As my Steam page informs me, I have officially played five hundred and one hours of Left 4 Dead 2 as of last night (Update: As of 8/7/12, that amount is up to almost 740 hours). Considering I bought the game when it was new (a year and a half ago), I can safely say this is ridiculous, and that I am ridiculous by extension. It’s not as if I play the game competitively. I’m not part of a league, nor am I in the business of making new maps for the game. There’s challenging aspects on the higher difficulties, but it’s rare that I play on anything above Normal. So, clearly I don’t play it for the challenge, and I’m not insane enough to think game development is good for anything other than melting my brain into slag.
Plus, the game’s not really built for this kind of over-and-over replaying. There are only so many zombies you can kill before you stop seeing them as horrible perversions of humanity coming to eat your flesh, and start thinking (insert your own monotonous robot voice here): “Gear spawn points are here, here, and here. Effective weapon range is so and so. Coordinate other players. Share A and B gear at X and Y health thresh-holds.” As you play and get better at reading the AI’s foreshadowing, the less you need to rely on active brain processing and the more the game turns into a blood-spattered chat room (honestly, the best kind of chat room).
Which is really what it comes down to: Left 4 Dead 2 has ceased being a game, something I play for its own sake. L4D2 is a sandbox I use to play with friends who live far away (Montana, Texas, St. Louis, etc.). I imagine this is the primary reason why people still play World of Warcraft, since I know that’s what kept me playing for as long as I did (though I’ve been clean for a month and a half now), and I can’t imagine another, more positive reason to play it. Then again, maintaining long term, long distance relationships through the medium of games is better than using them as murder simulators or as an excuse to lord your gamer score over people who do more productive things with their lives.
The absurd amount of time I spend on multiplayer games like WoW, L4D2, and Team Fortress 2 also tars my perception of games which are not primarily social experiences. Mass Effect 2, Bioware’s recent sci-fi epic, contains no social interaction. Granted, there are tons of fake people running around, with dialog trees and motivations and purpose, even if that purpose is to fill space on the space station you are planning to blow up in a few minutes once you get all the good items and a new skill point. But interacting with fake people in the Bioware game in its number of canny disguises is the same as reading a script by yourself, to yourself, and then applauding your performance.
In short, I think I’m suffering from some kind of social-game-related Stockholm syndrome, where I ‘need’ the idea that I’m not playing alone, thanks to years of constant social gaming. Without the human chatter and the undercurrent of mockery – ranging from mild to audacious – keeping me company, games really are just a series of mechanical challenges which will, inevitably, grow tiresome.
There are only so many hours I can play any game before my interest gives out. Left 4 Dead 2 is no longer the game I’m playing, because I’m deathly tired of Left 4 Dead 2. I’m playing “Shout at People for Lighting Me on Fire” and “Discuss What’s Wrong on the Internet Today”. When I’m playing Mass Effect 2, though, all I’m allowed to play is Mass Effect 2, and when I get tired of Mass Effect 2, all I can do is turn it off.
No comments:
Post a Comment