Mainstream big-budget video games have been shifting towards a mechanical singularity for years, and it's really time to ask if that's something that might be keeping people away too? I'm still waiting for an excuse to upgrade to PlayStation 4 or Xbox One myself, but I'm not excited by the prospect of more detailed chest-hair physics in what are basically the same games we had last gen. And what if I just never get that excuse? I'll have indie games, sure, and Nintendo will always be there for me, but nowadays, AAA titles are just something other people play. The kinds of games that I enjoy have been pushed out of that space and I'm being pushed out with them.
This is a contentious issue, and there are always going to be exceptions that run counter to the trend, but it seems a lot of play styles, genres and core mechanics have been polished out of a mainstream industry preoccupied with adolescent power trips and gritty revenge sagas. Consider the fact that atmospheric survival horror stopped being a thing in mainstream development several years ago. The most recent titles in the Resident Evil series dropped the old inventory management system, got rid of the hacking puzzles and upped the ammo count, turning this tense and terrifying series into a sequence of mindless cover shooters. Of course, Resident Evil 4, the game that signalled the change in direction, was hugely successful, but subsequent (inferior) titles thoughtlessly accentuated its action-focused gameplay. This is presumably because somebody pointed to a pie chart and said that young men like to feel powerful and you can't do that if you only have a torch. The thing is, the recent excitement around Capcom's decision to release a remastered version of series favourite Resident Evil 2 suggests there's still a large audience for the original recipe.
Underlying all of this is a central notion that games are best for shooting or killing things – or scoring goals – and all other intricacies are subservient. The excuse that “games are good at binary states – alive or dead – not the complexities of emotion” is often carted out to explain why violence is the focus of the majority of blockbuster titles. But games have always been about more than that. What of exploration? What of puzzles? What of rhythm action and strategic salt-on-the-fries theme park economics?
Narrative games, multidirectional platformers, strategy sims and “casual” puzzle apps aren't weird outliers, they're all the bits of games that have been jettisoned in the race toward the perfect shoot-'em-up mono-experience; they're every idea a dev has had that was considered too much extra effort to fit into a sprawling AAA epic, or was “too girly” to appeal to the target audience; they're what happens when people want to focus on mechanics that do something other than kill, race or score. Indie games (and to some extent the smartphone sector) are now the spiritual remnants of a time when mainstream titles were still trying to figure out what games were, when they could just as easily be about jumping on platforms or dancing or talking to weird fish men . Now, the console and PC mainstream is increasingly focused on dynamic beard growth, modular weaponry and chucking money at voice actors.
