Gaming community, I’m about to make a statement which will probably get me shunned to my bedroom early and without any supper. Considering your anger when the Playstation Network is down without explanation, I’ll have to put it bluntly: I won’t be getting next-gen. Now, put your Blades of Chaos and blue shells DOWN and be calm. I can assure you that it isn’t due to a distaste or lack of money. My argument for doing so is pretty simple; I’m a bit of a culture freak.
By that, I don’t mean I staple Kermit the Frogs together to make a t-shirt like Lady Gaga once did. What I mean is I feel this need to always be aware of the culture around me. I spend most of my day on Facebook and Twitter looking for trending topics in the worry that I may wake up tomorrow and miss something that has potentially just exploded onto the internet. To remain blissfully unaware is difficult.
Have you ever been asked “Have you seen this?” or “Have you heard that?”and feel that little bit dumb or ‘out of the loop’ for having not done so? It pains me when I know I haven’t seen Life of Pi or read Harry Potter past the fourth book, because I feel uncultured, even though I like to think I’m a pretty well-rounded individual. Well, it’s the same with gaming.
In the great console war, I chose my side long ago on Christmas Day. Since then, I’ve been dedicated to Sony’s innovative exclusives and mainstream titles, from the original, clunky Playstation to the high-tech prowess of the Playstation 3. I made it my mission to delve into as many different genres as I could, from shouting ‘JAAASOOON’ in crowded shopping malls in Heavy Rain to pummeling thugs and battling throat cancer in inFamous.
Yet, all it took was a “You’ve never played Mega Man?” to make me realise that this exclusivity was excluding me from culture that exists across consoles. Certainly, you can’t play every game that’s ever been created, nor would you want to. However, you can only remain so versatile within such a restricted domain.
One of my friends is a self-confessed Nintendo fanboy (admittedly, not something many people confess), who would constantly inform me of the latest game that “was much better than your AAA rubbish”. Usually, I would roll my eyes at him; now, I’m willing to invest in a part of culture that just hasn’t existed in my life at all. Whether that be Nintendo or the simple ‘indie’ developer (I’m developing a slight obsession for the newly released Octodad: Dadliest Catch), there’s still a vast amount of content that is yet to be explored.
So why the need to move onto next-gen? From a developer’s point of view, it’s ‘moving with the times’ as technology advances, products need creating and, let’s face it, the wages aren’t going to pay themselves. For the consumer, are you really dissatisfied with your current console and need to move on? Has the absence of touch-pad controls and speech recognition made you break down crying in the middle of GAME? I didn’t think so.
That’s why, my nerdy brethren, I’ll be saying no to next-gen for the next couple of years. As part-time IGN anchor Ron Burgundy famously put: ‘Try to think of these consoles as women. Totally different, beautiful women that you can play with”. Without sounding like a player, I think I’ll spend time with some other women before I take my current relationship to the next level. God forbid my girlfriend reads this article!