LAGWAR | GAMING'S BEST IN TOP NOTCH MEDIOCRITY

I’ve had the privilege of being old enough – er, I mean, experienced enough – to see several generations of gamers go by. From the old Atari 2600 days to the sleek, realistic graphical madness of PC/PS3/XBox/Wii, gamers have been an interesting lot that have  carried with them different priorities, preferences, and dislikes. Now more than ever, gaming has become a generational thing that has been passed down through the years to an increasingly younger and ever-changing set of people.

There aren’t that many collisions between generations of gamers, but when they do happen, they are sometimes violent and not pretty. People who treasure the old school feel of classic games clash with today’s twitch generation of achievement junkies and breathtaking cutscenes. They fight on everything from the difficulty of games, to the practices of companies, to the exclusivity of consoles. They bash into each other with all the speed of two freight trains, creating such diametrically opposed opinions on how games should be developed, hyped, and released that  every game that is released is compared to its predecessors and what was done before.

For developers, the struggle to capture the market of “old school” vs. “new school” in terms of gamers is also a struggle. Gamers have been released that have been hyped and advertised as eliciting a feeling from a previous successful title. They also tend to build on familiar formulae, using prior sales to push marketing forward on new titles.  Even consoles like the Wii have made it an entire strategy to reach out beyond the traditional target audience, going back generations in order to re-capture simpler times and mechanics.

There’s an almost near-religious conviction towards a certain style or mechanic of play that I don’t get behind. Whether old school or new school, games have changed over the years, which means I’ve changed and adapted to them. The reason why I don’t find either argument for style of gaming that appealing is because like many things, gaming is an inevitable evolution that has moved forward ever since someone built on the Pong and Pac-Man generation. From Pong to Super Mario Bros. to Starfox to Final Fantasy X and more, each successive generation of games has built on the generation before it. Because of this, I don’t think a game is necessarily better because it is older or newer – rather, I think it’s better because they find a way to keep me engaged even after all my years of gameplay.

There’s also the fact that if I want to get a taste of either kind of gaming, there’s alternatives out there. New releases are obvious – they will always arrive with a huge splash and the hype of multi-million dollar marketing. Examples include recent releases such as Dragon Age: Origins and Modern Warfare 2, along with most of the MMO releases of the last couple years or so. Older releases are finding a new foothold not just in the used games section, but also as downloadable, discounted content, in places such as XBox Live Arcade and the Playstation Store. With such easy accessibility to the titles of yesteryear, I can get my hands on classic gameplay whenever I want, making any argument about gaming going in a bad direction moot. If anything, the fact that games are becoming this varied and widely appealing is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Old school gamers should learn to accept that the inevitable march of gaming towards new and exciting things is only good for the industry. New school gamers, who have no idea about when you only had two buttons to do things, should understand that even the newest titles have roots in the old favorites people talk about. Either way, both sets of gamers have something to learn from each other about what makes games fun, which is ultimately the goal that any developer or gamer should be shooting for no matter when they started playing.