Gamer-at-Arms – The Times they are a-Changin’

There’s a great scene in the film Dodgeball where all the main characters have decided to enter a dodgeball tournament, but it they’re all shit at it so they get trained up with the help of a retired dodgeball legend. You’d expect that this training might involve dodging balls but their coach has the belief that “you can dodge a dodge ball” if you can dodge a variety of other things, namely wrenches and traffic. Maybe I’ve laboured the metaphor a bit too much, but I’m studying Games Development and right now that is sort of what my entire life feels like.

In truth, I’d been told from the onset of the course that I’d need to cut out playing games in order to get a decent grade at the end of it. That’s been the story of my life really. Stop playing or my work will be affected. Of course they all failed to appreciate just how much of a stubborn wee fuck I was. Up until relatively recently I’d barely dented my busy gaming schedule and managed to get by with my uni work, just like with my college work before it and my school work before that.

Things have changed now. For a start, I’ve entered my fourth year at university and with that my workload increased dramatically. More and more I’ve come to realise that I can’t just coast by if I want to have a decent future. Slowly, gaming has finally started to take a back seat. Despite that, I don’t want to give it up entirely. I’m doing this Games Development course so that I might one day be able to make great games – is it silly to suggest that, in completely giving up the things that I love so that I might be better able to make them, I might lose my way somewhat? That I might forget why I’m doing the course?

It’s a thought I’ve never really been able to face, so I’ve decided to just try squeezing wee bites of gaming in where I can. No more day-long sessions storming through Dark Souls – instead I intend to try and game only to bookend a day, or to take a break in the midst of the odd long haul of work. Mobile games in particular have come in handy for the latter respites – I’ve been quite taken by Super Hexagon and Bad Piggies as of late – but they never keep me occupied to a satisfying level for the longer stretches.

It’s one of the reasons I, and a great many other people, still go to the cinema – there’s nothing quite like seeing a film on the big screen.

That’s really why I’m on the side of the fence that says mobile games will never fully replace traditional console-based gaming. Sure, smartphones and tablets will eventually possess the technomancy required to power a full-fledged gaming experience to rival that of any console, but the design limitations of the device itself will always have aesthetics pulling the short straw. It’s one of the reasons I, and a great many other people, still go to the cinema – there’s nothing quite like seeing a film on the big screen.

Similarly, I think there’s nothing quite like playing a game on a larger screen. Back when OnLive was released onto Android (and wasn’t up to its eyeballs in debt) I played a wee bit of the original Darksiders and while I was adamant that it meant I wouldn’t need to buy another handheld, I still found it lacking that aesthetic punch compared to playing it on my Xbox. It’s quite hard to feel like the Second Horseman of the Apocalypse™ when you’re sitting on a bus, or somewhere similarly mundane, watching it all unfold on a tiny screen.

That’s another thing as well – the prospect of gaming out and about is something that actually worries me a little bit, and this goes back to what I was saying earlier about losing my way. It worries me because of a piece I once read that looked at how our lifestyles evolved in tandem with technology, specifically washing machines. With the advent of washing machines, more and more people found less reason to visit public washhouses and more time to do other things. It is my fear that gaming may one day emulate this – I find it sad to think that we might get to a stage where people just play games as a means to pass time between other activities.

Which is why I hope consoles as we know them never really go away. Consoles provide an important gaming bedrock upon which I don’t think mobile gaming can ever build – because consoles are essentially immobile, you have little choice but to sit down and take the time out to play a game. I think that’s something that’s important to uphold as the generations come and go. Not just of our gaming devices, but of ourselves.