Hey Dan

Puritan Work-Ethic, How I Loathe Thee

Finally, someone other them me thinks unlocking levels or options sucks! I am a video game recreational user, not a junky. Although, I think my wife would witness for prosecution on that charge. I play a handful of hours in a week and can not compete with players who spend literally 4-12 hours a day playing. The truth is I don’t want to. What I want is to play the game I bought.

Modern game theory draws players in by giving them incentives to keep playing. The incentive started out with new stuff to fight or new tracks to race on. That got expensive fast. Creating content is expensive, I get that. Creating a dozen tracks to race on without making all of them look the same is hard. When Icewind Dale the sequel to Bolders Gate came out, I went through the whole game in one sitting. Granted it was a 19 hour sitting, but hey. I never had to go though the same area twice. Yes, the game seemed short.

Story is also a key element of game theory. Icewind Dale and Bolders Gate both had storylines that I enjoyed and followed. The same was true of the Diablo, Star Craft and Age of Kings series. Not all storylines are interesting or that easy to fallow. Castle Wofenstine is a great example. I played the demo; you remember the one with the multi-player beach assault with flam-throwers, sniper rifles, grenades and machine guns! OMG what a fun game. When the game came out I bought it right away. What I found was long walk with a pistol searching for bad guys that seemed to know where I was. I might have enjoyed the story, had I seen any of it.

The elements of incentive and story have gotten way out of hand. I own a PS2. It is unlikely that I will upgrade it to a 360 or PS3 anytime soon. The problem is not the system but the games. Today when I buy a console game what I get is one maybe two things I can do.

Take Grand Turismo, great game play if you have spent 300 hours unlocking cars, tracks and races. What if you want to pull it out of the package and race with a couple of friends? Bad idea. You get two tracks for multi-player and you can choose anyone of three colors of Toyota Camry or Honda Civic you want to race. This is Grand Turismo, the game that lets you drive an Enzo Ferrari. The greatest car ever built. By the time I unlock the cool car none of my friends (also recreational users) will want to race ageist me! Great game, never going to by version 4.

I love consol race game. The only consol race game I play any more is the Burnout series. It has the same problem as Grand Turismo with the exception of it is more fun to wreak a Toyota Camry or Honda Civic.

Game developers, please hear us. Not all the people who buy your games are 13 years old. Some of us have only a small amount of time to play before the world needs us back. Please let us have the big gun, fight the dragon and drive a super car into a gas truck at 180 miles an hour.