Glut of Games

[Patrick]

I'm not really complaining; it's great to have a lot to choose from.
But isn't it amazing what a vast variety of games are out there these
days--with new ones coming out all the time?

Think back just twenty years, and things were very different. Think
back forty years; there were plenty of games for everybody, but not
nearly as many as there are now. Think back to a hundred years ago.

I started a poll over at BoardgameGeek.com, asking people if they have
a favorite game, or maybe a few favorites. Some 324 people responded,
and 28 percent said they do have one favorite game (another 37 percent
said they couldn't narrow it down to one, but they could name two to
five games as their very favorite).

But I also asked people who had a favorite game to name it. I made a
list out of the replies, and right now there are 103 games listed.
That's almost a different favorite game for every person!

No wonder it's so hard to talk about gaming in general anymore. One
group expects you to be talking about video games, another group
figures the focus will be on the latest board and card games--and then
there are wargamers, RPGers, and abstract gamers scattered around.

Even in this group, we seem to have disparate tastes. Some members
are mainly into traditional card games; one is an avid wargamer; a
couple are computer gamers. And I'm such a strangely asocial gamer
that hardly anybody can relate when I try to get at the essence of
games--the spirit that all games have in common.

I'm not even sure what games do have in common anymore. The number
and variety of available games is staggering.

I suppose the old saying is true--the more things change, the more
they stay the same. So, despite the astronomical abundance of games,
most are just imitations of other games. Trace their "family tree"
back far enough, and I'll bet we could find three or four ancient
"root games" that all others come from.

But that doesn't matter in the least to someone who busies himself
collecting Star Wars Miniatures or all the Heroscape stuff, or who's
still building his Magic: the Gathering collection. It doesn't even
matter to those who feel they've played all the 2008 games to death
and are anxiously awaiting this year's new releases. It certainly
doesn't matter to those holding their breath for the nth edition of
Final Fantasy or more scenarios or expansions for some other series.

I get the impression people today are hopelessly restless. They have
an insatiable thirst for novelty, and they feel weighted down if a
game takes more than five minutes to play, or stuck in a rut if they
have to play the same game more than twice.

So, what's going on this world I seem to have grown out of touch
with? Does everyone have a surplus of leisure time these days? Have
people's minds been so conditioned to multitasking that it hurts to
concentrate on a single game for an hour or two, or to play it
repeatedly and endeavor to master it? Or is the world so harsh and
oppressive that everyone has to escape into some alternative, virtual
reality, where the story unfolding in a game compensates for their own
life stories failing to unfold?

Whatever's going on, it seems to me that there's more game playing
going on than ever (if we count video games), but game players are
mostly going their own individual ways instead of getting together and
agreeing to all play this game or that one.

I read an interview with an elderly guy who was a famous checker
(draughts) player. He said that when he was growing up, everybody in
town played checkers. Everybody in other towns did too. You could
easily get a checkers game going in a barber shop, a bar, or
anyplace. So, it was easy to get in some practice, and it meant
something to get good at the game. When asked if he'd recommend
checkers or chess to a young person today, he said probably chess--not
because it's a better game, but just because it's more popular.

And yet, I was walking through the mall one day, and a friend pointed
to a chess set in a display case. "That's something you don't see
much of anymore," he said. "It seems like kind of a lost art."
Chess--a lost art? I wouldn't have thought so; chess is still played
all around the world, as far as I know. And yet, I'll bet chess is
completely foreign to many young people today; lots of folks probably
view it as a dying relic of the past.

So, which game does everybody know about today? Halo? (That's the
last uber-popular title I remember hearing; but it's probably old news
by now.) How do people keep up with the latest fads?

On Memorial Day (this past Monday), I was pleased to see an unexpected
scene on TV. I wasn't really watching; the TV was just on in the
background, and a news program was running a special on soldiers in
Iraq. "They don't have time for much," I heard the narrator say.
"Just some dominoes and . . ." That made me turn and look. Sure
enough, there was a group of soldiers sitting at a table, shuffling
dominoes. Cool. Some classics are still with us. I considered that
a nice sequel to a scene I'd seen on TV during the first Iraq war:
back then, Nintendo's "Game Boy" was all the rage, and soldiers were
holding theirs up to show that handheld video games were helping them
cope with the stress and boredom.

Well, I guess the gaming world will survive, whatever is going on.
Back in the 1970s, the Avalon Hill Game Company complained that their
rival, SPI, was producing a glut of wargames that threatened the
hobby. Today, many wargamers look back fondly on that "glut" and hope
the market will again be saturated with great games to play.

Sure can be hard to get down to *playing* games, though, when every
individual gamer has a different favorite. Somebody has to settle, or
else everybody has to play by himself against a computer AI.

--Patrick

[Sukunai]

The situation is simple.

When I was a teen I had one way to get a game and only one way to get
a game.
And it happened after going to the store and hoping there was a game
to get at all.

At one time the local gaming store stopped getting role gaming books
for the usual hysterical reason (goddamned religious idiocies).

My wargaming collection was sparse, but then so where the titles. And
once you had Squad Leader and Third Reich you rarely had time for
anything else at any rate.
The mid 80s was my wealthy years, and I bought oodles of wargames.
Alas I bought a lot of WW3 stuff and we thankfully WW3 never happened.
So I ditched most of my 'never going to happen' wargames quickly when
the wall came down.

Then this thing called the personal computer and then the internet
happened.
Poof no need for hard to find wargaming magazines.
Poof no need for even finding opponents.
And then boom games were damn near everywhere (electronically).
The next big poof was when the internet made it possible to download,
and maybe that was more than one sort of poof.
But it also made it possible to market and deliver and advertise like
never before.
Is piracy hurting? If someone says they have a concrete answer, laugh
at them. No one really knows.

But this much I DO know. You can produce wargames (any games for that
matter) like never before.
You can also use computers to drive publication of board games just as
easily.

Today there is a great deal more games than has ever been possible
before.
The Nintendo DS releases about 10 titles a week minimum. Some weeks it
can look like several every single day.

I have access to every wargame of mention ever made for the computer
in the last 10 or so years.
And there simply is no way to play them all.
It's easy to want them and easy to get them, but your day is finite,
and eventually you learn what I have had to learn.
There's more games than you can play, and you WILL have to choose to
not play some.