The importance of mid-tier gaming

One of the biggest reasons for stagnation in the mainstream gaming market is the tendency of big publishers to focus on the large, blockbuster titles. With the current model of huge, multi-million dollar releases every year, there are clearly signs of fatigue in the gaming market. As such big titles compete for the tightening consumer wallet, the question should be asked whether such a model is sustainable and what could be done to fix the situation. 

This is where mid-tier games could fit comfortably in the niche; Jim Sterling has recently championed the use of such titles, citing the practice as a boost to creativity in the industry, especially during the peak times of the PS2 era. Jim is indeed correct that mid-tier games could produce a more sustainable niche for big publishers. 

With the costs of development skyrocketing, many game publishers have engaged in shady practices to boost their profits. Imagine how much better games would be if hundreds of millions of dollars and the fate of the developers themselves didn’t hinge on their profitability; there would certainly be more creative risks taken, as well as fewer implementations of anti-consumer ‘features’ such as loot boxes.

There is a need for more ‘useful’ games; ones that may not make all the money all the time but don’t need to be so big to be profitable. Given the tightness of customer wallets, this model would arguably be more sustainable; there’s a lot more room for someone to buy a couple of £20-to-£30 games on top of a big budget £60 blockbuster, rather than expecting them to pay for three or four such ‘must-have’ titles (representing nearly a £240 outlay – almost as much investment as buying a whole new console!). In this way, mid-tier games could be the bread and butter of a mainstream gaming industry that currently stands on unstable footing.

While some may argue that game dev costs are spiralling out of control as technology is pushed further and further with each yearly release, the question should be asked as to whether such costly development is always the way to go. Surely for a risk-averse big company, smaller and less costly games could represent a salvation for creativity. Instead of risking hundreds of millions on a single title, and the jobs that come with those big bucks, surely it would be more sustainable to have a varied portfolio where games can make profit at all levels of the market. This practice also represents an insurance policy against disaster; if your big, AAA blockbuster falls by the wayside one year and suffers from terrible sales, then you can fall back on a portfolio of smaller, profitable titles to shore up the earnings before the next instalment.

As mainstream gaming continues into the next generation, big companies will undoubtedly need to review their strategies and cost-efficiency. If a game doesn’t need to have the best graphics, why bother spending so much and then push that cost onto the consumers? Many such players will be content with paying a little less while getting a slightly less graphically-intense game, and in fact will probably be more likely to buy the game ‘on-top-of’ a AAA £60 purchase. Mid-tier games represent an interesting avenue for a more sustainable, more creative gaming future, so hopefully these will be utilized correctly and more often in the coming years.

Mental Health Week: how videogames helped me

It’s currently Mental Health Week in the UK, and a conversation with a very good friend led me to think about what gaming means for me and my mental health. I am open about the fact that I suffer from Borderline Personality Disorder; a name for a collection of problems that came about because of being bullied harshly during my formative years. My journey is my own, many will relate to it, and many more won’t. But it is important to recognise how gaming has helped me learn to cope with my own issues.

Does gaming help with mental health issues? I am not acquainted with the statistics to be sure, but over the years I can candidly say that the games I played were a vital lifeline in helping me to cope with hard times. If it wasn’t for video games, and the world they helped me escape into, I doubt I would be here today.

In Primary School, life was tough for me. I was bullied verbally and physically practically every day of my life. I have developed a defensive personality where I am always suspicious of other people because of this. It’s hard to make friends when every person you’ve ever met has hurt you in some way. I had the occasional friendship but they never lasted, as most people that made themselves acquainted with me were soon convinced by a gang of abusers to join in the bullying or they would become a target. 

I didn’t know anything about mental health. I had been seen by the occasional specialist, but my parents were terrified of the stigma and refused to get any help for me. I was told to hide a lot of my issues as much as possible, or I ‘would be sent away to the loony bin’. As a result, my coping mechanisms were poor. I first attempted suicide at the age of eight years old, by trying to bash my own head repeatedly against a tiled bathroom wall. 

I found my coping mechanism in escaping into the fantastical world of gaming, where for once I could count on predictable patterns and a happier, nicer world. Conversely, reality was a bleak place for me, where I had no safe space to feel relaxed.

I first discovered gaming after my Dad bought me a SEGA Mega Drive bundled with Sonic the Hedgehog 1 and 2. I recognise now what these games meant to me as a child. The bright colours depicted a happy world, with cheerful music and immersive graphics. I could participate in a world where, for once, I was the winner. 

The world of video games was so immersive that reality would oftentimes fade away. Sonic was my hero as a child and I aspired to be like him. This cool, never-give-up personality was something that I admired greatly. I found a sense of self-worth in video games that I found nowhere else in the world.

As new games came out and became more mainstream, I managed to find some success in relating to other kids by shared stories. I managed to find a couple of best friends with whom I shared stories of playing Final Fantasy, and we would regularly track each other’s progress by the discs we were on. 

One of the most important game characters in my life was Zidane from Final Fantasy IX. He was a traumatised guy with a dark past, but despite this he turned out to be one of the most caring characters in the series. His main quote ‘You don’t need a reason to help people’ was something I took on board, and I modelled my own personality after him. I wanted to be the cheerful rock that could always be upbeat no matter the situation. Not only that, but the way he cared deeply about his friends and protected them any way he could was inspirational. 

Another game that was important to me growing up was Pokémon Red and Blue. I was amazed by the world of Pokémon and I felt a strong sense of camaraderie with the creatures that joined me on my journey. I got a lot of therapy from calling my rival after the ringleader of my bullies as a child. It gave me that vital lifeline of having at least one place, imagined though it was, that I could beat my bully.

Through high school, I developed a very close friendship with another teenage boy thanks to gaming. We became inseparable and would often go around each other’s houses to play Halo and Sonic games together. We bonded over the shared sense of belonging with each other, as we were both social outcasts, regularly bullied and tormented at school.

It was a shame that it didn’t last. As time moved on, we grew further apart, and at the age of 15 my friend and I had become enemies. He joined in on playground campaigns to encourage me to kill myself, and the bullying had been intensified. On occasions I was choked to unconsciousness, thrown down stairs and was verbally abused to the point I desperately started cutting myself with a pencil sharpener blade. 

I found gaming to be an important escape during these difficult times. No matter how badly I was bullied, or how loudly my parents screamed at each other at home, I could just melt away and be immersed into a better world thanks to video games. I could be myself and I felt safe to show my true personality in these worlds and not fear the horrid consequences as a result.

I was diagnosed with depression during college, where I realised that my previous experiences with being bullied were damaging my grades and my ability to socialise. I was paranoid about everyone around me and I had no idea who to trust. Thanks to recently having lost my friend, I had nothing but videogames for comfort, and they were an important lifeline during the harder times of becoming a young adult. 

Imagine being totally, oppressively alone in life, with literally nobody reaching out to you. That was my early adulthood until I was lucky enough to meet my fiancée. Video games were safe places for me when nowhere felt safe. 

I feel like as long as I have a gaming system by my side I can cope with a lot of things. Videogames gave me a reason to live and played a huge part in shaping my identity. As I went to darker and darker places, I could always boot up a game and forget about life for a while. It was a lifeline, a stick to fight with that was more important to me than anything.

One of the biggest ways gaming helped me was in finding communities online, and in doing so, I found that there were a lot more people like me that suffered. I wasn’t alone, and that was one of the most important things to me. 

As I now go into later stages of my treatment, knowing that I suffer from Borderline and all the issues that come with it, one of the key things I hold onto is that I can always cope by booting up a game and enjoying the warm feelings of nostalgia that I get from that. 

Gaming is an important coping mechanism for many people in this way, and I am glad that I can raise awareness in some way of just what gaming can do to help, not hinder, mental illness. I am deeply lucky to live in a world where more and more people are connecting through this awesome hobby, and I feel humbled to be a part of this community, something that helps me feel a sense of belonging I struggle to get elsewhere.

Bottling Lightning Twice: the challenge of following up a phenomenon

Occasionally a game comes around that surpasses all expectation. Such games become phenomenal, smashing genre conventions and presenting critically-acclaimed, excellent mechanics that other games scramble to replicate. I like to call such successes ‘bottled lightning’ games, as these titles tend to hit at just the right time and scratch just the right itches that make such phenomena practically impossible to feel ‘for the first time’ again. 

One example of such a game is Minecraft; in a games industry that at the time was dominated by linear action experiences and cutscenes, this game created a unique mix of survival and free-form creation unlike any other experience at the time. The true measure of the game’s bottled-lightning status was in its imitators; Minecraft clones became a dime-a-dozen; before it went multi-platform, developers raced on consoles to have their own ‘Minecraft-like’ experience to capitalize on the game’s immense popularity by presenting near-imitations. A renaissance of sorts happened in the genre of ‘survival games’ (a genre I’d argue didn’t so much exist pre-Minecraft), where hunger and thirst meters, as well as the mechanic of crafting from gathered materials, became commonplace in the market, even in games where it made no sense. 

With Minecraft being a billion-dollar product nowadays, and therefore the go-to-target of hipster scorn, it’s easy to forget the game’s early status as a pioneer that launched many modern trends we see today. Like it or not, Minecraft indeed bottled lightning. Who doesn’t remember the unique feeling of discomfort and newness as they launched the game for the first time, and how exciting the community was when they were discovering and re-telling every little legend and myth that formed around the game? It’s impossible to recreate that feeling in the game today; to play Minecraft for the first time again is impossible.

Dark Souls exists in a similar vein to Minecraft, and achieved widespread popularity in a similar, albeit less extreme way. As mainstream RPGs, such as Skyrim, became perceived as being simplified and ‘too easy’, and with the industry suffering from a perception of being ‘dumbed down’ to fit with an increasingly mainstream audience, Dark Souls came along as a punishing, opaque experience that offered deep, complex systems and a high barrier to entry. The game was a celebration of everything that had, up to now, been accepted tropes of videogames being so niche. As a phenomenon, Dark Souls gained notoriety rather than outright affection at first, as a difficult game accessible only for a certain kind of gamer and unapologetic of that fact. But as an industry trend, Dark Souls was a bona-fide cult hit, and it was undoubtedly helped by its unique flavour of gameplay that was rare to see in the games industry. 

Arguably, Dark Souls was the only game of its kind to truly strike its own unique formula that has been difficult to replicate, even for its sequels from the same company; for all the love Dark Souls II and III get, most fans now agree that the original Dark Souls is undoubtedly the quintessential experience of its gameplay. Even the game that preceded it, Demon’s Souls, doesn’t quite scratch the same itch. Dark Souls is certainly not without its imitators, many of which are excellent games, such as the sublime Japanese mythology-inspired Nioh. 

This leaves the problem of how to bottle lightning a second time; how does one follow up such phenomenal success with the weight of expectation? Fans would arguably want a sequel which would bottle lightning a second time and so uniquely feel new and exciting to play. But the sad reality is that this is, by definition, impossible to achieve with a sequel. Even if it succeeds in being so unique that it becomes its own phenomena, much like how Dark Souls did with its following-up from Demon’s Souls, a quitter hit that didn’t quite match its successor’s dizzying heights, it’s arguably because that game is so uniquely its own that it is instantly set apart from anything else. Instantly a game like this would set itself apart from its predecessors. Such games may bottle lightning in their own way but not their original inspiration’s lightning. So maybe the best way to approach such sequels and follow ups is not to expect this to happen and instead be happy creating new and interesting interpretations of the lightning formula; arguably, Dark Souls has already found some success in doing this with its sequels and with Bloodborne. Its sequels are successful and well-liked by critics and present interesting takes on the formula their predecessor founded. While not quite the same as playing the original, sublime title, what these games do is create unique interpretations of their own that make for great videogames. 

Bottling lightning may be something to aim for, but for audiences to expect the same to happen with follow-ups to the game would be foolish; a Minecraft 2, for example, would probably not nearly be a successful venture because it wouldn’t go off on quite the same tangent that Minecraft did and scratch the unique itch in quite nearly as impactful a way as the original. But instead creating new formula that expand on and interpret gameplay in new ways is still a worthy aspiration for any sequel and can sometimes be its own bottled lightning.