Monday, February 9, 2009 | posted by James Thomas à Becket

Demos: The Impending Glory of American Adulthood

The title is another Crime In Stereo song, off of their now-venerated 2006 record, the Troubled Stateside. Buy it now. The song is track three. Both the song and this piece are about the same emotion: Shit, I'm growing up.

These columns are starting to turn into letters to the community. I don't know whether it's just my pronounced anti-social tendencies (Seasonal Affect Disorder, how are you?) or that I’m getting better at writing.
Grant me your attention, if for a moment. I do feel as if I'm clinging to my sanity or good humor.
The current generation of games does not interest me. This isn't for reasons of quality, since 2008 was one of the best years for games in recent memory. I simply can't afford the new games and systems.
I'm feeling more and more distant from the current gaming generation and the reasons, aside from revenue, aren't really fashionable. I'm getting older and have other equally expensive interests to cultivate as well as a limited amount of time to indulge them all.

Investing in new systems is maddening. The Xbox 360 is prone to hardware failure and has a tiered pricing structure, which means if I don't want to play inventory management on my console, I have to buy an external hard drive (or pay extra). Plus, its new games cost $60. The Wii has yet to find a library of third party games that take advantage of the Wii remote and are actually worth playing. The PS3 (and the games on it) is still too expensive for my tastes and does not retain the PS2 backwards compatibility, which is where most of my games are.
I've yet to exhaust that library. Sitting by my television is a stack of about five or six stellar PS2 games (a later Burnout and Splinter Cell iteration and God Of War 2, among others) released in the last four years, each of which needs finishing or starting. I'm also tempted by the promise of the Baldur's Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights collections for a whopping $30 total.

Like books, movies, TV shows and other media, there’s always something new and shiny. But there are three or four less shiny things that get left along the way. The trick, if videogames are to be a hobby that does not cripple you financially, is to stay a couple years behind the cutting edge.

There are advantages to this for PC gaming—hopefully the bugs in the original games will have been fixed. The expansions on content will also usually come to you for free since the game is no longer current. It also means that on the console side the good games will have been removed from the chaff and will cost you half as much. It's because of these older games that I'm okay with becoming increasingly irrelevant in current videogame discourse. For reasons that make a sad logic to me, I am not much of a "gamer".

Gaming is an expensive hobby to stay up-to-date with. In some circles, it's only when I'm willing to pay a $350+ ante to play a $60 game that I am marked as a gamer. The disposable income exists to do that and buy one game, presuming I don't want to eat or enjoy anything else until the semester is over.
I'm keenly aware that I will not have as much time as I currently do later on, so five or six games will last me at least eighteen months. By then, the price will have gone down for the next generation systems and I'll have bought the aforementioned Baldur's Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights collections.

As I get older, I'm beginning to wonder if the real question of videogames is not what you pick up and what you stay current with, but instead what you leave behind along the way. I view the trailing edge as the way to play videogames like one might pick flowers--slowly and with gusto. This only makes the scent sweeter in a world that moves quickly and without pity. Whether it's a chrysanthemum or a controller, I hope you'll pick one up.

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