​The Terrible Year I Returned to Video Games

It had been well over a decade since I regularly played video games. More, probably. At least since my freshman year of college, when Halo served as a unifying force in those awkward early dorm days, linking homesick jocks and punks and musicians and nerds through a quad-wide LAN network. Halo; the great icebreaker, the great equalizer. We'd played less and less as the more alluring fruits of college life—parties, booze—presented themselves to us, until the whole practice was mostly phased out, pointedly abandoned like some misbegotten adolescent habit.

The last time I had really been into video games I was more like 13. Like so many other privileged 90s kids, I was reared on Super Mario and Street Fighter. I was glued to the screen for years, plugged in while the pixelated 2D plumber gave way to geometric Starfoxes and polygonal Final Fantasies, and, eventually reemerged, fully 3D, overalls intact.

Now, I'm 31. And this was the year I tried to get back into video games.

I told myself, ostensibly, that I was interested in returning to video games because they were the new engine of speculative fiction—the sprawling role-playing games and immersive MMOs and hyper-realistic shooters advertised everywhere had, ostensibly, evolved the crude tropes of my youth into full-blown, nuanced, highly literate fiction, or at least something close to it.

I'd heard rave reviews of games like Bioshock, and how it made for artful satire of Randian libertarianism run amok, just with guns. The think pieces I'd thumbed through ​piled up—are video games a bona fide 'art form' yet? How about now? Surely ​these ten games qualify as modern art. Might they require more skill than their classic, board-based forebears? Sure, I'd downloaded Starcraft II—the next-gen chess, according to some commenters—and played a bit when it came out. But I hadn't owned a gaming console since I lived with my parents. And I'd spoken at length to talented game developers, writers, and academics who studied and played games religiously, who detailed the value of an increasingly fascinating medium.

But really, if I'm, honest, I just wanted to play fucking video games again. It was a particularly stressful and difficult year, and I found myself longing for that easy and uncomplicated release that comes with beating a level. So, my fiance Corrina bought me an Xbox for my birthday, and I set out to rediscover gaming as a young old man.

I started out with a game that did indeed claim to offer a pioneering approach to participatory storytelling and action; the long awaited sci-fi epic Destiny. It was one of the reasons I'd ended up here in the first place: I'd grown intrigued by the early concept art and the hyped promise of 'shared-world science fiction'. There was a certain poetic elegance to this fact, too: The last time I'd played games, I'd played Halo. Destiny was the first effort that Bungie, the studio behind Halo, had attempted since leaving Microsoft and striking out on its own. It was an ideal port from which to wade back in.

I felt a familiar heady rush as the gun bobbed out in front of me as I ran through an immaculately detailed ruined-earth environment—gorgeous graphics, familiar, intuitive mechanics. Gunning down foes with the second-nature controls was thrilling, for a while. I was still a solid shot, turned out. After a couple hours, though, Destiny started to leave me cold.

The story was incomprehensible, and worse, apathetically presented. Peter Dinklage delivered the narration as if loaded on quaaludes, and when his monotone line-readings weren't putting me to sleep, the action, which soon grew insidiously repetitive, was doing the same. Was I bored? It seemed unlikely, given the snarling sound effects and the cold sweat collecting in my palms and my reflexes set to rapid-fire, but it sure felt that way. I decided to move on.

TitanFall was almost the opposite. There wasn't even any pretense of a story involved. Instead, this was immediate gratification, like some cyberpunk drug: an electric brew of guns, ammo, giant robots, players frantically yelling stuff, mostly at me, and to stop fucking around. But like any decent high, it was short-lived, and the comedown was ugly. I wasn't good enough to win—I still notched kills here and there—and never much felt that it'd be worth investing the time I'd need to become a contender. I was left dazed, feeling sluggish, questioning my life choices.

A sense of time is all-important to the adult video gamer, I came to understand. I constantly felt the draining away of my time—it may as well have been a third or fourth life bar on screen. As I jogged around the Moon with an assault rifle, an unordered list of real-life things I should be doing cycled relentlessly through my brain—deadlines to meet, emails to answer, arrangements to make, projects to finish. Playing video games, I realized, would never be as good as when you were 13, when any sense of genuine obligation was ill-formed at best, and easily batted away by the fun-seeking impulses still ruling your brain.

I'm sure that younger gamers will point their friends to this story and say, look at this grumpy old asshole. He doesn't get it. What a sad, cantankerous whiner. Stop overthinking it. (They will almost surely say so with more expletives than that.)

But I did get it! I loved video games. I can vividly recall the adrenaline thrill of beating Andross for the first time, the splinters of his face-ship falling away to ecstatic hell-yeahs; the ​crestfallen sorrow of watching Aeris die, and being unable to save her; the melancholic wonder of wandering around Hyrule, fumbling for the right song to transport me back into the past, to fix something I'd missed.

I wouldn't admit it then, but those things left an impact.

These games stimulated my brain in a way that fixed, linear stories didn't; I'd helped bring those outcomes about—me!—my choices, my swift thinking, and my hand-eye coordination had imbued my success, and the game's narrative arc and conclusion, with a unique emotional resonance. I'd been rewarded for winning, and that's what I wanted again.

But that's exactly what remained elusive. So I began to foster something of a weird imperative to get to the bottom of this—why wasn't gaming more fun? What was I, we, anyone, looking for in a good modern game; sheer, unsurpassed adrenaline? Unmatched emotional depth? Progressive complexity? A swirling, shut-out-the-world good time? Where was that Tetrisine, four line-clearing, Bowser-trouncing satisfaction that registered mild euphoria in my brain in 1996?

Bioshock was engrossing, and totally clever. But it devolved into a standard-issue shooter, mostly; I'd played that before. Corrina and I tried Portal 2 in co-op mode—it was an ingenious game, but ultimately inspired more bickering than anything. Then I played Mass Effect 2, which, while not new, I'd heard cited as one of ​the best works of science fiction of the 00s—not just in the video game world, but period.

And yep, it was great. I was pretty quickly absorbed by the story, gameplay style, and wide array of choices offered to my character, which genuinely seemed to alter the game's outcome. I made ethical decisions about private prisons, population control, and artificial intelligence; I had to choose who to fall in love with (or at least to seduce). The game looked at racism, invasive species, and immigration, and did so in a provocative, compelling alternate universe. In other words, it was effective sci-fi. I logged nearly twenty hours.

So of course, that draining hourglass was a persistent nag. And while ambitious, Mass Effect never pulled me into the narrative the way a truly great novel or film can—whether this was my own neurotic fault (think of the things I could do with 20 hours! I could read Ulysses! Write a story, take a coding class!) is tough to discern. 

Anyway, none of the games were organically transcendent enough to eliminate my latent anxieties. As such, I was alternately impressed and disappointed with how far games had come: there were incredible, rich new narrative platforms, but they were ultimately limited in depth; the comment they offered on the mechanics of the real world weren't quite as nuanced or critically penetrating as I'd hoped. Ultimately, you're still just wading through conversation menus and shooting anything that moves.

Beating the game was great fun, but fleetingly so, and starting another was daunting.

Maybe I needed something quicker for my fix; something I wouldn't have to pour so many hours into. I tapped away on Flappy Bird (best score 117), which, whatever. The fewer words added to the Flappy Bird think piece cannon the better. I downloaded Hearthstone, perhaps the true gaming phenomenon of the year—according to Blizzard, its maker, it has picked up over 20 million players since launching last spring. That was fun too, and I messed around with friends, and had at least one great night after roping Corrina into playing (she's hooked now, too).

Again, there's that specter of investing time to reap the rewards necessary to make continued play compelling—you need to win certain games to unlock more powers and benefits. It's addictive, sure—I kept hitting 'Play' again to try to score more loot, to best that other unsmiling avatar—but that's not the same as fun, as anyone who's played Candy Crush will tell you. There's a lot more skill needed here, but the capitalist motor was too familiar; I just felt like I was feeding Blizzard's machine. I'm on the brink of deleting the app altogether, mostly to stop myself from playing more.

Everything, it seemed, demands the pouring of hours.

​

To the backdrop of my meandering quest for video game satisfaction in 2014, another, much higher-profile saga was unfolding, and it effected anyone who played, discussed, or engaged with video games. I'm talking, of course, about GamerGate.

Around the time that I was reacquainting myself with the layout of an Xbox controller, hordes of gamers were setting their sights on predominantly female "social justice warriors" they felt were ruining the medium. Under the auspices of upholding "ethics in gaming journalism," the baser ranks of the movement harassed, sent death threats to, and otherwise terrorized women affiliated with the gaming industry.

It was beyond ugly, and even now that the worst has subsided, I don't fully comprehend the fury and the scale of the attacks. I've drifted from gaming culture, sure, but I think I can relate to the mindset of the diehard gamer—and this inspired nothing but cognitive dissonance and repulsion. This was the unleashed ugly id of the adolescent, testosterone-addled boy gamer, ​amplified by viler influences, and set upon comment boards, Twitter, and Reddit. There is never any excuse for targeting and harassing women online, period—my friends and I knew as much in the 90s. Even we'd had a bigger megaphone—those were the days of dialup and AIM—we would have avoided this steaming misogynistic mess like the plague.

The mere presence of the phenomenon gnawed at the back of my brain as I wandered around this or that neon space station in present day adult-gamerland. This is what I was trying to recommune with?

Of course it wasn't, not really; a handful of bleating ignorant voices don't represent the entire community. But it was hard to attempt to thoughtfully engage a medium alleging to have outgrown its juvenility as hundreds of teenage boys are loudly complaining that girls are ruining their fun.

And it underscored another fairly obvious truism about games—the experience of gaming is as much about the onscreen product as it is about the gamer. If you are the kind of gamer who feels personally threatened when someone criticizes the plethora of obscenely large-breasted women in video games, your general gaming experience is probably filtered through a lens of aggressive insecurity. You are more likely to be the kind of guy who's going to make rape jokes while you play Call of Duty, and bash my skull with the butt of your gun after I'm already dead, and then proceed to squat repeatedly over it.

Not unrelatedly: If you are the kind of gamer who constantly feels anxious, like he is running out of time, even when an onscreen clock is not ticking, your experience will be all the worse for that, too.

I did play some great games this year, regardless; I sometimes enjoyed myself immensely. Altogether, I feel like I got a reasonable idea of where the industry's heading; there is indeed some truly innovative storytelling taking shape, and some hyper-innovative leaps in ass-kicking technology. But I never was able to scratch that itch—that raw, supremely satisfying feeling of just goddam beating the game. I was too preoccupied, maybe—too many cascading real-life to-dos kept invading my menus—or too put off by the real-world politics of gaming. I didn't feel that video games were giving back the time I gave them; by the end of the year, honestly, it started to feel like more fun to reach for a novel.

My brief, very incomplete sampling of modern mainstream games found that they were undoubtedly exciting, graphically stunning, masterfully designed—and exhausting, addicting, and powered by a newly pushy profit motive (downloadable content, add-ons, semi-sequels). And let's just say there was no speculative fiction masterpiece here; no video game equivalent of 2001 or Blade Runner or Clockwork Orange I encountered out there yet.

I have spent enough time on the internet to know that every word of this essay will be the subject of fierce disagreement—maybe I'll get some death threats of my own!—but this is my own personal experience, nothing more. I have complete faith games will continue to evolve graphically, intellectually, and in complexity; it does feel that the medium is perennially perched on the precipice of becoming the next mass market art form, Hollywood leveled up.

In the end, the game I played most in 2014 came out in 1992. I downloaded the port of Street Fighter II on Xbox, on a lark, and found myself returning to it throughout the year. I'd pick up with Ryu and just hammer away for a few rounds, until I got stuck on one of the bosses, or beat the thing outright. I'd play with Corrina for quick, 5-minute bouts. It was simple and dumb and beckoned the purest flood of giddy nostalgia in this whole endeavor, which was inevitably destined to be mired knee-deep in the stuff.

I probably won't be buying any new games next year. Probably, it's just me; this whole plunge may ultimately have been tortured exercise in digital remembrance; a hopeless quest to revisit simpler times marked by simpler modes of button mashing. If so, I've at least earned myself a protip: Sometimes you just can't ever get back to that first stage, when the story and design all seem new, when you really don't know what's coming after the next boss.