I vaguely remember a time when video games weren’t home appliances yet, but right now. I was born in 1980, and the Nintendo Entertainment System came to the United States six years later, exactly when my dad brought home my family’s first personal computer. So even though I remember when games weren’t popular yet, I’ll be one of the last to; since then, games have been an integral part of all our lives, and it goes without saying that they will come to our lives. when we are older The question is, what games and how?
It becomes a rather complicated thought experiment. Will I want to play the games I love now thirty, forty, or fifty years from now, or the games I loved back in the ’90s as a teenager, when gaming was in its first real heyday? It would make sense: many people enjoy listening to the music they heard as teenagers, music that shaped their idea of what music is and created a sense of identity and culture. The same can be true for gaming: RPGs and shooters from the 1990s definitely take me back to a certain period in my life, and probably always will.
Gaming is now more popular than ever and every day countless young people play the first game they fall in love with. Somewhere, a boy plays Elden Ring for the first time, perhaps changing his idea of what an RPG could be. Someone plays their first round of Apex Legends or Call of Duty: Warzone or Warhammer 40k: Darktide with friends and immediately realizes that cooperative games have their own powerful electric magic.
In the recent Call of Duty: Warzone game in the new DMZ mode, my team and I boarded one of the last helicopters to take off from Al Mazra when the city was filled with radioactive gas. We seized an armored truck from a heavily fortified compound on a nearby mountain after my brother managed to revive me and our friend from a heavy firefight that knocked us out, and ran down the hill to the exile site with pockets full of disks. hard. . and propane tanks. This is it, I thought to myself. This is how you want to play Call of Duty forever, instantly realizing that it will be impossible.
What worries me is that many of today’s old classic games won’t be around indefinitely or even for very long. In an ideal world, we would do more to preserve games for future generations to play, but even if that were the case, modern multiplayer online games like the DMZ are transient in nature, even the most popular ones are phenomena that eventually fade away. will extinguish. We’ll play them for a while and phase them out until the publisher finally decides they don’t have a large enough player base to justify the cost of keeping the servers up and running. is in action
Some multiplayer games exist via peer-to-peer matchmaking and private servers, but they don’t work for everyone. Even games that aren’t primarily focused on multiplayer, especially the Dark Souls series, aren’t complete without a server connection. If the servers for Elden Ring or Dark Souls III go down for good, will we be able to bring back what their developers planned? I think it is unlikely.
Even the games we play now are not what they were when they were first released. There is currently no way to play the Red War story campaign in Destiny 2, and the jumping system introduced in 2020 means there are no full patrol areas and countless missions within them, just whatever version of Destiny 2 you can. play right now. . . If Fortnite is still with us 30 years from now, it won’t be the same game it is today.
I think it’s safe to say that my retirement years will not be fulfilled by any of today’s live service games. It seems inevitable that they will stay with us for decades to come in one form or another, but they all have a lifespan. I’ll have to play everything new and popular if I want to keep playing battle royale into old age.
For me, the glow of keeping up with the latest technological advances is fading fast already, and I highly doubt that at 70 I’d care much if a new graphics card can reproduce the individual basal cells that cover Doomguy. forearm arthritis
Right now, the easiest game for me to imagine in decades is Dwarf Fortress, which always felt like a handcrafted legacy that got unstuck from time to time. His obsessively detailed modeling produces results that I find endlessly surprising and charming (even, or perhaps especially when they lead to disasters), and have fascinated me even more in the 15 years he’s been on my radar. .
But at the same time, during the two years of the pandemic, I have found that online gaming has become an indispensable means of keeping in touch with the people I care about. My single player colony management sims and dusty old war games cannot provide the connection and shared joy I experienced in Al-Mazra and Tertium, and as the journeys have become more difficult in my later years, I think I’m going to want to rely on cooperative games to make up the slack.
As AARP found in a 2020 study conducted by the organization, the number of older gamers is increasing, and their (our?) share of the gaming market will only increase as my age group approaches retirement age. . We’re all on this journey somewhere, and it’s worth considering what else we’d like to have with us as we near its end.
Source : PC Gamesn
