The Iron Dagger

You feel driven to complete the level, get the achievement, do the thing. You do not actually like the game (anymore?), but it appeals to your brain chemistry in a way that keeps you going, keeps you coming back.

– Zubon, Compelling But Not Entertaining (Kill Ten Rats)

In under 300 words, Kill Ten Rats’s Zubon gave life (beautifully, as usual) to some of my own thoughts on the state of today’s gamers. While he talked about games in the social media sphere, I can relate to his words in others – especially in a ‘snack culture’ where bite-sized content has transcended ‘time-pressed alternative’ to become ‘always-preferred choice’.

It’s a variation of the tired old Pavlovian argument, and it’s bothered me for a long time. I’ve heard the counter-arguments. But attention span, everybody’s favorite scapegoat (“Millennials suck!” and all that), does not seem to add up. When sprawling content-fests like Dragon Age: Inquisition and the Witcher games turn up, people do play them, and milk the daylights out of them.

Addiction to winning? Nope. I’ve known bottom feeders in Dota 2 to log night after night, not for friends, or to up their ante, but just to get their posteriors walloped. Masochism then?

I have no answer (yet). Not even a theory. Just a thought – what is ‘entertaining’, anyway, but a subjective? When I was cooking up my custom Ranger squad in Wasteland 2, I got kicks out of filling in little biographies for each member, following the style of the default Rangers’ ones. Nobody but me would ever see them. But writing them, the process of it, that was entertaining. How many others would call it a waste of time and a dork move?

Similarly, many gamers these days don’t split hairs. Perhaps, to many of them, ‘compelling’ is fun. Perhaps, they don’t need to care about the hill to fight to its top – the fighting is everything.

And more’s the pity, because the day that becomes the norm may be a dark one for games as art!

Someday, I want to see a poll of the world’s comic book gamers, with just two options: ‘I like playing as Batman’ and ‘I like playing an original, badass ally of the Bat’.

But nobody’s done that, and settling the vote by existing titles’ popularity is flawed – pitting option 1’s 800-pound Arkham gorilla against option 2’s washed-out hunter, DC Universe Online, is a joke.

Yet I passed on games like X-Men Legends and Marvel Heroes. Because those only let you step into existing heroes’ spandex, not design your own (hero, not spandex). Just as I passed on any Lord of the Rings title where you only control canon characters (didn’t hurt that most of them sucked).

I’m a card-carrying voter for option 2, because wearing the skin of a familiar figure just makes me feel strange.

Take Batman: the living, breathing standard of unattainable badassery to all wannabe DC vigilantes. Which angle has the richer potential for a game plot – living the Batman Always Wins meme, or being one of the aforementioned wannabes, rising from alley-rolling amateur to stand with the Bat Family?

Give players ownership of their avatars, in a setting that makes full use of this personalization, and you get a closer approximation of ‘roleplaying’. Not merely ‘playing a role’, which is what you’re doing in the Arkham games.

That being said, honorable mentions must go to rare titles that make you ‘play roles’, yet leave sufficient wiggle room that you still feel the ownership. Like Deus Ex, and the Mass Effect trilogy. I’m sure a lot of folks got pretty attached to their JCs and Shepards, and so did I – even though they’re essentially those games’ Batmen.

So no, I’m not wailing on games where you don’t get to cook up your own avatar. I’m not saying that’s what makes a game great – look at any Elder Scrolls entry, and then any B-grade RPG with a 1-hour chargen sequence, and tell me if there’s any sport in comparing the two.

All I’m saying is, it’d be nice to have a game experience where you decide the protagonist, canon figures take center stage, and player-centric content (like origin stories) is procedurally generated a la Shadow of Mordor’s Nemesis or Skyrim’s Radiant systems. And make this single-player. Because online worlds are like bananas in the refrigerator – sooner or later, something makes them go bad.

I keep seeing the word hardcore thrown around.

Not the Diablo character mode. And not what Infinity Ward’s Mark Rubin called it.

Hardcore as in, diehard loyal. To a media franchise – games, comics, movies.

There’s usually disapproval, or pride, behind it. Like elitist or old guard. Like an attitude that’s, intrinsically, more negative than positive.

But what exactly is it?

As in “this entry in the series is so bad, only hardcore fans would appreciate it”.

I call that loyalty. A willingness to overlook even glaring flaws because the sum means much more than the parts.

And “these fans are so hardcore, they refuse to accept what this entry did to their beloved series”?

That’s perfectionism. An unwillingness to overlook even small flaws because the parts, after all, are the sum.

Speaking of Diablo, many gamers will remember Diablo III’s launch. The WWII to the Diablo fanbase’s Korea. The polarising into South and North camps of ‘still good’ and ‘epic fail’.

Loyalty? Or perfectionism? Does it matter?

I’m a paying subscriber to a media franchise. I don’t just want a good game. I want a worthy successor. That I care enough to be hardcore is not nitpicking – it’s concern.

Besides, perfectionism is a kind of loyalty too – loyalty to standards. Which is becoming more important these days, with mass commercial appeal being the watchword, and growing dissonance between the standards we set for the games we buy and the standards the people behind those games set for themselves. (BioWare proved that, quite adequately, with Dragon Age 2.)

Do you care enough about a series to support a new entry that carries on its lineage within reason?

Or do you care enough about the series’ standards to denounce that entry’s failings?

Either way, you care about something. Does that make you hardcore?