Loss of Core Gaming

My love for gaming is not a new thing; when I was younger, I was outside of the catchment area for my primary school and thus had very few friends in close proximity to my house, with whom I could play. Consequently, I played a lot of video games; I owned a Sega Mega Drive — or as those in other parts of the world might know it, the Sega Genesis — and then later, a PlayStation. I also spent a lot of time at a friend’s on his Nintendo 64, before going on to claim a PlayStation 2, various Game Boys and a PSP as I got older. Now, I own a new PSP, a DSi XL, a Dell laptop and an Xbox 360. I even own an Android phone with a NES emulator that I bought from the Android market, if that counts. It’s a brilliant application, and there is no loss of nostalgia when going back to play such classics as Battletoads and the original Super Mario Bros.

There’s a point to this article, however, and it begins with what’s missing from the above paragraph. I have another console — a Nintendo Wii. I didn’t include it above because it just doesn’t fit into the what I remember from my childhood: those evenings sat on a beanbag in front of the relatively small LCD television. Each time, I’d come close to breaking my controller in a blind rage every time I inadvertently caused Sonic to careen off into danger, probably after spending 10 minutes in a breathless panic trying to traverse a particularly difficult level. The reason behind this is obvious, simple and confusing at the same time: motion controls. Gaming has changed — evolved, if you will — and although it’s definitely not for the worst, is it for the best?

Economically, this new generation of gaming, with the Wii, Kinect and PlayStation Move, has been beneficial for the industry, reaching out to new audiences. Older people who might get bemused simply looking at a keyboard or an Xbox 360 controller are now getting involved with the family to play games on the Wii. Whole families are playing a huge variety of new games together: sports games, fitness games, party games. In the past, party games like Mario Party were the only real way of reaching out from the core gaming culture of friends gathering to play Halo and out to families who want to enjoy activities together.

You could say that the introduction of these new concepts to gaming has kept the industry alive and booming, changing it for the better. Some might say that making these changes has drawn developers away from the ideals of core gaming, subsequently producing games of poor quality or lacking in original concepts. Some gamers can be critical people, and those that are tend to be well acquainted with the internet, and you can see from opinions on forums and blogs around the net that although it hasn’t been a huge effect, core games have decreased in number and quality since the introduction of the Wii, and people have noticed.

What happens when there are more, similar peripherals launched into the market? Is core gaming going to diminish into a hardcore gamer’s haven, a last refuge for the nostalgic among us, not yet ready to delve headfirst into “new gaming”? I’m being over-dramatic, but this shouldn’t take away from the point I’m making: Gaming could be changing into something a lot of us won’t like.

Despite these last few words, I look behind me to the bookshelves where I keep my rows of videogames and realise, with a sigh of acceptance, that I’m okay with Nintendo. Nintendo have, despite pioneering all of this, managed to keep a balance between their well-known core gaming titles and the new age of Wii gaming. We saw at E3 that they plan to revamp old and much loved titles, and they’ve brought original concepts to the same old games in such examples as Super Mario Galaxy and The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks. I have Monster Hunter Tri back there as well, and I bought it bundled with the Classic Controller Pro, which I’m currently using to play Mario Kart Wii.

These are both also examples of how Nintendo are balancing well core gaming and new gaming. What I’m worried about is whether, in a competitive craze or in the future, Sony and Microsoft will focus on the Kinect and Move too much, delving excessively into “new gaming” and forgetting entirely the gaming that they’ve committed themselves to so well with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. I definitely don’t want to see sit-down classic controller gaming fade into the background, and though all Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are all currently keeping this type of gaming in the limelight, will that last?

On an almost, but not quite unrelated point: I’ve seen a recent surge of iPad, iPhone and Android news into the gaming industry. People are paying a lot more attention to how useful they can be as gaming platforms with the development of games like Plants vs. Zombies, and games that have also been on PSN or XBLA have definitely helped with this. I tend to agree with the interest in these devices as gaming platforms, there’s no reason why — with the recent rapid advancement of phone and tablet technology — these devices can’t be just as good with games as the Game Boy once was. Then again, one could easily look at the N-Gage and how spectacularly that failed. Perhaps these will also fail; only time will tell.

My point is that gaming is changing; there’s nothing we can do to  stop it, and my job is just to watch and comment. Even though I may not like the potential loss of core gaming, I do like some of the aspects of “new gaming,” and I know that, like everything else, everything eventually changes.