We Need More Deliciously Addictive Games – Cold Take

I’m a man of extremes who’s extremes average each other out, so I’d like to balance out the last video’s downer tone with a little toxic positivity.

There are truly great games these days. Good wholesome, nutritious games are important, and they do exist. But I think people have forgotten what it’s like to be in the heated embrace of a game so devilishly crafted it costs you your health, your social life, your college career, and your sanity while you smile ear to ear as it all comes tumbling down. After all, escapism is the drug of choice for the gaming community. It’s a drug that a business major with a minor in sociology can try in vain to synthesize, but it’s not going to come out of many studios if they’re playing it too safe. Games still come out that are too good for their own good, but they’re too spread out across different genres. We’re missing the addictive quality and quantity of the product that made the game industry bigger than movies and music combined. This might sound weird, but I don’t mind if a game’s predatory or tries to manipulate me. What’s a great game if not a hijacking of the brain? The problem is I haven’t been hijacked in a while.

As far as wholesome, non-predatory games go, I don’t think any community speaks up for their game like Deep Rock Galactic’s. Ghost Ship Games has sold over 5.5 million copies of their online co-op shooter featuring a lot of the contemporary norms. It’s a live service online multiplayer game with battlepasses. That’s more red flags than a golf course. But the gameplay is balanced around chilled out teamwork and the battlepasses can be done at your own pace. There is no FOMO, no ‘Fear Of Missing Out,’ because you can’t miss out. And I almost forgot to mention these battlepasses are free. The devs try to stay in contact with the community and they’re able to respond directly to the fans without worrying about numbers from on high. At worst it’s possible to become a little too fixated on completing your routine tasks and push a sleep schedule back a few hours, but no one’s gonna judge ya for partaking in the virtual equivalent of grabbing a few drinks at the pub with friends and staying out until closing time. Under the surface of dangerous caverns and alien combat, the game offers serenity and bliss, or as the gnome spelunking enthusiasts would put it, “Rock and Stone.”

But Serenity and Bliss are a different drug. Primarily peddled by the cozy genre, we’ve always had a game or two that dealt in low-stress high-enjoyment experiences like the Sims, and the genre’s really been standing out as of late. Valley Peaks promises mountain climbing as a frog in a world where you can practically smell the brisk Autumn air. Mika and the Witch’s Mountain feels like your own Studio Ghibli adventure as a one-witch postal delivery service. Post-dad games like Power Wash Simulator and Hardship Spacebreaker are seeing high demand for invoking the satisfaction of a job well done. It’s gotten to the point where you can garden in Jedi Survivor and nurture your own slice of heaven in Disney Dreamlight Valley with all the other HarvestValley-likes –even Johnny Triple-A wants a cut of the cozy action. These games are important. Cherish them. But it’s going to take a little more than Serenity and Bliss to get us away from the zombie drugs the business has to offer. People need a visceral high again.

Take these modern incremental loot systems for example. Finding gear that increases your stats by a percentage of a percentage is like sniffing glue compared to vintage Borderlands, Diablo, or even Terraria loot systems where you’re hunting down each individual piece to a set that can give you completely unique and diverse abilities. I still check in on Ubisoft’s game trailers from time to time to see if their open world adventures are worth camping outside of a GameStop at midnight and calling in sick for a week, because I crave the near-sinful pleasures their products used to provide for a one time fee. Games like the OG Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry showed the game industry we would settle for nothing less than the best until we settled for less than the best. Every game studio and buzzword you turn your nose at nowadays used to turn noses the other way if you catch my drift, so I don’t fault people for gravitating to the next closest thing– cut with a little more sawdust each year. FromSoftware still gets mentioned week after week because they’re one of the few remaining dealers trying to put their fans in the clouds with each release. But contrary to the opinion of the fans, they don’t supply the entire space.

If you don’t like souls games or Nintendo’s Tears of the Kingdom then you’re stuck scratching the withdrawals away while you wait for the next hit in your preferred genre, be it platformers, looter shooters, sports games, ARPGs, open worlds, Todd Howards… Not everyone likes every kind of game. Your high may not suffice mine and vice-versa. But shooters used to have an overabundance of superstars like Half-Life, Doom, GoldenEye and so on. Platformers had dangerous diversity across Banjo-Kazooie, Mario, Psychonauts and so forth. The indie scene was cranking out anything: Undertale, The Binding of Isaac, Rimworld, and the like. Each individual genre seemed fully stocked to the point where I could be in online calls with my friends and each of us was playing a different favorite game that was released that year. There is still high quality product, but if it’s not in your preferred genre then you have to wait for the next lap around to see if it’s your turn.

Don’t conflate this with me asking for more high-prestige games. Wanting every game to gun for game of the year or bust gives this air of pretentiousness to the point where you can feel games bending over backwards to include as many award-bait features as possible. But then there’s also an air of resignation. If you’re not going to be game of the year then what’s the point? Just because you won’t be the game of the year doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to be someone’s game of the year. Somewhere between B-tier and award-winning is where games like Project Zomboid or UltraKill make their home. These are the summer blockbuster hits. The Will Smiths of the game industry. It’s nice you got the Oscar for King Richard. However it was Bad Boys, Men in Black, Enemy of the State, Wild Wild West that sold us on Will Smith Summer and none of those saw an award.

I’m not condoning vices. All I’m saying is if I must choose a vice I’d like it to make me feel something beyond mild numbing dissociation, but I don’t always want it to take me on an introspective trip through the cosmos. It’s like having a dealer that only ever sells you two things: a tube of OraGel they found on the street or gluten-free LSD.  But OraGel is where we are because good games have played it safe for a while now. Looking at the big hits of 2023 so far shows that a decent chunk of them are laced in Nostalgia. Dead Space, Metroid, System Shock, and Resident Evil with more to round out the year perhaps. As good as they are, our tolerance inevitably builds up and makes it harder to get to the same place with the same recipe. Nostalgia reminds us of the good days, but it’s missing the fearlessness and suspense of the time. Maybe it’s because the economy is currently looking like two miles of bad road. Maybe Sony doesn’t feel the need to shoot for the stars while Microsoft’s doing a nosebleeding nosedive. Nintendo’s still got the goods, putting out a title that’s so much more in line with my desires that I might muster up the courage to wrestle the Switch away from my girlfriend for a sniff. No one seems to remember the guy Nintendo sued into legal slavery for modding their games now, huh?

It’s hard to hear the cries of “Boycott Blizzard” over the amount of traffic Diablo IV is getting currently. Imagine that power of development being used for good. All the psychological trickery and sociological design being put back into world building, character development, and creating intricate systems to create worlds unthinkable to the human mind and mechanics that innovate what we already love across a multitude of genres all at once. Maybe that’s the key element that’s missing here, the phrase “all at once.” Games needed to deliver a near lethal dose as soon as you opened the box because there were no second chances. The internet lets studios slowly drip-feed dopamine over a longer period of time. Distractions are what’s on offer because they’re cheaper to make than Escapism and will make do in the meantime.

Consider me the ugly duckling of reviewers. While I do believe video games can be high art, I’m also looking for a dirty good time. While I do pay my dues to the wholesome games and occasional near-masterpieces, I think there is a lack of fearlessness in the developer space to make raunchy intoxicating experiences that remind people that we got into this habit for more than just a mild buzz.