Read This Before Buying That Video Game PDF

## Opinion | How Videogames Fell From Art to Addictive - The New York Times ### Guest Essay ### Read This Before Buying That Video Game - By Simon Parkin - Writer and host of "My Perfect Console," an interview-based podcast about video games. When I was a child in the 1990s, I campaigned for my...

## Opinion | How Videogames Fell From Art to Addictive - The New York Times ### Guest Essay ### Read This Before Buying That Video Game - By Simon Parkin - Writer and host of "My Perfect Console," an interview-based podcast about video games. When I was a child in the 1990s, I campaigned for my first video game console several months before Christmas. My parents, like some parents who came before them and most who came after, were wary. They associated video games not so much with the thrilling secrets of Super Mario's undulating hills or the literary flair of Infocom's interactive fiction games, but instead with vague ideas of truancy, delinquency and probable ruin. My grandmother, a pragmatic woman, took pity. She secreted under the tree a Game Boy and a copy of the Soviet-era miracle that is Tetris. In the years that have followed, video games have evolved in astonishing ways, often expanding to fill the advancing technologies that power them. Tetris remains as potent as ever, but today's players are drawn to video games that function more like social media platforms than discrete interactive stories, playpens that employ psychological tricks and gambling-adjacent techniques to dissuade their audiences from immigrating to rival virtual worlds. It's a creative shift occasioned by economic concerns, one that has come to actively harm the medium and those players most deeply embedded in it. While the creators and publishers bear responsibility as stewards of that field, so, too, do I and other parents whose choices this holiday season help shape the culture. ### Video-Game Makers, Like Novelists, Filmmakers And Netflix Executives, Have Always Employed A Raft Of Techniques To Keep Their Audiences Engaged. But There Is An Especially Close Link Between Engagement And Economics In Video Games, Where, For The First Two Decades Of The Medium's Existence, Most Players Paid To Play By The Coin. - In the 1980s, an executive at Atari, the company behind Pong, remarked that the ideal arcade game should provide a short burst of entertainment before frustrating players, so they insert another quarter to continue: something easy to pick up, hard to master, and with a difficulty curve that followed the trajectory of a mountainside. In the early 2000s, after video games became widely internet-connected, publishers discovered that keeping players engaged for as long as possible could be even more profitable than trying to move them on to their next product as quickly as possible. At the peak of its popularity, in 2010, the online fantasy game World of Warcraft had over 12 million subscribers, a population roughly equivalent to that of Senegal at the time, all of whom paid a monthly fee to live out digital lives in the game. Players were incentivized to join clans of like-minded players and pursue their shared goals with the determination of a sports team hoping for a promotion. While through the '90s and early 2000s designers had vied with one another to attract players through novel, imaginative design, now, for many, the main goal was to keep players engaged for months, even years at a time, mainly through familiarity. With so many virtual worlds competing for our attention, publishers did anything they could to lure players away from rival games. Rather than sell a video game for a fixed and profitable price, like a hardcover book or a Blu-ray Disc, many began to offer their titles free, at least in the beginning. Once invested in the game, players could then purchase a season pass, a kind of I.O.U. from the publisher promising to bestow a clutch of rewards such as digital costumes, potent weapons and other benefits in exchange for a fee - the allure no longer the creativity so much as the promise of virtual trinkets. ### Fortnite, Released In 2017, Refined This “Season Pass” Model, Which Helped Generate More Than $9 Billion In Revenue For Its Creator, Epic Games, During Its First Two Years. - This extravagant success had a profound effect on the industry's major players, who began to see their games no longer as discrete pieces of entertainment but more like destinations, such as Instagram or Facebook, to which users would, ideally, log in every day. Jacob Navok, former director of business development at Square Enix, one of the largest Japanese publishers of video games, recently pointed out that pre-Fortnite most players would, like readers of books, finish one game before moving on to the next. Today, while the industry continues to grow, he wrote that a smaller number of games are developing "stickiness seen in social media companies." The industry's prioritization of these live service games - the term for video games that never fully end - mirrors, to a degree, Hollywood's investment in “forever” universes; Marvel and “Star Wars" provide familiar characters and settings in which to tell endless stories, while simultaneously promoting merchandise and filling theme parks. Where film studios rely on storytelling and aesthetics to keep viewers plugged in, video game designers have an arsenal of additional psychological mechanisms at their disposal, many of which tap into our common fear of missing out. Game design is often no longer predominantly the task of crafting challenges that elicit joy, delight and surprise (or the noblest of creative goals, encouraging people to see the world from an unfamiliar perspective). It is primarily the job of building machines to keep players engrossed and spending, in many cases, by grinding out repetitive tasks rather than ones that encourage creative or exploratory play. The trend began, arguably, with games like World of Warcraft, but in recent years it has become astonishingly refined by the world's brightest designers. This has affected the experience of playing video games, which, for many of us growing up, offered a series of interesting and surprising cognitive challenges and provided spaces in which to experiment and better understand the world. Players today often experience burnout from repetitive tasks that resemble paid-for menial labor: collect 20 apples; clear the swamp of vermin; score 1,000 head shots. To keep players engaged in these unfurling to-do lists, the industry invented loot boxes - in-game lottery tickets that intersperse the monotonous exercises with an assortment of randomized rewards. Loot boxes may make the game more entertaining and provide bragging rights to players, but they also align video games more closely with the booming gambling business. (Some research indicates that loot boxes' design can normalize risky behaviors among children, even precipitating problem gambling in adulthood.) Also profound are the long-term risks to the health and status of the video game medium. Managed like pieces of evolving software, many of today's most commercially successful games therefore lack the artistic impact of older titles. None of the 36 video games held in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection were published in the past decade. The rapid content cycles and updates contribute to the perception of games as flimsy, incomplete works. In Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone, for example, new maps replace old ones, which become inaccessible, an erasure of the work of their artists and designers. New generations often cannot go back and learn from older versions of games whose servers were switched off, or that have changed over the years and now share only superficial resemblances to their earlier manifestations. The industry is struggling to build a lasting canon. It is no wonder games are often treated not as works of art - an accusation that once cast the film critic Roger Ebert as video game fandom's bête noire - but as temporary, shifting distractions. From many angles this is, in fact, what they increasingly are. Like most executives working in creative media within a capitalist framework, the video game industry's leaders prioritize short-term shareholder profits over broader concerns about cultural relevance or impact. But it is notable that the dominant and most highly profitable video games of this moment are built upon experimental ideas that originated on the margins of the commercial industry. Minecraft, released in 2011, followed few of the fashionable rules of game design. The game had no clear goals or instructions, and its rudimentary presentation defied the fashion at the time for ever more realistic on-screen depictions. Three years later Microsoft acquired Minecraft's developer, Mojang, for $2.5 billion. There is a growing urgency for major publishers to reassess notions of success, to move away from purely financial metrics and consider the benefits of artistic innovation, cultural impact and the fostering of innovation. Nintendo, one of the biggest and most recognizable game companies on the planet, remains something of an anomaly. Like its competitors, the company prioritizes its established characters and their worlds, but often treats those worlds as playpens for restless experimental design, which, in the case of 2023's The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, reveals the breadth of untapped creative potential in the field, available to studios willing to nurture and retain institutional talent rather than abandon teams the moment a game is released. There is still much invention and creativity within the independent sector, which is filled with designers who struck out on their own, having become disillusioned with the mainstream. Still, it is insufficient. For the health and survival of the industry built on imagination and invention, the most moneyed publishers, as leaders within the field, must take an enlightened lead and invest in projects that prioritize creativity and long-term cultural value as much as shareholder value. And those of us considering which games to buy this holiday season, either for ourselves or for our loved ones, should be mindful that our consumer choices shape our culture and our selves in profound ways. - Simon Parkin is the author of "The Forbidden Garden: The Botanists of Besieged Leningrad and Their Impossible Choice” and the host of “My Perfect Console,” an interview-based podcast about video games. - The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: [email protected]. - Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and Threads.