When I was a kid, I first discovered video games in the basement of some friends’ house down the street, where they had a Sega Genesis. I would later receive one for Christmas because I wanted one so badly, and it wasn’t long before the first Playstation came out and I had one of those, too.
That first Playstation came with a game I’ll never forget: Spyro the Dragon. It was fun, cartoony, and came in three dimensions. Pretty intense stuff. So when Spyro 2 came out, I was all over that. And Spyro 2 did something very interesting….
Skill Points. Skill points were little rewards you could earn for doing weird things throughout the game, such as destroying all the cacti in a level, or landing on a difficult-to-reach ledge, or beating a particular record for time challenges. Sometimes these skill points would unlock concept art from the game’s design, or possibly cheats. But the point was, they were not an integral part of the game; they were more like side quests that would unlock extra features.
When Insomniac sold the rights to Spryo and began developing Ratchet and Clank for the Playstation 2, I was very hesitant to trade my dragon friend in for some weird-looking rodent. How could you, Insomniac?! But since the game came with the Playstation as part of the bundle my parents bought that Christmas, I figured I’d give it a try, and it was totally worth it. Ratchet and Clank was such a hit that it’s gone on for some 10+ additional games, many of which I have played.
But Ratchet and Clank carried the concept of Skill Points forward, going even farther with them. You could unlock different bodies for your character, such as a snowman, unlock strange features such as displaying the levels in horizontal reverse, giving enemies big heads, etc. Now, I never played a wide range of games, but I still suspect that this is where it all began. Sure, games had had cheats for ages, but this was different. This wasn’t hitting A + up down left right + start on the title screen. These were built-in objectives and they were rewarding because they often came with a sense of accomplishment, and gave you greater insight into the game itself. Real fans did all the skill points.
Imagine my surprise when the PS3 came out and every single game had “skill points”. But now they were called “Trophies”. Whenever you completed one of these meta side-quests, a little icon would pop up indicating you had achieved one of those trophies, and it would become a permanent part of your game profile. This is one of the worst things that has ever happened to video games, in my opinion.
It was fun having a few games that gave extra challenges to reach. There were not a tremendous number of them, and they were easy to be familiar with. But then, every single game that was released had these quests. You were no longer just completing a game, you were fighting it for those trophies. And every trophy was marked by how rare it was, some statistical measure of how many people had accomplished it. Some games could have 50 of these inane side-quests, designed not so much to give you a cool little feature as to keep you playing. Keep you addicted. Keep you “achieving”. And it makes me want to throw up because it didn’t have to be like this.
Some people are perfectly capable of ignoring these trophies. I am not. I really hate seeing my completion of a game as a trophy percentage. It ruins some of the experience for me. I have a streak of perfectionism in me that is fairly common, and I’ve always been somebody who preferred to “100%” a game if the option was available.
Like, why can’t I just play a game, win it, and be done? Oh, because gamers supposedly always want more content, right? So let’s give them 100 trophies to earn so they keep playing! And we’ve seen games get larger and larger, too. It hijacks your brain’s reward system. It also hijacks your time.
I got rid of my PS2 several years ago, something I really didn’t need to do, but it wasn’t a terrible move, either. But I hadn’t played the original Ratchet and Clank games in ages, and wanted to revisit them. As it turns out, there was a re-release of these as a bundle for the PS3, so I bought that. All I can say is that I’m already sick and tired of them but am too busy chasing these stupid rewards to put it down.
You can’t 100% win Ratchet and Clank 2 the first time. No, you have beat the final boss, then go back for “Challenge Mode” to buy all the weapon upgrades and unlock all the skill points. Why the fuck do we always need challenge mode? Why not just “there, you won, good job. Get outta here”? Because of a problem with how it was designed, one particular skill point took me around 10 tries to get right, even though I had otherwise completed it almost every time. Right now, I’m trying to upgrade all of the weapons to the max, which will cause a cascade of skill points and trophies that will give me the full 100%. But I’m spending hours mindless upgrading these stupid weapons that I never used because they were never useful. And this is basically every Ratchet and Clank game ever, which is why I kind of gave up on them after awhile.
I’m not one of those people who thinks video games in themselves are a waste of time. Some pockets of the Christian church think that anything short of being a full-time international social-working astronaut is evil (“You could be studying another language with that time!”), but what really bothers me about so many games these days is that they are deliberately designed to destroy your life. I guess the hard-core gamers got bored and demanded more content, so you now you have never-ending series of “expansion packs”, new quests, and new things to “achieve”, because some a-hole paid “good money” and wants more. I feel like I’ve wasted my life when I play 4 hours of video games. It makes me want to throw up. But it feels impossible some days to fight that need to reach 100%. So I guess some of that is my fault, but I hate it. I really hate it. I wouldn’t mind taking a sledge hammer to my PS3.
This is, quite simply, why I don’t play many video games. And the vast majority of what I do play are all games I’m already familiar with. Some of these new games are just frickin’ hard to learn. You have to invest a lot of time just getting the controls down, and it doesn’t feel worth it to me. But I also don’t find games to be relaxing, either. Typically, they just piss me off. I remember trying to start Spider Man when my roommate was watching. I felt bad, but I got so insanely pissed off I just gave up. It wasn’t worth it. I’ve never played that game since. I don’t know how some people do this on a regular basis. This is why I still wonder if I would enjoy a Switch. The games just seem to be more user friendly and not as intense as the crap that makes headlines for Playstation and Xbox. But I’d really have to do my research on that first, as a common theme I’ve seen is that no matter what, video games simply don’t relax me at all and I really don’t enjoy them much anyway.
I was there 3000 years ago when this started! Between the anger and wasted time, I kind of despise video games. Pretty soon I hope to get rid of my PS3 and downshift again, but my interest comes and goes in cycles. But as my goals in life have come into clearer focus over time, I find my desire to play games drastically reduced. Like most things, this is different for everybody.