Games As Content

This post was originally made on Cohost in November of 2022.

Thinking about how a game like Stray would still be in the collective unconscious if it came out like, 10-12 years ago. People still talk about Tokyo Jungle with some reverence, and Dragon’s Dogma, these flawed games that hooked people on their world and mechanics, but now… Something feels different.

I don’t know maybe I’m just not in the right circles, but after that first month, the game fell out of any social media posts and discussion. Stray felt like a small game that just caught lightning, it caught things people liked and adored, but maybe it was only surface deep. Maybe I misread the moment.

The only games that get any sort of social cache and staying power are things that belong to huge franchises. Hell, even then it feels like only From Software gets that sort of staying power now. In 5 years will anyone be excited to talk about Stranger of Paradise, despite all the effusive praise it got from fans?

Maybe it’s just a me thing, because I am noticing it with myself. I’m not playing Shin Megami Tensei 5 to like… get lost in it. I’m not getting sucked in. I’m playing it to Play It To Completion. I’m playing it as Content to be Consumed. I’m playing just to Beat it. I can tell you what’s happened, but I can’t really tell you how it made me “feel”. Maybe I’m projecting my own inadequacies in appreciating things onto the population writ large.

This feels though like a widespread movement with how fast our lives became over the past 10-15 years. Twitter innundates you with post after post after post in a continual drumbeat that encourages you to scroll, more, more. Tiktok, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and their predecessor, Vine, got people blasting through incredibly short form videos. Digestible, easy chunks to watch and move on from. We see this contrasted, though, by the popularity of the video essay, videos about topics we’re tangentially interested in that soak up hours of our times. Everything online feels so breakneck that we now need multiple forms of stimuli just to do any one thing. We can’t give something our full attention.

Hell, even streaming is potentially The Most Multitasking. You’re talking to yourself, to your chat, you’re reading chat, reading any alerts, potentially listening to music, as well as playing a game. I told myself so many times that “oh I’ll use streaming to force myself to play this RPG, it’ll keep me honest”, but that’s a lie. I wasn’t taking in anything in the game, I was too busy trying to Talk about the game as it was happening.

The Games Industry itself isn’t much of a help. The second something launches, it’s immediately onto the next thing. Here’s the next hype cycle. The next awards show. The next big thing from Ubisoft, Activision-Blizzard, EA, Naughty Dog, and on and on and on. There’s no chance to breathe most years. When there is a dry spot of the calendar, people get antsy. We just want something to chew through. And then we get our big blockbusters. Games that can range from these 10 hour campaigns (but we really want you to play the Multiplayer), to the Hundred Hour Collectathons and RPGs. Bigger, more expensive, more Stuff to do, otherwise it’s a waste of our money.

Something else kind of related to all this… Your Backlog.

How often does your backlog feel like something you have to “Get through” rather than being games you’re excited to play? The backlog is always said with this sort of weary weight and that’s a real bummer.

I know this is rambling, and I’ve lost the plot of my thesis. I just… feel sort of melancholic about my relationship with Video Games and seeing how other people are playing in a similar sort of way. Playing to just Play. What game on it’s own has developed it’s own Fandom since like, Undertale? A fandom that is producing works of art, fiction, music… months after launch? Persona 5? I KNOW I’m not in the right places for these things. But when Undertale and Persona were getting big, you could not miss at least hearing about it. It feels like fandom now is less unified, more fragmented.

It feels like a hard environment for something to stick around in memory for awhile. Stray felt like something that people would still be talking about, but now, nothing. And I don’t know if I misread the game’s launch as something more than it was, or if we’ve already moved past it.