit and play it for hours straight, I would grow restless after collecting a couple stars and would want to go do other things. I’ll probably eventually finish it, but it’s not very high on my list. A few short months later, I was concerned about not being able to afford Smash Bros. Brawl when it came out. I poured — literally — entire days of my life into Gamecube version of Smash Bros. I have hundreds of hours clocked on it (it keeps track of that sort of thing); I was looking forward to Brawl like nothing else. Then it happened: The game came out, my roommate picked it up, and I haven’t so much as watched them play. Frankly, I just don’t really give a fuck anymore.
What’s to Blame?
I’ve linked my departure from hardcore gaming to several things.
• Quarter-life Crisis - I don’t know if it’s nostalgia or what, but over the past several years I’ve found myself drawn back to the games of the era in which I was weaned on them; primarily 8-bit games. Despite the fact that we have every modern system available and a fucking WALL of titles for all of them, I find myself playing more Super Mario Bros speed runs or short and sweet rounds of Robotron 2084. I would much rather go down to Ground Kontrol and play a dollar’s worth of rounds of Gorf (which can be played one-handed, freeing up the other for your Pabst tallboy) than hang out at home and play the latest/greatest titles on my roommate’s Xbox 360. That’s not to say I’m elitist about it; any retro gamers that bitch and moan about modern games and the emphasis on graphics over gameplay are either delusional or just playing shitty games. There are tons of great games out. It just so happens I’m getting to the point where I want to control a clump of pixels, shoot pixels at a different-colored clump of pixels for about ten minutes, die and be done with it.
• The Wii and DS - When it first came out, the Wii was the raddest social gaming system ever. The Zelda game was a blast and had a great single player mode, but I spent probably five times as much time in Wii Sports with my friends, gamer or otherwise. Despite the general mood in Christmas of ‘06 because of my grandma’s death and subsequent family in-fighting, everybody faked getting along just long enough to get several games of Wii bowling and golf in together. My girlfriend at the time never seemed to get tired of constructing Miis on my Wii and after I picked her up a DS and several titles for Christmas, several winter days were spent doing nothing more than loafing around playing Meteos, Tetris or Zookeeper against each other. Then more than ever I was enjoying more “casual” titles over the newest and most involved single-player adventures.
• Rhythm Games - I’ve been a rhythm addict since my exposure to DDR in the early Dreamcast era. Combining my hand-eye coordination and natural sense of rhythm in the context of a video game came easy to me, and I can generally pick up a completely foreign rhythm game and get pretty good at it pretty quickly (well, except for Beatmania, which will never make any fucking sense to me). Since the advent of Guitar Hero, rhythm games have become the new casual genre du jour, probably edging out sports and puzzle games by a fair margin among people my age, regardless of gender. Now with Rock Band, the social aspect is a huge draw as well; Portland is not the only town with a “Rock Band Night,” lots of bars all over the country have picked up on its potential as an extremely entertaining, more inclusive karaoke alternative. I can play Rock Band all I want at home but really only play an hour or two a week, mostly just as “practice” for Tuesday nights downtown, not joking.
• Overexposure - Both my roommates purchase and play way more video games than I probably ever did and it’s done more to turn me off of gaming in the past six months than anything else, almost to the point of being irritated by games. Imagine having a friend that worked at the coolest theme park ever and could get you onto all the rides as often as you wanted for free. You’d be sick of it in a month, tops. Or imagine being a casual pot smoker in an apartment with two guys that do nothing but. “Hey do you guys wanna, I dunno, NOT smoke weed today? No? Huh.” You’d be looking into other ways to entertain yourself pretty quickly. There is nearly always a game being played in some capacity (handheld, console, PC) in my apartment, and I’m really just over it. I live in an amazing part of the country now and there’s just too much to do outside and with other people to feel comfortable holed up collecting stars in Mario Galaxy for too long. The fact that there are two incredible skateparks within a two-mile radius of me (and what, three times that many in the metro area, with plans for a grand total of NINETEEN over the next couple years), doesn’t help matters. In the past two weeks I’ve met more skateboarders and musicians than I did in my entire life in Wyoming and I plan to make use of these connections. When my primary skate buddy confessed he thought video games weren’t a good use of time, it didn’t phase me; I shrugged it off when four years ago I would have been deeply insulted.
What Next?
It could be a phase. There were several points in my life where it seemed skateboarding wasn’t that important to me (but now, looking back, that seems to be mostly due to girlfriends) and it comes back in waves. Right now, skating is back at the top of my list and I’m loving it; it’s possible games will do the same. Of course, just like skateboarding during those phases, it hasn’t completely left my system. I still like to lay and log in 15 or 20 minutes on my DS before I fall asleep and I still update my MAME collection every time there are new releases and play a couple classic arcade games for a while, but the passion just isn’t there like it used to be. Maybe it’s how my body, fighting my refusal to mature in any respect over the last several years, has decided to force some semblance of adulthood on me. If this is true, then my legs and/or ankles are clearly the next to go. All I know is that, given the chance again, I definitely would not be risking the future functionality of one of my digits to play Sonic Adventure or Soul Calibur now. It’s over.
March 21st, 2008 at 11:26 pm
I don’t even know you anymore, pretty soon you’ll be calling it the pacific northwest and having polaroid art shows in coffee houses
March 21st, 2008 at 11:32 pm
I just said I’m not playing video games as much. I still don’t own a scarf. Or an umbrella. Things are going to be just fine.
Oh, and I still want Resident Evil 5.
March 22nd, 2008 at 12:07 am
Don’t bother, it doesn’t want you if you won’t finish it!!
March 22nd, 2008 at 12:39 am
Hey, I BEAT Mario Galaxy. I just didn’t get all the stars.
March 22nd, 2008 at 1:26 am
I don’t even know you any more.
March 22nd, 2008 at 2:32 am
Hahaha
March 22nd, 2008 at 10:23 am
he’s that guy
March 22nd, 2008 at 8:19 pm
hahahahahahahhahahaha. polaroid art shows. hahahahaha
March 28th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
Wow, video games to skateboarding… yeah you’re definitely diving into that adulthood thing hard. Now that you’re an adult maybe you should start collecting comic books or open a lemonade stand.You could call it “Adult lemonade.”
March 28th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
That was kinda the point, Captain Comprehension.
March 30th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
No bill, you’re the point.