After spending the better part of the last 3 days gaming, I've reached that inter-game lull where I've completed one game and I am considering what to play next that will inevitably consume my life for a time. That window of opportunity has left me with time to contemplate gaming as a whole, and how it has changed. The point of this blog was to explore topics related to nostalgia, and this is perhaps one of the most pertinent to my life if for no other reason than the fact that I tailored my education to Technology and Computer Science with the express intent of becoming a game developer. I didn't pursue that path in the end for a myriad of reasons which I won't get into right now, but the evolution of the games industry is something that I have witnessed, and arguably something I have lived.
When I think about the games I played as a kid, and think about those that I invested the most time in, there's one common theme - all or nothing. What I mean by that, is that the first console I ever played with was the Sega Master System II, which took read-only cartridges, had no internal storage other than its firmware, and didn't have memory card slots. When you played a game, you started from the beginning, every time, and if you wanted to finish the game, you had to do it in one run from start to finish.
Alex Kidd In Miracle World, and Sonic The Hedgehog are the two games for the SMS2 that I spent the most time playing, neither one I managed to finish as a kid - I have since, with the help of emulators but that still feels like admitting defeat to some degree because it's not the way the games were designed or intended to be played. Regardless, both games are still considered quite difficult, despite all that has come and gone since then. That specific iteration of Sonic 1 has been released on many other platforms, sometimes they were close copies but made easier, like the Game Gear version, and sometimes they were completely different like the Mega Drive version and Genesis version. The point of the "Master System" series of consoles was that they were intended to be difficult to complete.
I remember the hours I played Sonic or Alex, only to die late game and the frustration I would feel in that moment. You were faced with a decision, to rage quit, angered by the stupidity of the loss, or to contemplate whether you had the time to potentially finish the game starting from scratch if you were to replay, you had to face that reality before you started again because no matter how far you got, if you had to stop for whatever reason, that progress would be lost. When I look back on this and compare it to modern games, despite the assumption that being able to save your games would make you more likely to stop, I think it actually had the opposite effect. You were more likely to stop when you had spent hours playing and just died and lost all that progress. Being able to save your game encourages the "one more round" / "one more go" mentality, where you try to eek out every last drop of progress you can get from your gaming sessions which inevitably draws them out.
A Second Chance
The concept of an extra life in video games has its origin in the arcade where you inserted money to play the game, and the profit motivation of the cabinet designers necessitated limiting how long a player could spend on a single run of the game - in other words, how much play time that single coin bought the player. Lives were used to limit the play time, with the requirement to pay more to keep playing being the driver. In those early days of home consoles, they sought to emulate the arcade experience and let people play games that were functionally similar, but without the need to insert a coin to keep playing, the inclusion of lives never really made sense, still they persisted for several decades, even today some mainstream titles still have similar limits for arbitrary reasons.
When I think about the games I play today, the time it takes to finish the game has gone from a few hours to a few days or a few weeks, the ability to save progress is a necessity because of the length of time and the amount of objectives there are within the games to achieve. Still I wonder at times whether games should have replay value. In those early days of my journey through gaming, the desire to finish the game was my driver, and the inability to do that was what made me come back to play again - a lack of choice was the other limiting factor, I owned 6 games for the SMS2 and swapped them with friends frequently to play others, future console generations I would do the same, and rent other titles until that no longer became an option. Point was, the illusion of endless choice and the belief that I could find something better to play than the immediate choices before me wasn't something that factored into the decision making process when it came to picking what to play.
Today there are just under 200 games in my Steam library, and probably more than that in my Epic Games library - most of the epic games I got for free over the years from their weekly free game offers (every Thursday two games are listed for free which you can add to your library and keep) that's in addition to games I bought which don't have DRM or a digital store that manages them. So when it comes to PC games there's a mountain of choice that my younger self would be amazed by, but at the same time I spend less time invested in each game than I did when I was a child. There are only a handful of games, Minecraft, Hollow Knight, Stardew Valley, Slime Rancher, to name a few where I have a significant emotional attachment and collectively over 2,000 hours of gameplay racked up at this point. None of those games would make sense to play if you couldn't save your progress - even Hollow Knight with its Steel Soul mode and Minecraft with its Survival Hardcore mode both let you save your progress, despite the fact that dying ends the game with no opportunity to continue they still don't expect you to finish the games in one unbroken run without stopping, I don't think many could other than speed-runners and even then you're probably going to rely on exploits to be able to do that.
Disposable Media
In the last few years I've been making a conscious effort to stop treating my digital media as disposable. I became conscious a few years ago now that I had played so many games once and then moved on, listened to new music and watched new TV shows and Movies on streaming services and never returned to them. Just like the games I played a lot as a kid and developed an attachment to, the music and TV shows I go back and watch time and again are all things I consumed repeatedly when I was younger.
I cleaned out my home, not for want of a Marie Kondo inspired life, but for a want of a more organised living environment and the space to breathe; old clothes and physical media I had no use for anymore went to charity shops, anything that was beyond salvage went to the local dump, and some things went to the recycling centre. I've been making an effort to treat my digital life the same way. I have deleted gigabytes of old documents, photos and things I no longer need, and I got rid of a lot of software I hadn't used for years. My games libraries however are a lot harder to organise.
When it comes to Steam, there are about 50 games that have under an hour of gameplay each, games which I haven't gone back to reply, not because I didn't like them but because there wasn't much to them once you completed them, or once you experienced the novelty, a few others are there purely for the sake of nostalgia having gone back to replay them when they were remastered, Alex Kidd in Miracle World for instance was remastered and released on Steam and despite having probably hundreds of hours sunk into the game when I played it on the SMS2, it has just 27 minutes of gameplay racked up in my Steam library, it satisfied my curiosity, and scratched the itch of wanting to know what the game would look like if it were released today.
It's a shame that you can't take a Steam game you already own and gift it to someone else who might get more use out of it than you. I know Steam has a marketplace where you can sell the trading cards that you occasionally unlock from games, it would be nice if they allowed you to list a game you no longer want on there for others to buy at a discount, a digital second-hand market. I understand why this isn't a thing, but I still feel like it should be. With physical media when I consumed something and got all the enjoyment I was realistically ever going to get out of it I could package it up and sell it on to someone else, or donate it to a charity shop, or give it to friends and family as I did with most of my old consoles. That media used to have a chance at a second life, part of me is quite sad that digital media doesn't have that chance.