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Here's an interview with a guy named Dane MacMahon: http://www.nodontdie.com/dane-macmahon/ (thanks LESS T_T)
In many ways, he's like one of us. He watched in horror as hardcore PC gaming turned into a crass, consolized mass industry in the mid-2000s. But whereas we clung bitterly on, our hearts filled with hatred, he just shrugged his shoulders and left the hobby. And now he can't find his way back.
Some of you may find this to be an interesting read. Here's an excerpt:
In many ways, he's like one of us. He watched in horror as hardcore PC gaming turned into a crass, consolized mass industry in the mid-2000s. But whereas we clung bitterly on, our hearts filled with hatred, he just shrugged his shoulders and left the hobby. And now he can't find his way back.
Some of you may find this to be an interesting read. Here's an excerpt:
What's your opinion on smaller, independent teams making games. We haven't really talked about them yet. Have they done much to move the needle or hold your interest?
Yeah, no, I love it actually. But it just hasn't gotten me back yet. I actually put in my notes, "Indies are a big step toward tempting me back." Because stuff like Pillars of Eternity and -- that's like the big one I remember, I don't know why. But there's other ones, too. I see role-playing games that seem like they're made for me. "Like, hey, if you grew up playing Baldur's Gate, you should come back to videogames and play Pillars of Eternity." That's exactly what they're doing and I'm exactly who they're talking to, but for some reason -- I guess it's been too long or something, I'm tempted, but I'm not jumping over the cliff.
Part of that is probably it would cost money. My computer in the closet is like seven years old, so it would probably need upgrades, and then you have to buy a $60 game, too, so it's like, $1,000. So part of that's money, but just greater than that, I feel like I've moved on. It feels like an old relationship or something. You know, that old girlfriend might look great and I remember the good times, but that doesn't mean I'm going to call her. It's similar to that.
It's kind of an emotional thing. I feel like they wrote me off, and I wasn't important to them anymore, and now they're trying to bring me back, but I've moved on. [Laughs.]
Yeah. You had a good thing, but let's be honest.
Yeah, which gets into the nostalgia thing. How much of it is nostalgia and how much of it is, "Ooh, I want to play Mario tomorrow?"
As we age, what do you think changes about what we're looking for out of games? Certainly fun is still there, but what is that extra thing we're looking for?
A sense of culture. A sense of community. A sense of art appreciation. A sense that it's important to me.
I think when you're young it's just fun. When you get older, you want a little more out of it. You have less free time. You want to get more out of your free time. I want to feel like I'm important to it and it's important to me.
Like, you can make a Super Mario copy and make it exactly like Super Mario, but just different enough and arts and aesthetics and stuff to not be sued, but it wouldn't necessarily be the same to me at 35 as it would at 15. I don't know -- 'cause I have seen stuff like that. Like I said, Pillars of Eternity, 22-year-old me would have flipped out over that. But, 35-year-old me, it's like, "Oh, that's tempting, but I've moved on it."
What is the difference? I'm not even sure. Are there movies I loved when I was a teen that I don't like anymore now? Probably. But I don't know what the difference is. That's a good question.
How do you define creativity in games?
Mechanics. Level design. When I played Quake 2 online everyday after work, it was all about, you know, how to use that weapon to defeat that opponent in the right exact way and how to beat him perfectly, all that stuff. I feel like as it's gone on, it's been more about story and more about graphics and all that stuff. But it kinda got away from the true creative part being the mechanics.
Games being like movies is something that really turned me off. That's another thing. I kept focusing on culture because that's my educational background. But they try to be more and more like movies, they focus more on story and graphics. And like, I have movies for that. I have novels for that. I'm big into movies, too. So, I didn't come for that. Like, I came to games -- like Diablo 2, I didn't even read the text, to be honest with you. It was all about getting to new areas, killing new enemies, getting new loot, and hanging out with friends and talking on chat.
So when it was more about the story part, I sort of tuned it out. I did some of that in Baldur's Gate. It was rare. You have to do it really well. Baldur's Gate is an exception, it had gameplay and story, in a talking-to-people fashion, whereas now it's like, "Watch a cutscene." That really turned me off. The last game I tried playing was Dragon Age last year, whenever it came out. I hadn't played a game a year before that. And somebody told me, "Hey, your computer can run Dragon Ageon low."
So, I got that, and I played it. It's either a movie or you're collecting stuff. It's one or the other. There was nothing else to it. I played it for a few hours and then I stopped because I was either walking around collecting things or I was watching a cutscene, and I just was not impressed by that. So, you want to know where creativity should be? In me doing interesting stuff. [Laughs.]
That game was literally "keep smashing the R trigger" to kill enemies and walk around and press "A" on stuff to pick it up. Like, if you boil that game down, that's what it is. That's what it was. Now, when I read reviews, when they talked about how amazing it was, it was all about the story and it was all about the dialog and it was all about the pretty areas and it was all about the characters and all that stuff. But when you're sitting there playing the game, you know, there was no depth to the combat. There was no Zelda castle. You just picked up tapestries, or something, to make your thing look prettier.
I wasn't doing anything interesting. The story kept me completely out of it.
Sometimes when I hear people talk about these bigger games, they just sound like a massive project you're working on.
[Laughs.] It feels like work.
The purpose of this site is to not slam big-budget games, although I do think there is a degree to which they are culpable for the lack of creativity. I really liked Assassin's Creed II. It's the only Assassin's Creed game that I liked and played to the very end.
Same here.
I kinda liked GTA V, but what I liked best about it were the heists because I liked the project-management aspects of them. [Laughs.] I'm serious. But what you're talking about in Dragon Age reminds me of that stuff in Assassin's Creed II, where you collect stuff to improve your mansion or whatever.
I think there's definitely people who are into games for different things, and probably the era you joined is a big part of that, I would think, because different eras of videogames concentrate on different things. I will always love platformers because I was a 14-year-old playing on Super Nintendo. That's what I played as a kid.
Maybe if you have joined in the last 10 years, you're more into story than I am. I don't know. But I think a lot of people come to games for story. A lot of people come to games because they're super bored and need stuff to do, and a lot of games nowadays give you 100 hours of stuff to do. It might not be fun, but you're working on something. You're doing something. Completionists or whatever. I don't know.
Like you said, it felt like a project. That is exactly how Dragon Age: Inquisition felt like. It felt like I was working at something. It felt like I was doing a job or a task list.
Sounds like you're trying to put a ship in a bottle.
Yeah. Exactly. Building a model. Way back in the day, Fallout did not feel like that. I don't even think there was a quest list in the original Fallout. It was literally just, "I walked around and I did stuff as it came to me and I enjoyed the tactical combat, and at one point the game was finished and the story had some cool aspects to it." And I was like, "Ah, that was fun."
Deus Ex, same way. Like, they plopped you down in New York and you had to figure out how to do this thing in the warehouse and you had it all open to you and you figured it out and that was the mechanics of it. Now, it feels like the last few games I played, I played Dragon Age and before that -- man, it was years. I don't even remember. But, like, everything I played just felt like I was checking things off. I was working at a project. I think you perfectly captured it by saying it. I couldn't say it better.
I don't even know if it's fair to hold Mario up as some sort of gold standard because I was thinking, well, in Mario you collect 100 coins and you can get a new life. In Assassin's Creed II, you collect, I think, like, 100 feathers and I think you get an achievement.
But I never did that stuff.
[Laughs.]
[Laughs.] But different people come in games for different things. Like, I didn't even know -- I don't even remember that, 100 coins in Mario. Like, my goal was to get from the beginning to the end without dying. So, I was all just about, "Make sure you jump over the pit. Make sure you land on the platform. You make you dodge the turtle dude. Get to the flag thing and then you won." So, and in Deus Ex, they said, "Okay, your mission is to turn off the satellite" or whatever. I don't even remember. But they gave you a few different ways to do that, and I just did that. I didn't care if I shot every soldier in the head. I didn't care if I collected every item. I just did the goal. And now, I think achievements were a big part of that. I think they're focusing so much on the minutiae or the busywork aspect that you lose sight of what's actually fun about actually sitting down and playing a videogame.
Do you feel like games have gotten less creative? Or just fixated on different things?
I definitely feel it's less creative. I think it's -- I think they're copying movies wholesale for the story and the visual aspects of it, and for the actual gameplay, I'm not trying to be mean to the people who make them, but I think they're focusing on the things that are easy for them to design, relatively -- not easy to design in general but compared to deeper mechanics -- and foster a compulsive, working-at-something feeling for the player, but not necessarily truly enjoyable.
I didn't play the last Grand Theft Auto, but I remember Grand Theft Auto 3, way back. I played that for the first time in a store. They had a kiosk set-up. You remember those? [Laughs.] I played on a PlayStation 2 in a store aisle. I was into videogames more casually at the time. I was 21, doing what people will do at that age. And I remember playing that and thinking, "Wow, you can walk anywhere. Wow, you can get in any car." That was just amazing to me. That was a truly new thing. I went out and bought it, and I played it for 50 hours or whatever and loved it, and then Grand Theft Auto 4 comes out years and years later, and it was the same exact thing, it just looked better and it had a lot more cutscenes. [Laughs.] Like, there's nothing new here. I already did this, and the parts they improved, I'm already getting from movies or whatever, so I don't know what's supposed to really get me excited. And I don't know what Grand Theft Auto V is like, but I assume it's the next step? But did they -- you mentioned something that was pretty interesting, and if that's a new mechanic, that's great. That needs to happen more often.
I just remembered the game I had played before Dragon Age: Inquisition was actually when I was on my summer break when I was home from working in Russia: It was Dishonored. And I really liked Dishonored. From Dishonored to Dragon Age, I played nothing, so you can look at a calendar to see the dates on that. I enjoyed Dishonored, but it was basically like Deus Ex again. It was the same thing. So, like, I enjoyed it because I enjoyed Deus Ex but at the same time, I already did it.
So maybe this gets into the whole greater conversation we're having.
Maybe you spend your 10 years in games and you kinda see everything that games do, and then there's nothing new for you anymore.
Well, why do games still matter to you to if, by your own admission, you have pretty much lost interest?
It was a big important part of my life for a long time. When I was a kid, I definitely ran around outside just as much, but I played a lot of games. Mega Man. Mario. Final Fantasy. Shadowrun. All those back then. It was a huge part of my youth. And then, I got away from them for a while and then I came back and they were a huge part of my twenties with Quake 2 and Diablo 2 and all that stuff. I played that a lot in the early 2000's. They were a big part of my life.
I've barely played them the last seven years, and yet -- I think when something's part of your life so much, you just can't escape it sort of. So, every once in a while I'll be like, "Hey, I wonder what's going on in the world of games." I'll click on myEurogamer bookmark or my Kotaku bookmark and just see what's up. And I still follow some people involved in games on Twitter, like Jeff Gerstmann, 'cause he's funny, and he talks about videogames and I'm like, "Hey, I remember videogames."
And so, even if I haven't played anything in six months and before that, for two years, it's still something -- it's a part of my life. Like, you can't escape it. And I don't think it's all nostalgia. I think it's genuine good memories and it was important to me at the time. I kinda wish it could be again, to some extent. And the indie games, too. But at the same time, I've played it.
Pillars of Eternity is another Baldur's Gate. I've played it. I played it when I was 21 or whatever. But I've played it and I loved it, but I've moved on, and I don't need to play it again. If I do, Baldur's Gate would probably be more satisfying because of the nostalgia factor.
I think you kinda have your era, and you enjoy it, and it's an important part of you. But then you move on and it's not the same anymore.
