Increasing in Complexity

By Ria Bulthuis

There have been so many fantastic video games out lately--Horizon: Zero Dawn, Nier:Automata, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild--take your pick. Graphics in games have come ridiculously far in the past twenty years, and there’s a lot less of the original Doom’s “just shoot things” mentality and a lot more focus on story as well.

My first console was a Nintendo 64 that my parents bought for the family when I was around 6. It came with games like Super Mario 64, Star Fox 64, Mario Kart, NBA Jam, and Banjo Kazooie. A large portion of my childhood was spent with them. In more recent years, I’ve moved on to games that are like the ones I mentioned previously, and I’m amazed at the differences.

We millennials grew up primarily with games meant to entertain. Technology was much more limited when we were younger, and the main audience of a lot of games was still kids. Because of these two things, gameplay was a lot more important--they had to be fun. It wasn’t a major goal of game creators to tear a player’s heart into tiny pieces, like a few recent games I could mention have tried, and occasionally succeeded, to do. Most of the storylines that I remember consisted of “the princess is in another castle,” without ever meeting the princess or having any knowledge of why we needed to rescue her other than the fact that she mentioned cake.

There are exceptions to every rule of course, but even complex stories from twenty-year-old games seem quite simple in comparison to the ones we’ve grown accustomed to recently. As technology evolves and graphics get better, it seems to me like they’ve been getting more cinematic with their storylines as well. The Last of Us is one example from four years ago, and some readers might know exactly what I mean. At the most basic level, it’s a zombie game. It’s a lot less about zombies, though, than it is about the relationship between a snarky teenager and her decreasingly reluctant caretaker. Not everyone cried at the end, but I happen to know a number of people who did.

What I’m saying is that we’ve reached a new era of video games. Gameplay is still important, but it’s no longer necessarily the priority. Creators have learned to use the technology to create relatable, flawed characters that a player can have relationships with.