The gaming industry… Having been something akin to a slave to its machinations for the last 20 years I have felt like talking about it. I still fondly remember the old days of the NES era, along with the golden age of gaming, which many refer to as the SNES / Sega Genesis Era. I played my way through school, from NES to SNES to Genesis to Gameboy(color) to N64 to Gameboy(advance) to Gamecube to PS2 to Wii and finally to PC gaming. After starting college I ran out of funds to drop hundreds on short games and their respective consoles with the Xbox 360 / PS3 Era. To make do with my ‘addiction’ I switched to PC gaming and World of Warcraft to save money. Throughout college the pressure of graduation along with the relative difficulty of a Computer Science degree made spending the 6-10 hours I used to play games per day difficult, so I started cutting back. Post graduation I settled into a job and started playing a bit more, but a part of me enjoyed its new found freedom in the form of programming. It is from this perspective that I’ll talk about the past 20 years of how I killed time.

This is my opinion, but I believe there are only two types of gamers in the world. The escapists and the Dedicated. Most gamers start off as escapists and will evolve into the Dedicated if left to their own devices. Escapists tend to be people running away from various problems of their life and just want a nice relaxing activity to submerge themselves in. Escapists can also be what is referred to as casuals, people who are not invested in gaming culture but still enjoy a game every now and then to ‘cool off’. A Dedicated is someone who follows this escapist mindset to the exclusion of everything else in their lives. Dedicated tend to try and become proffessional gamers and barring that, will attempt to go down a path that brings them closer to computers (generally IT at the very least). A talented Dedicated with greatly honed reflexes can and will become a decent professional, the others will either fall out due to life circumstances unless they happen to be extremely well off. As long as a Dedicated doesn’t incur a game break event, they will pursue this dogma no matter what. Its the only thing they know and care about.

The game break event is when a Dedicated either realizes his own inferiority or finally comes to terms with the fact that living for gaming is a fundamentally empty existence. As the real world will quickly teach you, a gamer may be king in his group of friends, or local arcade, but at tournament level you have to be good. Some will bounce back from a partial game break and continue honing their skills, but most will fall from the ranks of the dedicated back into the world of escapists. Those who fall are quite at risk for suicide, especially if they do not have any other paths or goals in life. Those who get back up however, are people who are leveraging years of problem-solving experience with quick reflexes and a quickly learning mind.

Most programmers have played games and a large number of the programmers of my generation were interested in the discipline only because of game development. The issue with this however, is that games are fundamentally simple problems (even more so nowadays with the rampant hand-holding in the industry) while programming and IT are not simple problems. Logic minded gamers who need to step into the real world will find solace in IT and programming if they can re-arrange their problem solving patterns for it, but others still yet fall through the cracks.

But what of the games themselves? While the consumers of the industry may be riddled with introverts, surely the games make this worthwhile? The short answer is no, the long answer is as follows. Nearly 30 years ago, Nintendo released the NES and saved the budding industry from collapse. NES games were very difficult to make up for how short they were. All except those designed with no end could be completed within 20 hours by a dedicated. The reason for their shortness was that you couldn’t really fit all that much data on them. As time went on and media improved, games could be made much larger due to more efficient storage mechanisms. Despite this however, very few non-multiplayer games have more than a hundred hours worth of content with the average being around 8-12 hours.

So whats wrong with these games? In keeping with the previous question, innovation. The gaming industry as a whole has amazing potential, but when the cost of development of most games is greater than or equal to some Hollywood Blockbusters, you begin to get risk vs reward assessments made. Many genres in the gaming industry have not evolved conceptually in the last 20 years. There are some titles within genres that push the bounds, but as a whole if you buy a First Person Shooter or Platformer, you know what you’re going to get. Is this necessarily a bad thing? To consumers as a whole, no, but it builds upon itself.

A man smarter than I once said that “[The global] economy depends on selling people things they don’t need at prices they cant [really] afford.” While games are relatively cheap to the gamer, they perpetuate a cycle of consumerism that is curiously irrational. Most gamers can appreciate the fact that they are abused by companies in the form of downloadable content (paying for 2/3s of a book and having to buy the last chapters separately). And can appreciate that they, as a whole, can be relied on for a steady stream of income because they are curiously irrational consumers.

The gaming industry creates these people. Fans that embrace rampant consumerism for the sake of the next great fix. For many, it doesn’t matter if they know the next game in the series will be bad or more of the same. They’ll eat it up anyway because thats what a consumer is. Even the more rational introverted gaming types fall into this trap because its so much easier to just play a game than to deal with something.

I may write up a sequel to this post at some point in time that goes into much more depth, but for the most part this sums up my feelings about the industry. What’s very interesting are the undertones of this article, for those interested in reading more, check out ribbonfarm consumerism .Venkat sums up many points on the real world far better than I can.