The Road to Gaming Hell is Paved With Good Intentions

Being a principled gamer isn’t always easy. I know, I tend to rant a lot against games featuring grizzled “space marines” and nothing but shooting people in the face. I love to rant against games being too violent to show to nongamers. I like nothing better than go out and bemoan the lack of originality. But when the next swath of new games swings around, I rarely double check on whether or not the games I’m about to finance, the products I’m going to vote for with the power of my wallet, are in accordance with my principles or not.

There are some things that get me to really avoid titles. Sometimes. Horrid DLC tactics for example. But even there I’m not a well principled person despite all my ranting. I still bought Deus Ex Human Revolution like any other guy even though it featured pre-order exclusive DLC. And it gets worse with genres, tropes and gameplay features. This year I’m sinning twice with my two first big purchases. Binary Domain is a game featuring a lot of “space marine” protagonist, a token female and colored character, third person shooting and, well, not blood since there are only robots to shoot at, but that makes little difference since most of the game seems to be shooting. The other game I’ve got on preorder is Syndicate, which, despite seeming to have decent characters, story and setting, is cut out to be the most gruesomely, gratuitously violent game since a very long time.

When id’s Rage rolled around, I swore to myself that would be the last game featuring ruined civilizations as it’s main backdrop for me to buy since gaming really has ridden that horse to death. Now I Am Alive rolls around and promises to make ruined cities interesting again.

Whenever I play some new pretty but simple shooter, I get the feeling of having played that game before a couple of times and tell myself that I won’t go for another one of these. But then another, prettier shooter comes around, and I find myself wondering why I again have this sense of deja-vu.

Maybe I’m just a weak willed gamer, having been conditioned by the industry to some sort of Pavlovian reflex that makes me buy things that call to some part of my brain. Maybe I should just develop a stronger catalog of principles, and stick to them, despite of what the industry’s advertising departments keep suggesting that I’m missing out on. At the end of the day, when I’m being true to what I really want from gaming, there certainly are a lot less games that are absolutely unmissable and worth a purchase and the time invested.

Maybe if I—maybe if we, gamers collectively—adhered more to our principles and just didn’t buy all the diamond encrusted turds the industry throws at us, maybe just maybe we might see better games being made out of sheer necessity.

I have started sticking to my principles now by ordering Mass Effect 3—and canceling that order a few minutes after placing it. I want to play that game, so I can base my criticism on solid experience. But I do not wish to give BioWare/EA my money for all the shenanigans they pulled with this title.