4

Will We Keep Buying Games Filled With Intrusive Microtransactions?

Call Of Duty: WWII is a game that wants you to take a serious look at the Holocaust before hopping online to tell the person you shot in the nuts that you're going to bone their mom. And like many modern games, it also employs randomized "loot boxes" -- packages of cosmetic unlockables, experience boosts, and other bonuses that you can slowly earn or quickly buy (without knowing exactly what you'll get). So it doesn't improve the gritty realism when you're hanging around the Normandy beachfront and a giant box falls from the sky to inform everyone that you've unlocked the ability to decorate your pistol with the goddamn Statue of Liberty.

Call Of Duty: America Single-Handedly Wins World War II Again's setup was mocked, but that mockery did not prevent it from becoming the best-selling game of 2017. Activision, the publisher, made $3.6 billion from "in-game content" in 2016. That their newest approach involves rewarding you for watching random people open their loot boxes like a nerd voyeur is not a coincidence. As Polygon pointed out, it's all about keeping you engaged. Seeing people play virtual slot machines while the game screams "heroic!" and "epic!" is a constant nagging reminder that you too might unlock an epic new reward if you keep playing and heroically spend money.

Call Of Duty: We're So Sorry About That Weird One Starring Evil Jon Snow In Space was not the only 2017 game to explore new ways to wring money out of their customers. Middle-earth: Shadow Of War features a tedious end-game grind that you can fast-forward by buying loot boxes, and also tried to make you pay for content that memorialized a deceased developer, which is like charging cover at a funeral. Forza 7's $20 "VIP Membership" was such a ripoff that the developers were forced to change it and give their players free cars (in the game), but they're still locking once-standard race modes behind loot boxes. Destiny 2 forced players to spend money if they wanted to change their armor color, used a paid expansion to lock players out of base game content, and misled players about how easy it would be to earn free stuff.

Worst of all was Star Wars Battlefront II, which inspired a fan revolt rivaling the fervor of most communist revolutions. Initially, characters like Darth Vader (the guy that might as well be the logo for the franchise) remained locked behind either 40 hours of grinding or lucre, even if you had already dropped 80 bucks on the game's deluxe edition. The developers stripped out the worst of their "pay to win" features in the face of complaints, but reviewers pointed out that the game remained a tedious grind-fest that forced you to say goodbye to the rest of your schedule if you wanted to get anywhere with it. Naturally, it still sold millions of copies.

3

Can We Actually Reward Original Ideas?

It's not a coincidence that every game with a microtransaction controversy was a sequel in a massive franchise -- those same gargantuan budgets force developers to stick with the tried-and-true brands (go down the list of 2017's best-selling games, and it's not until #8 that you find an original story). And it's right about here that a chorus of gamers will shout that innovation is alive and well over on the indie game scene. Just look at 2017 indie hits like Cuphead, which sold over two million copies!

Sure, let's look at it. Most of the game was made by two brothers over seven years, and all they had to do to make it happen was, uh, quit their jobs, remortgage their homes, and work brutally long hours. How many aspiring game developers do you think are out there who remortgaged their homes and didn't sell two million copies of their passion project?

It's not like that's an isolated case. Seemingly every indie hit has a harrowing story behind it. One of the creators of Night In The Woods said that the workload almost killed him. He wasn't being figurative. Jason Roberts' Gorogoa began development in 2011, when Roberts quit his job. He ran out of money in 2013, got a boost from an indie development fund, then blew through that too. He finally released Gorogoa in late 2017. Seven years to make a game you can complete in under an hour. And those are the successes. An average indie game is lucky to make $20,000.

It's slightly beyond the scope of this article to determine how to completely redesign the economy to better support the arts, but let's not pretend that gaming's current business model rewards innovation. In Hollywood, creators who want decent budgets without involving superheroes found a home in prestige TV, and the streaming model has made that work. Gaming needs that -- a marketplace in which creators can get funding for riskier projects without having to sell both kidneys or pray their Kickstarter goes viral.

2

Will Someone Try To Clean Up The Dark Underbelly Of Streaming?

Your 12-year-old child / niece / adopted crime-fighting ward watching their favorite YouTuber play Minecraft is the new Saturday morning cartoon binge. College students watching someone tear up Dark Souls on Twitch is the new lonely masturbation, I think, based on my own academic career. Twitch gets 100 million monthly viewers, so there are a lot of people not masturbating right now. Think about it.

1

Have We Crossed A Line With Realistic Violence? Is There A Line?

As someone who has killed enough fictional people to (de)populate several countries, I don't have an inherent problem with video game violence. I've only once tried to emulate what I saw in a game, and my post-Tropico attempt to overthrow a Latin American government barely even got off the ground. But I have been playing games long enough to see the technology evolve from "shooting a vaguely human-shaped blob makes them grunt and fall over" to "shooting a photorealistic human makes the camera lovingly zoom in as the bullet pierces their neck and their attempted scream is only a sad gurgle while their blood catches the light of the sun," and the two engender very different reactions.

It's not just me. Critics noted that 2015's Rise Of The Tomb Raider wanted to show a smarter, more nuanced Lara Croft who was haunted by PTSD, but also wanted to show her graphically stabbing dozens of dudes in the neck in glorious HD with no hesitation. It's like if a filmmaker tried to mash up Full Metal Jacket and The Expendables 2. More recently, the trailer for The Last Of Us 2 was called out for making grimdark torture the selling point. And Wolfenstein II: The Game Twitter Thinks Single-Handedly Solved Neo-Nazis alternates between asking us to be sickened by violence and making us cheer for a brutal-but-hilarious rampage through a parade of caricatures.

No, I'm not asking for censorship (if something in today's society is going to motivate a generation of children to go on a violent rampage, it's probably not video games). What I worry about is stagnation. Game mechanics are still built around violence, and if your enemies aren't zombies, cartoon Nazis, or robot dinosaurs like in Horizon Zero Dawn (a game that probably would have sold better if its title was Cyborg Stegosaurus Explosion), you have to go to ridiculous lengths to justify 20 straight hours of slaughter. That's why franchises like The Walking Dead, Fallout and The Last Of Us are set in grim post-apocalyptic worlds where 99 percent of the people you encounter are brutal, borderline-feral humans -- it's so you have an excuse to kill them.

But that is depressingly limiting when it comes to what kind of stories you can tell. ("So is it zombies this time? Or have the humans gone mad due to some kind of mind control? Or both?") I like mindlessly chainsawing evil aliens in half as much as the next man who's secretly still 14, but at some point, you long for that to be the exception, not the rule. It's 2018, and video games have been mainstream for going on half a century now. We have to turn the corner on this at some point, don't we?

Mark is on Twitter and has a brand new book.

The newest Pokemon games are still very much worth playing, don't @ us.

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