Opinion: We should stop being lazy gamers | Pure Nintendo

As a society it is safe to say we have become more relaxed and needy at the same time. This isn?t necessarily a bad thing. For thousands of years it has always been a sign of nobility to be perceived as having an easy or relaxed lifestyle: kings with their thrones and nobles with their nobility. These are all signs of someone who has made it in life. Take even the President of the United States. Besides the whole fact of running a country, the President has nothing else to worry about. ?These people are on top of their game and everything is brought to them on a silver platter. All they have to do is ask and watch it happen.

These days, technology is here to help our lives become easier and reach a version of that lifestyle. Today, no one wants to look up questions in a book or even wait to get home to use Google. Most people have the ability to just pull out their smart devices, which puts the whole world in front of their eyeballs. Some people, mainly the older generation, see this as a weakening of our society (making people lazy, anti-social, etc.). In a way, old people may be right. Our society wants everything now, as easily, and as quickly as possible. But that isn?t the reason I am in your head today with all these words. This need to have things done immediately and the ability to quickly find the right direction or path has made us lazy gamers. The laziness has caused us to miss out on a bunch of great game opportunities and shifted our definition of a gamer.

Whoever is over the age of twenty-three should at least remember growing up with the NES. For those young bloods who may have missed out. ?NES games, for the most part, had no real way to save games. I cannot tell you how many times I played the worlds in Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 3. For me, most of the joy of those games was seeing how far I could go before running out of lives. For the original Mario Bros., the difficulty was increased with the lack of continues. Once a player ran out of lives, they were out of lives forever, or until they restarted the game. This caused competition between my brother and I. We would see how far the other could get, or how many points we could amass before we had to start over. This difficulty made it a badge of honor one could carry with them.

That badge of honor is something video games and gamers are missing. Oh, you finished the latest Call of Duty? That?s nice, so have millions of other people. Oh, you scored 5 touchdowns with your running back in Madden. That?s cool, I have scored 7! There isn?t much left in games these days where one could hang their hat on something a million people have done, or done better, already. ?It should be safe to say that a majority of gamers who struggled through the original Mario Bros. never truly finished the game. I am honestly not ashamed to admit that I am part of this non-finishing group. ?It was also way into my high school years, way after the release of the game, until I finished Super Mario Bros. 3. I am proud and glad that I beat the game even if it was later in life. Video games have become extremely mainstream to the point we have lost what makes us gamers. That chip on our shoulder is now gone. Yes, there are still those games that are difficult for most, but those are few and far between. Even those games have the ability to dumb down the game to make it easier for some.

The badge of honor of being part of the elite group who finished a game is replaced by an elite status of just playing a game a lot. In the 90?s, when someone said, ?I finished Super Mario Bros., Contra, Mega Man, TMNT 1, etc,? most of our original reactions have something to do with admiration. ?Wow that person is truly skilled at games.? ?Now, when a list of finished games is read to us, ?Call of Duty, Darksiders, and Assassin?s Creed,? we don?t have that same reaction. ?Oh, you sure have a lot of time to play games, you must be a true gamer.? We have gone from a gamer being someone who is good at video games to simply someone who has a lot of time to play video games.

There is still some video games that offer a glimpse of that elite accomplishment. One of the first games that came to mind is any Mario game. The new Mario games like Galaxy 1 and 2, Super Mario 3D Land, and the 2D Mario games offer the ability to continue after dying with no real punishment for losing a ton of lives. What it does offer is the elite status of collecting all the stars. It is one thing to complete the game, but it is another to complete it with all the stars and unlock the extra levels. This accomplishment is worth some praise and admiration. Other incentives like Trophies or Achievements are there but, to me, they seem to be missing that extra sense of admiration.

To reassure you, I am not calling all video games of this generation bad. I do still yearn for my nostalgic days, but I also enjoy games like Call of Duty and Assassin?s Creed. I am also guilty at times for being turned off by games that are way too hard. I can be a very lazy person too. To be honest, sometimes I do not want to work very hard when I play games and that is fine. It is the mentality that every game should be a mindless walk that is affecting our gaming society.

Recently I read a few reviews about a recent Wii U eShop release, Toki Tori 2, which made me disappointed in our gaming community. I am going to use Toki Tori 2 as an example since it is the most recent event. However, my point goes far beyond this one game. Most of the reviews shared three similar issues with the game: it became too difficult, there was a lack of direction, and no sense or need to finish the game.

To the first criticism, being difficult is up to anyone?s own judgment. Should a game really be judged by how difficult it can be? Maybe. But what is wrong with a game that is too difficult? Is it necessarily a bad game because only a particular breed of people have the skills to complete? No, it?s not.

Games these days can be full of too much direction. This spoon feeding of information has made gamers spoiled. ?Games like Mario, Mega Man, and any other video game from the early 90?s never gave real direction. Did Super Mario Bros. tell you that the ?B? button jumps or does a Mega Man game tell you how to use the blaster? No. They leave it up to the gamer to find out for themselves, which was half the fun of playing these games.

I am a pretty big fan of the Bioshock franchise. When playing through the most recent title, I realized that everything I needed to do was laid out in front of me. The game made sure that I knew what to do and when to do it, even if it was something that I had already done 100 times. The game went as far as to provide an arrow of the correct direction I was supposed to go. The idea of wandering around until the right path is stumbled upon was gone. Now, I didn?t have to press the button that provided the arrow but it was there so I was going to use it. Remember, I can be lazy.

The main point I want to harp on from the review is the idea of having no real incentive to complete a game. What is the reason to complete any game? To quote a comment I read from a review: ?I don?t remember when games started giving me hotdogs or cash money to finish a game?? For me, the reason to finish a game is the same reason I have been finishing games for over 25 years: to have that sense of accomplishment and that feeling of mastering a task or objective. Why did anyone want to control a short fat plumber through fire and weird, flying turtles? There was no reason really. To save the princess perhaps? Who was she to us? We all played those games to finish them, or get further than our brothers or friends. ?Video games have become so story driven that gamers have forgotten what exactly makes them gamers. It is one thing to play a game to finish a story, and it is another to finish a difficult game for no reason. A gamer isn?t someone who just plays a lot of games, a gamer is someone who is a master at their craft of gaming.

There really isn?t a right or wrong way to play games or a reason to play games. Everyone is different. They do different things and like different things. These differences are what make our world great. I may sound like an old man when I say this, but we cannot turn our back on what makes us gamers. I call that a distinction be made between someone who plays games and someone who plays to be the master of them. Maybe we can make up a new word for it?Uber-Gamer. ?Let us not forget why we all started playing games in the first place, to have fun.

Source: http://purenintendo.com/2013/04/12/opinion-we-should-stop-being-lazy-gamers/

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