Days-long movies_

Lately, I’ve found that high budget videogames (for which I pay about €60), namely RPGs, are starting to become uninteresting to me. I now spend time playing Angry Birds, Cut the Rope or even a kind of Who Wants to be a Millionaire on my phone, instead of finishing open playthroughs in my PC.

And recently, I believe I found the reason why.

Yes, it’s true that after Mass Effect 3, my gaming itch has hardly needed a scratch, but I still play these casual games. I like playing: it’s fun, entertaining and passes the time (sometimes more time than I hoped), so why am I not into RPGs lately?

One thing I noticed in ME3, it seemed like I was seeing a movie with button clicking in the middle, rather than a choosing what I wanted to say, explore what I wanted at a given time, and talk to my companions when I desired kind of game with cutscenes in the middle.

In Rules of Play, I read about why videogames, when they first came out, became so successful: they introduced interactivity where there was only a passive action.

But in the past few years, games have been doing the exact same opposite: they’re reducing their interactivity and becoming a more passive medium. And it is boring me. Thus, instead of wasting my time with a pseudo-film of thirty-plus hours, I’ve started to watch a lot more real movies and series.

So now we have a bunch of these beautifully rendered and amazingly scripted videogames that are essentially hours-long €60 movies. Not that it is such a bad thing, the videogame industry has the right to develop in the way it wants, it’s just that I don’t want to watch a movie that lasts three days, but I also don’t want to break my piggy bank for a 5 hour game.

I want these new games to have the beautiful graphics that we have nowadays, but have the interactivity and customization of those of old too, so that each experience is a unique experience of rainbow-vomiting goodness.