The Invisible Goal: My wife was once majorly into CityVille. This Facebook browser-based Sim-City game focused primarily on energy and supplies that were procured one of three ways: waiting for real time to progress, using actual real-world money to purchase energy and supplies, or having friends who play the game regularly trade with you. After polling the internet during the making of this article, I feel there has been an epidemic of spouses forced into this game and games like it, wherein we were that extra player to trade just that many more items with. For CityVille, I found a mobile site that allowed you to do the basics of planting your crops, such as candy canes, to harvest them to supply your electronics stores. It was easy to go in about twice a day and farm my supplies to keep the city going. Since I got the mobile version, I've gone up about fifteen levels and accumulated a good $3.2 million bankroll. About a week ago, though, I realized I haven't seen my wife touch her Facebook on the PC (and therefore hasn't played CityVille) in a good eight months. Yet a couple days ago, I found myself popping open my iPhone browser to plow away. I literally have NO REASON to do this again. The gamer in me is striving for completion, even though the social aspect is gone, and I've often hated games such as this because there literally is no further point to reach. All I can do is expand and grow faster, and there is no reason to anymore. I'm really hoping writing this article gets it out of me!
Everyone Else is Doing It: Let's say you're a huge Halo fan. No matter what, the sci-fi world just draws you in. You love the pacing, the guns are balanced, you have the maps memorized. Yet all of your regular Live gaming friends you love to play with are hooked on Call of Duty. Even though there's plenty of other people playing online, you really want to play with your friends. So, you choke it up and plug CoD back in. It's like going to the arcade with your friends, who all scream to play Ninja Turtles, when you're sick and tired of it and nobody's on Sunset Riders at the moment. Who cares who the world feels is a superior game? You know what you want to play, but the peer pressure is there, so you grumble and slide your quarter in the slot anyways.
Everyone Else Says You Should: This is similar to the last, but far worse. More centered around the single-player epic, games that have raised the benchmark of quality in the eyes of the world. Not just your friends, but just about everyone has heard of it, and in circles you find you're that one person who hasn't played it, causing most everyone to drop the topic in case you didn't already know Aeris dies (sorry, spoilers). Sure, the story's there, but the gameplay is repetitive, you have to collect 5,000 thingamabobs to get the ultimate item that allows you to get the bonus content that's really the second half of the game, whatever it is. Even if the rest of the world loves it, you can't stand it, and it feels like a chore when you get game time and you realize you ought to put some time in. It's that prequel to the other game that your elitist friend says has to be played in order to enjoy the story, even though the game engine completely changed. It may even be the best game you've ever played, but the chore of keeping up with certain aspects (as a Goozex member stated, "capping off" the collecting of magic spells in Final Fantasy 8 to keep your stats up in the junction system) feels like a laborious chore. This also relates to the classics: A Goozex member brought up Ghosts and Goblins: back in the day, a classic game would be rage-quit, and the desire to succeed would draw us back in, even though we're ready to rip the controller in half. Nowadays we are so spoiled with insta-save points and the like that any game that is truly hard to that level may just put a sour taste in our mouths.
It's DLC! I Gotta Play It!: One fellow Goozex member brought up Madd Moxxi's Underdome Riot, DLC for the original Borderlands. Quoting him: "There's basically nobody playing the first game anymore, and I really hated the fact that it's pretty much 100 waves of mostly similar enemies. I played through that thing by myself, cursing practically every second of it. It took me about 12 hours to finish all of it." Maybe you loved the game itself, but the DLC changes the entire flavor of the game, yet you're a completionist. Perhaps you never got around to it, but things have improved so much in sequels, or nobody's on the servers to make it fun anymore. I played through Arkham Asylum on Xbox, and have since bought a PS3. I find myself really tempted to go rebuy the game to play as the Joker on PS3, but I resist. It's merely challenge rooms, and the mechanics of Arkham City evolved so much I'm sure I'd be blowing $20 just to get a copy of a game I've already played that would make me mad. Another friend mastered Arkham City then went back to finish the Riddler Trophies in Asylum, only to rage quit a couple days later due to Batman's lack of moves.
Get Me Out of the Sandbox: Sandbox games, for all their amazement, do have their flaws. Either 3/4 of the game is an optional side quest, or the main story requires so many run arounds and fetch quests that you just don't want to do it anymore. I remember wanting to continue the story in Red Dead Redemption only to find it's 7:02 PM and I was supposed to show up between noon and 7, but I had to ride my horse halfway across the country to get there. So now, it's stand around and wait. Go somewhere, and you risk missing the window. Leave the controller, and wild wolves eat you while you're making a sandwich. Since when was gameplay sit-and-wait?
So why do we do this? Are we addicted? I think it harkens back to the olden days. By and large, games were good. I may have some rose-colored glasses on here, yes, but the simplicity of older generations honestly allowed less room for suckage. A platformer was a platformer, and if it was bad enough, you could tell two minutes in. There was less arguing, because if a game's mechanics were off, you and all your friends pretty much didn't like it. Now that games are more technical, more art, everyone has their own opinion, and nobody is wrong. It's like a Van Gogh fan versus a Picasso fan. Both have a right to enjoy their favorite artist, but don't have the right to shove the other's works down the opposition's throat. Games, by definition, are SUPPOSED to be FUN. So we plunk down the change for our entertainment, and end up with the occasional game we play that our body is trying to force our mind to say this is so fun when our heart says I bought a $60 coaster. Not everything is fun, and it's your right to pick and choose what you want. It's even worse that we feel we can pop in and out of games like the old days, just bouncing from world to world like we swap a Nintendo cartridge. Games require time and investment now, but we may purchase two or three games we want to get through and get lost in one's world, slowly building our Stack of Shame higher and higher, in that worst game of all: spending our real world money to collect discs of plastic we may never have the time to get through.
So, with this article under my belt, I feel my therapy is done. I'm off to tell my wife I'm deleting my CityVille account, and reclaiming my game time to play what I want to play! I wonder if she'll even care...