So, E3.

I’ve taken a bit of a break, and it may be a bit longer still. Let me just say that E3 has been pretty thoroughly atrocious this year. In case we didn’t already know, Sony has Move, it’s still a terrible piece of technology. Microsoft has Kinect, it’s a piece of technology with potential but it may as well be elfin magic as to making appreciable videogames with it. EA is still EA, trying to make money off of everything, convinced that by logging every piece of information you’re willing to give it, it’s perfectly acceptable to put that information out there and make you feel inadequate. Ubisoft is about as equally incapable as EA, though they’re as much flopping dead on the sand for new ideas as any of these other companies.

Today I’m not going to talk about the games (just go watch the trailers, there are tons of them all over Youtube or any other video-based media site by now), if you want my “picks” for games I’m interested in, none of them are at E3 (or rather, none of them are at the press conferences anyway), I can already tell you this much. Waiting for Dark Souls, Journey, and Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition patiently. Since the PC version of AE rescinded its foolish DRM plans (Digital Rights Management really needs to go dig itself a deep hole along with gamification), I’m sitting pretty for games. The Witcher 2 came out, it’s pretty good, though a more complete review will be available later.

Speaking tangentially on gamification, this word, and the idea is really something that has only collectively made playing videogames less fun year by year. The drive to create stuff for the sake of stuff and then share that stuff for the sake of sharing that stuff is pointless and vapid to the point of absurdity. How the whole cult got started on this is beyond me, but it must be something of a cult in order to be this blinded to what it’s doing versus what it’s intended to be doing. The idea is simply to make the games more enjoyable, but what we get is a jingoistic marketing spin on the idea that’s thoroughly lessened our ability to enjoy games, simply due to the new walls put up unnecessarily to meet some mystical “gamification” standard.

I don’t need points for every level I beat, not every treasure chest needs some huge reward (there was even a time when they could be traps!). The entire idea of a goal is that the reward is inherent in what you’re doing, not what you’re given for doing it. The latter half is called work, and games aren’t work, they’re entertainment. I believe that people should be able to separate the two, and yet as I watch gaming communities, that seems to be the evolution we are currently experiencing. E3, now more than ever, proves this beyond a doubt and worries me as a future professional who works within and outside of the field.