Games are always in flux and I love it
The video game industry changes a lot, and it’s always to be expected. It’s that time of year again when we’re excited to see all the new trailers and we’re thinking about the future not in terms of days, weeks or even months, but five. With each new title released, we look forward to seeing how the graphics, gameplay, story, art and music will push the game even further, showing us something this medium hasn’t. have done before. The constant buzz over new consoles has become even more pronounced with the scarcity of new hardware from the ninth generation.
There’s a constant drive that pushes us forward, and while that’s exciting, my emotional side wants to slow down and smell the roses a little. I get indignant just looking at a side by side video game graphics from nearly thirty years ago to the present. Maybe that’s why I’ve been playing a lot of cozy community emulators lately.
Final Fantasy Glowup are from gaming
The future of video games is impermanent
This sentimental mentality got me thinking about how fleeting and impermanent games are. I compared video games to the live theater before, because live performance is the closest cousin we have in the game. There are many reasons for this, but what I want to find out here is how, like every performance of a play, musical, show, etc., will be unique to any other game, no two levels of a game will be exactly the same.
In the way that different actors taking on famous roles like Hamlet will portray the same character in a way only they can, different players can alter the most linear bit of the sentence. Chat games just based on how they want to play.
Action in our own game
A classic example of this is a pacifist stealth game against genocide, which can lead to “good” or “bad” endings in some cases. While the majority of characters can be set in stone, the player still has the ability to change the way they act out that story through the game. Is your character a ruthless killer who wields a flaming gun? Or are they trying to stay as peaceful as possible, choosing to sneak past all enemies instead? Do they try to avoid fatal hits to the best of their ability, only to make mistakes and cause the character to make deplorable choices?
Not only do the players act out a character’s story according to their own interpretation, but their “performance” also ends and is performed with the final degree of curtain falling at the end of the play. What’s even more interesting about the game is that you can do this an infinite number of times just by restarting a checkpoint if you want to. Unless you have the perfect frame, even the most carefully compiled speed runs will never be exactly the same. Things can only get more interesting from here, with the future of video games geared towards improved AI and process-generated content.
A race against time
Of course, this also has a downside – the fact that we’re losing track of hundreds of game history to the gradual degradation of hardware. Old games and consoles are literally rotting, and the thought of that makes me incredibly sad. Books can last for thousands of years because all you have to do is open a book and grow, you get the full experience.
It seems that the more complex our media is, the harder it is to make sure they last. The film industry is also solving this problem by film roll decompositionand the games are on track as important parts of the original game history are being lost to the hands poor storage conditions and rotting plastic.
Fans on the internet have really done a great job of storing online game content in ROMs, but sometimes you can feel like you’re missing out on the full experience by not playing the game as originally intended. . Plus, legality is always a little tricky – companies like Nintendo notorious for raiding ROM sites.
It comes in a lot of different forms, but there’s really something about games that keeps them changing and evolving, for better and for worse. Although we may run the risk of losing some really great artwork (something archivists are getting better and better at fighting), there’s really something invigorating about how this industry keeps moving forward all the time. Sometimes I feel so tired, but the optimism always hoping for something interesting right next to me is the reason for me to keep coming back to my favorite games. Personally, I think the future of video games is very bright.
