'You' Suck

So some of you might've seen by now that, in my top five piquant characters list, I decided to identify "you" as the character of the year, nodding to the explosive trend we've seen in games and online worlds that demands we be able to personalize everything, to express ourselves through gameplay, to build and share stories rather than have a character imposed on us and a story given us to complete like a workbook.

In writing about virtual worlds a lot this year, I've learned that the promise of insane amounts of advertising dollars is motivating this drive to really pin down what makes people have fun with interactive media -- in order to keep them engaged and feeling positively about the experience as much as possible. The virtual worlds space is somewhat disparate from the game world, but that doesn't mean that these two spheres don't have heads together in spots. Virtual worlds folks are looking to game professionals for their experience in creating rich, lifelike worlds, and game folks are seeing that virtual worlds have (or at least have the potential to garner) something they don't -- millions and millions of users that encompass a broad range of ages, that can be fifty percent (or more) female, that are willing to personally invest in a world, take stewardship of building it, contributing to it, and creating the game-like content therein themselves.

In my opinion, one of the biggest problems with games these days is not necessarily with games themselves but with the relationship the audience has to them. We gamers are largely a professionally dissatisfied lot, and everyone's a game critic. I'm not sure when we came to have such high, vast expectations of games. I theorized recently that the hostility and negative attitude from some parts of the gamer community comes from having those expectations go unmet. And I'm not advocating we should not have high expectations of games, or at least certain kinds of games -- there's no experience quite like gaming, and I think we've only begun to scratch the surface of the manifold things we can do with them and get from them.

But, for example, the response to BioShock. The mainstream media loved BioShock, because they could finally put Ayn Rand into a video game article, as a cheap shortcut to making people understand the potential and depth of games. I loved BioShock, because it gave me an experience that hinged primarily on my own self-generated story, my intrinsic emotional response to things. I said a lot at the time that investing in the game, making the Little Sister choice meaningful, was the player's decision entirely.

And I don't ever foresee a day when we'll be able to sit in front of the screen, glaze out and have a game change our lives while we sit still and stare at it. But what surprised me about the way some people responded to BioShock was that they were angry that the game hadn't made that connection for them; because it hadn't, they were dissatisfied. Plenty of people, after participating in anticipation, speculation and excitement about the title's release for months, one week after it arrived on shelves, promptly tired of the topic and asked, "so what's coming out next?"

Which raises a crucial points about this whole Web 2.0, user-generated content, world-building age that some rather smart people are certain is the future of games. We don't all want to make our own stories, characters and worlds. To some, if "you" really is the "character of the year," it's not good news. And I've said I wish I'd added a "for better or for worse," clause in there, because haven't I just written a lot recently about how, as The Plush Apocalypse tidily put it, "'You' is an anonymous, homophobic, misogynistic dickhead?"

While I don't think I have quite so little faith in people, I do feel like this massive trend of open-world, do-it-yourself characterization that's been gathering so much steam might steam out before long. Like any big-big trend, we'll synthesize the useful lessons from it and integrate them into what we already know, for a neater and more subtle evolution on our familiar baseline.

The uncertainty comes in when you realize we're talking about a medium that is only a bit older than I myself am -- we're beyond calling games "nascent," but we could call them pubescent, maybe, even as of only this year. Gaming hasn't been around long enough to even parse out a single solid baseline; the idea of considering them with more depth than simple arcade toys is fairly new, if not for all of us, than for a good majority of us. So the crystal ball looks a little foggy.

But "you" is not the star for everyone. At the end of the day, we love games for the experience they give us and the worlds they create. If it were about us, and about other real people, we'd just go and play laser tag with our stupid friends, or something, and then bitch about them on the internet later.