I’ve found myself in a weird place with games lately. Although I still enjoy playing them, I'm becoming increasingly jaded with both games and, more to the point, the culture surrounding them. For example, I can’t count the number of times I’ve questioned whether or not my XBOX Live subscription is worth the roughly $15 bucks I pay for it, since I play online for the social aspect of it, as opposed to simply wanting to play against non-AI opponents. I question whether or not it’s worth it because there seems to be a moratorium on headset chatter over XBOX Live, with those rare folks who do have a headset plugged in either existing as slur-spewing vomit sacks (which conjures the image of a Boomer wearing a microphone) or silent, lonely hisses and background noise (dishes clanging, players readjusting in their seats).
It may be just me, but I remember XBOX Live’s earlier years as being different. I fondly remember playing endless hours of Gears of War, knowing that each match would be a unique challenge, full of different characters (if not all of them amenable). I made a lot of friends over the service during those days, but now the few that I add during a session almost never stay on my friends list for more than a week. I guess the simplest explanation is that all of the rational human beings have retreated to their impregnable “friends-list-only” fortresses, abandoning the wilderness that is XBOX Live to the slobbering 12-year-old pseudo-gangster racial-slur-hurling mutants. So I often find myself asking the question: is it all worth it in the end, or should I just abandon this apparent wasteland to its own devices? As a certain video game show host has said, it seems that this kind of behavior has become expected of XBOX Live-goers, so that anyone behaving as they would in the real world is considered to be any one of the many homophobic insults thrown at them by those that “get” XBOX Live. Maybe that’s it; maybe I just don’t “get” XBOX Live. Maybe there’s some underlying joke that justifies all of the nastiness that goes on that I just haven’t picked up on. Either way, I’m left wondering whether or not I’d be better off unplugging the Ethernet cable from my XBOX.
Still, for all their faults, the online community is not entirely to blame for my current dissatisfaction with gaming. It seems that game companies are playing increasingly fast and loose with the established norms of game development and releasing just about anything that passes for a video game, regardless of the fact that it’s really just an old No Doubt CD with a space marine slapped onto it. I also can’t help but think that all of those beleaguered people ranting and raving about patches when they first entered the console gaming scene a few years ago must be feeling awfully vindicated today, what with the myriad of games still being patched months after release, not with new content, but with miniscule fixes attempting to mask what is, for all intents and purposes, an unfinished game. The result is infuriatingly macabre and completely impossible to swallow, like a drunken surgeon putting a band-aid over the shotgun wound of a patient who originally came in with a case of the sniffles.
Anyway, my attention-span-to-word-count ratio says that I ought to wrap things up soon, so I guess I’ll finish with a question: is the gaming industry beginning to treat us like the slack-jawed nimrods on XBOX Live, and if those Neanderthals truly are representative of our subculture as a whole, do we deserve it?
Edited 4 months, 1 week ago
