Five Gaming-Related New Year's Resolutions To Make the World a Better Place
As 2017 squeaks out of the auditorium, dodging the deluge of rotten vegetables we pitched at it for being a world-class dick, we turn our attention to the new year. Surprise, wankers: it's two thousand and eighteen as measured by our completely arbitrary choice for marking the passage of time! That means three hundred and sixty-five days to start hunting new achievements, becoming better people, and apologizing for all the perfidity we got up to last year. Change is hard, which is why Steemit pays me for producing content, not practicing The Worm like I'm the second coming of Scotty 2 Hotty:
If you're in need of inspiration for how to make this year better than the last, I've assembled five humble, 'nobody-will-press-charges-this-time' gaming-themed suggestions guaranteed to power up your new year!
1) Reduce That Backlog!
If you laid every video game cartridge, box, system, instruction manual, disc, controller, magazine, map, and accessory I own end-to-end, I would find your lack of faith disturbing. I own a ridiculous amount of paraphernalia amassed over three decades of hardcore collecting. If I could claim one soldier for every piece of hardware and software in my collection, you would already be living under my benevolent dictatorship where friendships are forged (and destroyed) over two-player co-op games of River City Ransom, and disputes settled with a round of Super Dodge Ball.
A high-ranking member of the Rebel Alliance described my collection as "heavily shielded and carr[ying] a firepower greater than half the star fleet" with "defenses designed around a direct, large-scale assault." I'm not saying, "Come at me, bro!", but...
No, actually, that's exactly what I'm saying.
The problem with a collection large enough to make Wedge remark, "Look at the size of that thing!" is there are literally more man-hours required to play through my backlog than are left in the ticking time-bomb of Mountain Dew, gas station burritos, and Star Wars references that is my heart.
Chances are you've got games in your collection you purchased with money 'younger you' earned, and which 'older you' will never get around to enjoying. So step one of our New Year's Gaming Resolution is to work on that backlog in one of two ways.
The first is to tear ourselves away from Overwatch, WoW, Call of Duty, Battlefield, Minecraft, or whatever online kill-fests currently power our non-working, non-sleeping hours, and attack the problem head-on. Hook up that old system, blow the dust out of a cartridge, revel in the beautiful noise made by a PlayStation loading its BIOS, and put your deflectors on, double front.
Get used to the cramping fingers and tendon pain of old-school controllers and handheld systems, pull a title at random off the shelf, and let it blow out your starboard engine. Even if it takes you down, send a text message to your buddies to get set up for their attack run. Oh yeah, you can almost smell that sweet nostalgia taking over, can't you?
You can? Sorry, that's the gas station burritos.
My bad.
In any case, there's nothing stopping you from creating an account on a site like The Backloggery or GameFAQs to track your wares, then stabilize your rear deflectors and watch for enemy fighters as you dig into that trench.
This is perfectly sage advice for anyone under twenty-five. But the truth of the matter is, I'm not getting any younger. At 40, my reflexes aren't what they used to be, and real life (not to mention real wife) bears down on me like AT-AT Walkers on Hoth where I'm a shield generator. No matter how many snow speeders I throw at the problem, General Veers (who is playing the part of 'Time' in this analogy) will eventually overcome my resistance. I've got a little Ion Cannon surprise of my own waiting for him though: it's called 'letting other people play for me'.
Do a search of YouTube for "[title of your favorite video game here] let's play" and I guarantee you'll find at least one person who speaks your language and has devoted more hours to conquering the shit out of that game I spent in class my freshman year of college. So while you're in the middle of doing something else, load a video of that person playing in another window and enjoy the story. Yes, actually playing the games is important, and if you put down the controller for good you miss out on the pleasure of solving the puzzles and killing the zombies yourself, but let's be honest: 80% of the reason to play a game is to see what the developers put into it. No one gamer can play everything to completion, but the real crime is to miss out on something epic because you couldn't devote 40 hours into getting good enough at Dead Space 2 to beat it to 100% completion in Zealot mode. That's OK: here's a guy doing just that over the course of twenty-four videos, each roughly 25 minutes in length, with zero commentary. Here's a speed runner who obliterates every boxer in Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! faster than it took Tyson to win some of his real-life fights. There are thousands of people who sacrifice their free time playing video games so you can enjoy them while you're "on break" at work.
Resolution 1: Let's see what we've been missing and start killing that backlog one title at a time.
2) Support Preservation!
Nothing lasts forever, but this is especially true in the world of video games. Roughly once every 5-10 years, new systems come out to replace the old and many people happily trade away their old gear to acquire the latest and greatest. Collectors and enthusiasts may keep their systems and horde games like Han Solo amasses debt to crime lords, but collectors don't drive the hobby forward; casual gamers do. And nothing leads to hobby-killing shortages like casual usage. Look at the early years of comic books, before people took an active interest in preserving and collecting them.
I grew up remembering a Pac-Man cabinet in every arcade, corner convenience store, gas station, and pizza joint across Indiana. That must mean there are shit-tons of them out there, right? Well, actually....
Bally Midway manufactured thousands of Pac-Man units, but a quick trip to the Arcade Museum which tracks cabinet ownership among over 7,500 registered users involved in the census shows us there are just over 600 total Pac-Man machines accounted for. And that's tracking everything including conversions and people who just have the PCBs and nothing else. If you only count complete, original uprights and cocktail cabinets, that number drops to 520 original dedicated machines. To put that in perspective, here's Pac-Man cocktail cabinet number 6,557, recently salvaged by the one-man gaming rescue crew that is Patrick Scott Patterson:
(c) Patrick Scott Patterson
Now THAT is a thing of beauty! (c) Patrick Scott Patterson
Arcade Museum obviously cannot account for all of the machines in existence, but there were at least 6,557 cocktail table Pac-Man games manufactured, and we can assume double that or more for stand-up units, just to be conservative.
Do the math.
What happened to all those old cabinets? I know: they're being hoarded by a bunch of asshole re-sellers trying to profit off our thirty-five year old memories, and collectors who don't want us to know they have them, right? Midway made tens of thousands of 'em, they can't just up and vanish. There's got to be more where those came from!
This is what you're most likely to find when you're talking arcade machine salvage. In the foreground is a Defender cabinet (373 known instances) looking like Sheena Easton got her hands on it. Behind it is a Phoenix upright (189 known instances) spilling its guts like a seppuku victim. To quote the OriginalPSP himself:
"It's been 5 years or so since Lonnie McDonald started playing Joust machines all over the country. I was helping him with that a lot at the beginning, as we scoured the country looking for original machines for him to play. All this time later, and only 150 or so have turned up... and some of them aren't fully original.
They made 26,000 Jousts in North America, and a media-covered national tour with a half decade under it has only turned up 150 of them. Even if those machines represent 1/10th of the surviving Jousts, we're talking here about 1,500 left out of 26,000. Even if he's only found 1/20th of the remaining Jousts, we're still at a pathetic remaining number."
This is the truth of our arcade heritage: only a small portion of it still exists in barcades and personal collections. The rest was left to rot in landfills, abandoned malls, and forgotten warehouses. If you think this extends solely to the arcade side, you've got another thing coming: console gaming is exactly the same.
FuncoLand, Electronics Boutique, and GameStop (before they united as one Megazord of second-hand video game sales) in the US routinely tossed out old soft- and hardware they acquired in trade to make room for the latest and greatest. Rental places such as Blockbuster and Hollywood Video followed suit. Even stores that today specialize in retro collecting have no choice but to discard titles that don't sell. How many times do you walk into second-hand stores, check the video games, and see nothing but old sports titles? How many times do you gloss over them because nobody wants them? How long is that store going to hold that copy of Madden 2001 before policy dictates it's dumpster-o'clock? How many of you trade in your old sports titles every year when the new version comes out? How many of you still own a copy of Madden 2001? How many of you just realized that, at some point, Madden 2001 will pass through the Trough of No Value and emerge on the other side?
"So, what, I should buy up every copy of every video game I see because one day it'll be worth money?"
No! I'm not saying that at all--we already tried that with comics in the 1990's and look how that turned out. What I'm getting at is the fallacy of our current mentality that looks at the number of PS2 consoles sold in North America and assumes there are still tens of millions out there to be had. At the time of this writing, there were roughly 2,500 listings for PS2 consoles on eBay, and nearly 650 of them were classified as 'non-working or for parts only'. That's for the best-selling video game console in history.
Think what that means for systems which didn't sell as well.
Think what that means for things our culture has told us are disposable: newsletters, magazines, instruction manuals, and all the rest of the stuff that isn't game software or the hardware upon which we play it. See why places like Video Game Preservation are important yet?
Resolution 2: We're going to pay better attention to the current state of our hobby. If you've got something to be preserved, or see even common pieces for sale you might normally pass over, consider donating them to an organization that will see them taken care of or refurbished so others can use them. Strong are we with The Force...but not that strong. If casual users and society deem our history disposable, then our future will suffer the same fate as Alderaan.
3) Research Our History!
I love playing video games, but playing is only half of the fun of this hobby. The other half lies in the stories, the tragedies, and the triumphs of the people and companies who made it all possible. If you have room on your reading list for a whole slew of book club titles, consider making room in the off-times for something that will inform you about the history of our industry, or at least a branch of it that you find interesting. Or if there's no time for a whole book, a quick read through the internet's back catalog will do wonders for your imagination. You can find articles on everything from licensed video games and anniversary retrospectives to stories about how Ralph Baer was responsible for the first unsolicited dick pic in arcade history and why the developers of Smash TV caved to fan pressure over a simple text screen.
Read the saga of how Sega took on Nintendo in the 16-bit era in Blake Harris's "Console Wars". Learn about the video games that didn't make it home in "Video Games You Will Never Play" by the editors of Unseen64. Discover the rise of the British gaming empire by flipping through "Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders". See how Japanese video games brought the market out of a slump after the gaming crash of the early 1980s with "Power-Up". There are hundreds of titles devoted to the history of our hobby, and the more well-read you are, the better able you will be to spot trends and enjoy the fruit of the developers' labors when you see what they had to go through.
Here goes nothing...except failing Resolution #1.
But books aren't the be-all, end-all of this resolution. YouTube user NoClip crowd-funds whole documentaries about studios and games through Patreon. Twin Perfect has produced a long-running series devoted exclusively to cleaning up all the misconceptions surrounding the early Silent Hill games, reviewing the later ones, and explaining why new developers keep missing the point. YouTuber Fungo got Guy Cihi, James Sunderland's voice actor and likeness, to provide in-person commentary on a four-hour live-stream through Silent Hill 2. Lazy Game Reviews has a playlist devoted to nothing but showcasing thrift store runs, in case you need some suggestions for building your own collection.
Books are too long, and you don't have time to watch hours of video? Don't worry, there's more out there. RetroMags is building the single largest database of video game and computer-related magazines in the world. Yes they host magazine scans, but they also have editors indexing and inventorying the contents of individual magazines, one issue at a time, to create their own Library of Congress card catalog for periodicals. Out of Print Archive is actively preserving high-resolution digital copies of magazines with the blessing of copyright holders. Kiwi's World offers up quality scans of mostly British and Australian publications, making it an amazing resource for gamers looking to learn about what happened across the ponds. Internet Archive user marktrade is a but one soldier in an entire preservation army for gaming-related periodicals.
Resolution 3: Become more educated this year than you were last year. The information is out there, much of it free or inexpensive, and there's no excuse for not taking the time to brush up on the history of your favorite pastime.
4) Contribute As Well As Consume!
Sure it feels awesome to finish off a game we've been working on for days or weeks and watch those credits roll, but that's only half of the hobby. If you're playing games but still feel your life is unfulfilled, then I have the solution: you're consuming too much and contributing too little.
Yes, of course, you're contributing to the hobby with your hard-earned dollars. And no, there's nothing wrong with just playing and enjoying the games you buy. But the truth is, making something and joining the community feels absolutely amazing. So let's work to balance out that scale a little bit and pull up that participation beyond updating your trophy info on PSN. There are a million things you can do to give back to the community that don't involve opening up your wallet and throwing more money at EA for loot crates.
Are you awesome at a particular game, or a particular genre of game? Not necessarily world-record-speedrun-levels of awesome (although that's super cool if you are!), but if your competency with a given title or franchise is such that you can show off some killer tricks, consider starting up a Twitch.tv, YouTube, or other video service live-stream. Not sure how? Take tips from people like Kage848 or GameEdged who built an army of subscribers in the 5- and 6-digit ranges. Are you bilingual? Love playing the sort of things that never made it out of Japan? Consider playing non-English games for an English-speaking audience (or, alternately, English-language games for a non-English audience) like GirlGamerGaB does on her channel. If you're a true badass, record a run for submission to Speed Demos Archive, or if you're more about completion over speed, record a game run for World of Longplays so others can see what the title's all about. And if you think there's no place in the world for you because you're not all that good a player, a search for 'video game fails' on YouTube returns over twenty-six million results. Trust me, if there's one thing a gamer loves, it's watching some other bastard drive a Warthog off a cliff in Halo for a change.
Told you. (c) Spartans Never Die
Video not your thing? Why not try your hand at writing? You're already here on Steemit. Start your own game blog, review old software, or talk about why you enjoy playing games. Who cares if no one reads it? You're making it with your own hands and putting it out there for public consumption--trust me, the platform here's big enough that somebody will upvote you. Do it twice a week for the whole year and that's 104 potential new streams of crypto-based income.
Got the proverbial face for radio? How about a game-themed podcast? Go edit the Retromags database and fill in the details for an issue or two of Game Players or Nintendo Power, or scan a cover they're missing. Even five minutes' work makes the world of gaming a better place.
I know, I know, putting yourself out there about as appealing as navigating an asteroid field as a TIE Fighter pilot. Be a bad ass and do it anyway.
Heck, you don't even need to do anything related to video games, just create something! Whatever you make, even if it sucks, leaves the world an infinitesimally better place than it would be if you hadn't created it. What's more, the more you create, the more you'll want to create. You don't need to set out to change the world, just make your little corner of it a bit more interesting. Don't do it for money or fame, do it because it's awesome.
Do it because you're awesome.
All of that's too time-consuming, you say? That doesn't mean you can't advance the cause with your credit card. Retromags takes donations to cover the cost of hosting the site every year. NoClip uses Patreon, as do thousands of other entrepreneurs. Heck, every creator on Steemit has a tip jar: give that upvote button a Force Push to say thanks if they teach you something or make you laugh.
Resolution 4: we've been sitting on the sidelines of our hobby for long enough. Time to strap on the helmet and wade on to the playing field. Watching from the bench is easy. Getting out there with everyone else is the hard work. And it's time to play hard. Let's make something and give back to our community, whether it's through content, time, or money!
5) Do Something Besides Play Video Games!
This is the most important one of all. The biggie. The Starkiller Base of video game resolutions (you don't understand how it works or why it exists, but you're compelled to destroy it anyway). Video games are awesome! They're a huge part of our culture, millions of us enjoy them, but some of us (myself included) can enjoy them a little too much. Yes, it rocks when you emerge as the top player in an Overwatch battle, or finish an epic raid in World of Warcraft...but neither makes you a better person in any kind of real-life capacity. If your clan is your life, that's fine: just make sure you have a life outside your clan too. As awesome as games are, nobody wants their epitaph to read, "He did nothing but pwn on Star Wars Battlefront for fifty-one years."
Actually...I take that back. Go ahead and put that on my tombstone when I'm gone. It'll be a lie, since I play Battlefront like a Stormtrooper fending off a bunch of pint-size warrior teddy bears, but it's not like anyone could drop a DualShock in my hands and challenge me to a fight on Dagobah after I'm gone.
Resolution 5: this year, we're going to strive to improve just one small aspect of ourselves. Whether that's studying the basics of another language, taking up crafting, getting back into the gym, learning how awesome a crock pot can be, volunteering with a charity organization, or smashing @triverse in another no-rhymes-barred rap battle outside of Kinect Star Wars, let's resolve to do one thing beyond video games to take our life skills to the next level.
I'll see you all back here in 365 days, and with any luck we'll have made the world a better place for gamers and non-gamers alike.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go brush up on my Warthog-driving and Ewok-hunting abilities.
Happy New Year, you bunch of womp rats. May the Force be with you!
Lofty resolutions indeed, my friend. I think we need to form a Backlog support group
I could go for that. :)
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