Monday, May 24, 2010

Is Video Gaming on a Downhill in My Life?

I enjoy gaming. No, I used to enjoy gaming.

If you know me, this is not a small matter--I spend 90% of my free time away from work playing and exploring various video games. Even at work, I spend my down time reading up on video game news, blogs, and such. You can pretty much say that I use 90% of my time awake in something related to video games. I used to be so happy to hold a controller in my hand and divulge in the action filled virtual space and act as a hero or a soldier.

However, starting some time ago, I noticed I'm enjoying video games less and less with each title I complete. Each new game I put into the game console, I enjoy less than the previous game. This phenomenon started with Modern Warfare. You can think of it as a peak of my gaming experience; it's been downhill ever since.

Below is a sample of triple-A titles I've played after Modern Warfare:

  • Dragon Age: Origins: vast, hardly interesting--feels like an exact copy of the Lord of the Ring--lore to explore, with hard-to-immerse presentation, and greatly time-consuming
  • Modern Warfare 2: great action with fantastic presentation and immersion, that ends up as a trashy Hollywood action film, and thus, a great disappointment
  • Mass Effect 2: fun action, great presentation (minus actors), with a really terrible story (and wasn't the story the focal point of this game?)
  • Grand Theft Auto IV: very enjoyable scenes (so far) that are interrupted with game parts that's not that enjoyable and breaks immersion
  • Fable 2: are you joking?

You see, for a topic worthy of a seperate post, I'm looking for some valuable and relevant experience out of video games that I can learn from to become a better human being. But all those games above? Hardly.

Is it that I am "growing out" of games? Or is game as a medium not capable of delivering what I'm looking for--meaningful and relevant experience? Whatever the reason, I feel as if I'm maturing faster than game industry, which, in my mind, is going a totally wrong direction of trying to mimic other and inappropriate medium.

Let's see what the industry has for me in the upcoming E3.

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