Left Behind: Living in Past Generations

There are 795 total Playstation 3 games in existence. 

Let’s assume, incorrectly, that each one cost $50 and average out to 15 hours to complete in full.  You would need $39,750 and 497 days’ worth of free time to complete them all in one non-stop gaming session—and that doesn’t count games like Grand Theft Auto, Saints Row, Dark Souls, ect where half of the joy is replaying and exploring every corner of the world.

Yet, despite the fact I still have 780 PS3 games yet to buy and play, I feel pressured both by the industry and the culture that surrounds it to buy a PS4.

I pose that as if I find it mystifying, but really, it makes perfect sense: most of these PS3 games I’m not interested in, there are PS4 games I want to play, the PS4 has better graphics and more features, all the latest games will be made for it and most of the community will be migrating to it, so if I want to stay relevant in any discussion about games I’ll eventually need to buy one.   Economically and culturally, it’s obvious I would want the bigger, newer, better model over ol’ faithful.

The thing is, I can’t.  Myself and others like me don’t have the money to justify buying a brand new console: those things are expensive and when the choice is between a new system and feeding the cat, well, I’m going to feed my cat because I’m not a horrible human being.  And in some respects, I should feel like I’m missing out—because I am.  I should feel like the culture’s moving forward without me, because it will be.  I should feel as if I have nothing to say regarding more recent game releases, because I won’t have played the games everyone’s talking about.

But I shouldn’t feel like a bad gamer.

That’s kind of what winds up happening for myself and people like me.  Those ‘left behind’ (SEE WHAT I DID THERE?) by the next generation with our older games and older systems begin to feel more than just being behind everyone else, we start to question the validity of our place in our own culture.  Like there really are gamer cards and we’re forfeiting ours because we can’t afford to keep up with the Joneses.  It doesn’t matter how much games we have, or how many games we’ve played: suddenly, what matters is all the games we won’t get to play.

It’s a symptom of our culture, which is a symptom of media as an institution.  Unless a game is a fantastic hallmark of its genre (Chrono Trigger, Halo, Starcraft, Tex Avery) you won’t find any discussion about it three, four years after release.  People have moved on, and there’s no online forum for “people who were late to play Impossible Creatures”.   Once a game is three months after release, the community that surrounds it starts to migrate to other games and form a community around THAT title, and the distance between the mainstream and those ‘left behind’ gets wider.   We’re still re-playing Prince of Persia and grabbing PS2 titles in bulk from our local games store, we don’t have anyone to talk too or community to engage with (not counting friends in real-life who might talk with you about these things)—we lack validation from the community at large that we’re still an active participant in the world of games. 



Part of that is necessity.  The games industry is on the go and constantly evolving: there are thousands of games in the world now, to keep the culture from feeling impossibly fragmented it can only take with it the couple-dozen timeless gems we admire and praise.  People, too, change: when I was a kid I was obsessed with Custom Robo (look it up, it’s still amazing) but while I would have happily talked for hours with strangers online about what builds we use and what strategies we liked best, nowadays I can only really remember the drill was OP and my favorite frame was profoundly awful.   I probably couldn’t carry on a talk about the game for a few minutes, let alone a few hours, unless someone made me play for a little while to reignite my nostalgia.

But to a larger degree, I feel like a lot of it amounts to elitism, one of the major bugbears of geek culture as of late.  I think there’s a broadly accepted view that if you can’t keep up with video games, then you don’t “deserve” to call yourself a gamer.   Everyone seems to have a different definition of what earns you the title we so highly covet (Some would say you have to play X game, you have to enjoy X system, you have to own X number of games, ect) but the only one really enforced by our external media and developers themselves is “owning the most recent console/PC”. 

Think about it: is there any reason Kotaku or Game Informer HAS to write articles about Destiny and not, say, the original Twisted Metal?   Is there any law preventing developers from making new PS1 games or a title for the Dreamcast?  

The only law is the law of economics: the PS4, Xbox One, brand new PC’s, those are where the money is.  If someone has the money to pay for a 400 dollar luxury item, they must have the money to furnish it with all the best, most expensive, flashiest games.   Accordingly, anyone who’s going to buy a subscription to Game Informer or share a link to an article on Kotaku are going to be those very people.  It’s a self-perpetuating machine—they have the money, so they’re the target audience, so they decide who a ‘gamer’ really is, and thus they reinforce their own hexarchy and leave the rest of us behind.  In that respect, it’s almost like “You need to have this X money to call yourself a gamer”.

I’ve seen that argued before, actually: “if you’re poor, you shouldn’t spend money on games!”—sure, it makes sense, if you think people in poverty are robots who need only food and clothes to stay sane.  More often than not, poor gamers use the escapism of video games to help them cope with their difficult lives, something they need since they can’t afford other luxuries.   And I think it’s a shame that the games culture has nothing to offer them.  You pick up a PS1 from a Goodwill or whatever, manage to find some Crash Bandicoot games, but for most—both in the industry and in the culture—that’s not enough to call yourself a gamer, and reap the benefits of being in a community of likeminded fans.



Unfortunately, I don’t think this is the kind of thing that can be fixed outside a personal level.  No developer in their right mind would devote themselves to making a game for an older console so we have new content to discuss with other players.  And I very much doubt there’s much call for a ‘old games that weren’t really popular but you might have liked” publication or website.  I guess, all I ask is that you take some time to think about those who are still plugging away at Dark Cloud on their old PS2’s and think about what you might say to someone who was.  There’s a lot of discrimination in the world of gaming: let’s try to stop economics from becoming one of them.