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Video game reviews are useless. The numeric score is useless. You can't judge a game dispassionately because a game is not a sum of its parts. A game is an experience. In as much as every person can look at a painting and have different feelings about it, people will have different feelings about a game.
A video game experience is not the sum of its parts, but how the individual interacts with those parts. I love the playfulness and inventiveness of Super Mario Galaxy 2. I hate that extra lives can be found on your home fucking base. They used to mean something. 99 extra lives used to be an achievement, not the sign of a particularly lengthy play session.
But this isn't a rant about how things used to be, or even how things should be. It's an exploration of why my brother and I, who have been "gamers" (I suppose) all our lives, enjoy vastly different elements of video games.
This came to light when he started playing World of Warcraft after me. I had fallen in love with the sandbox of an open world, with the rich lore behind the game (yes, I read the lengthy backstory, but not the novels), and the unique storytelling experience it offered. It was a rabbit hole.
My brother played the game and saw an opportunity to excel. This was something he could be good at. There was a distinction to be made between him and everyone else that played the game because he could make himself better than others. It sounds shallow, but it's just a different game experience.
Neither approach is better than the other. We both succeed in deriving joy from the games we play. It so happens that we enjoy different types of games as a result. We both love Left 4 Dead and Tribes 2. He loves it because he can play better than others in a competitive fashion. The same could be said for PvP in World of Warcraft, but I never saw its appeal. It was just a facet of the game that I never really felt rewarded exploring.
Back to Left 4 Dead and Tribes 2 though. My brother hungers for dominance in these games. He wants to beat the other side in such a fashion that they stay down. I savor that one glorious moment; the 20 damage pounce or the mid-air spinfusor disk. These are the moments that make the time invested worth it to me. These moments are harder to nail down in a sandbox game like World of Warcraft, but they are there none the less. I savor the view from atop the mountain, then go looking for another mountain to climb. My brother likes to sit atop the mountain.
But he's not an elitist. He never has been. To say otherwise would be insulting. He's always been generous in sharing his expertise in the games he's played. It started (for me) with Super Mario World, a definitively single-player experience. I would watch, he would play. I got to see the world, and he got to beat it. We both got what we wanted from the game.
Video games have been as much a social experience for me as they have been for my brother. He competes, I play cooperatively. When we play games together, this makes PvP a pretty comical thing to behold. He's trying to beat the other team, and I'm trying to help him do so. I have a PvE mindset in a PvP setting, whereas he can switch gears. So he tells me what to do in real time and I try to execute what he's saying. He's essentially playing two characters.
I guess my case study has been, and will likely be for the foreseeable future, my brother and I. We have more or less similar backgrounds, but fundamentally different approaches to video games. I can sit down with a single-player game and be fine, but he wonders what the point of it is.
Maybe the little brother is just more mature in this case. Mom told me once that I was born 30 years old.
(I should link to this blog, because this post echoes a lot of what he's said: Insult Swordfighting)
The Land of the Thin-Skinned
10 hours ago
