During the past six months I've been living in self-imposed isolation from games, playing only Ikaruga and Ketsui with any sort of constancy. At a time in life where I have begun to take stock and work-out what is important to me, where I go from here, I realise gaming has been a massive personal investment over the past ten years, both in time and money, and I've come to realise I've been getting increasingly diminished returns. Gaming is perhaps bigger today than ever, more money, more exposure. There are more avenues for people to experience gaming than there have ever been. Yet, I find myself increasingly disinterested at the state of it all. I have a stack of games from this generation I am wary to even start for fear of being struck with overwhelmingly apathy. They are notably few and far between, the games I have enjoyed in the past few years, ones I have written about here and elsewhere: Nier, Gears of War, Red Dead Redemption, and Vanquish.
I find myself looking forward to re-mastered editions of games I have played before: Ico, Metal Gear Solid 3, the Ocarina of Time. Nothing excites me about the state of modern gaming. I have boxed up the current consoles and simply left a PlayStation 2 in their stead.
Ah, the PlayStation 2.
The PlayStation 2 is where gaming mattered most to me, and that it was abandoned in suspended animation at the height of its maturation by the onslaught of new technology is a real shame. In its twilight years it played host to some of the finest games ever made. Games with a sense of purpose and pride. And its these games I keep coming back to, in my mind, which said mostly everything about gaming that I wanted to hear. The three most notable being Shadow of the Colossus, Dragon Quest VIII, and Final Fantasy XII.
These three games are individual pieces of work I would hold up, alongside Radiohead's Kid A, Stars of the Lid's Refinement of the Decline, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths, as works that helped define my character, that made me who I am. That you could play those three games and understand things about me that I have never articulated. Those three games managed to scale a peak which has, for me, not been reached again (Red Dead Redemption has come closest but, being based on our world, it loses most of the magic of these earlier games).
They presented me with open worlds - entirely imaginary worlds - and allowed me to wander in them, explore them, make them my own. They come closest to exemplifying my interpretation of the Shigeru Miyamoto quote at the top of this page, that games should be playgrounds, they should be worlds for you to fully exist in while you are playing them, and thinking of them.
Games today are simply so expensive to make that decisions of implicit artistic conscience have to be ignored in order for the money to be spent on the graphics so they are of a standard that won't simply be torn apart once the game is revealed to the gaming public. Everything else seems to fall by the wayside. Note a recent comment seen on a review of White Knight Chronicles II: "the graphics look like they are from 2007". And there it is: a snarky one-line comment dismissing thousands of hours' work. Whatever else the game has to offer is not important, the graphics look old. And this is repeated, over and over again, on countless reviews, YouTube videos, blogs. Thus more money is spent on how the game looks, and expensive graphics mean there is little money left to be spent on making the world breathe.
Famously, during the development of Final Fantasy XIII, it was stated that the game wouldn't feature any towns because for a next-gen game they would simply cost too much to create and build. Left on its own this statement tells you everything negative about the spiraling cost of games development at the end of the first decade of the Twenty-First Century. Features are left out games, not for creative or functional reasons, but for economic ones. And this from one of the world's most successful gaming houses. In their flagship title, no less. No towns. Too expensive. Things are getting out of control.
Yuji Horii, the creator and director of the Dragon Quest series, once declared that all he needed to make the games he wanted to make was the power of a Super Nintendo. This simple idea of allowing the story and wisdom in the design to be the hook you hang everything else on is exemplified in the Dragon Quest remakes for the Nintendo DS. All have more detailed graphics than the Super Nintendo originals, to be sure, but each, released only in the past two years, look incredibly simple visually. They are still fine, fine games. And, while I believe what Horii stated was absolutely true in terms of what he was trying to achieve at the time, the PlayStation 2 installment, Dragon Quest VIII: the Journey of the Cursed King is the absolute zenith of the series in terms of scale and verisimilitude. I also believe that a current generation Dragon Quest, using the increased power of the PlayStation 3 would surpass even VIII in terms of open world exploration and feeling, it would be anomalous in today's gaming landscape. It simply wouldn't be made (and isn't being, the next installment is being prepared for the Wii, or perhaps the Wii's successor). Besides, Dragon Quest is anachronistic anyway, strip away the graphics of VIII and you are left with a game which could run on the Super Nintendo, which is probably Horii's point all along.
I have recently restarted playing Final Fantasy XII, and the simple feeling of just how well put-together it all is allows me to simply relax into it. Nothing, to my mind, has been made like it since. It's a real shame. No doubt, this was an incredibly expensive game to develop in the year 2006, and that the games I hold aloft are from large, terrificly successful companies (Square Enix and Sony Computer Entertainment). What I yearn for, though, is a present where the idea of making a Final Fantasy XII is available to most developers due to the falling costs of that technology (creative talent aside). Imagine that a modest-sized development house could make a game in 2011 using the technological specifications of the PlayStation, and for that to be a viable financial decision. It's unthinkable. Instead, the tide of progress marches on and the costs never fall because we are continually looking for the next thing, and the smaller developers, those making modest, niche games, have to close their doors, unable to compete financially. More colour drains from the gaming landscape. And the only voices we hear become narrower and louder.
I think I shall keep gaming, most probably in the form of re-playing an ever decreasing circle of games: Chrono Trigger, the Final Fantasys, the Dragon Quests, Cave shooters, Ikaruga, and whatever Treasure makes next, in an effort to really understand what it is about games that I love, and to further recognise what it is I require from them should I regain enough interest to keep up with them once again.
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