#oneaday, Day 40: Technology is Exciting!

It’s been a funny few weeks for the games industry, what with spats between high-profile journalists such as Leigh Alexander and Jim Sterling; the whole Penny Arcade “dickwolves debacle”; and, yesterday, Fox News making the astonishing claim that Bulletstorm directly encourages rape.

This sort of thing is oddly symptomatic of the modern industry, though. We take technology for granted so much these days that new, exciting things are met not with the excitement that they deserve, but with cynicism, caution and, at times, outright hostility. This is arguably wise, given that technology generally isn’t cheap, particularly for early adopters. But sometimes I miss the days of wide-eyed wonderment at a new gizmo that does something no-one else has ever done before.

Case in point: Sony and Nintendo’s upcoming handhelds, the NGP and 3DS, respectively. Both are pretty impressive pieces of kit—the 3DS for offering glasses-free 3D glasses (which may or may not prove difficult to appreciate for those who actually wear glasses) and the NGP for being a veritable behemoth of pocket-sized power. Both will make a significant dent in your cashflow should you choose to adopt them, but both are incredibly exciting pieces of technology.

So then, why do the industry press feel the need to publish articles like this? This is perhaps a bad example, because PocketGamer did, in fact, also publish a counter-article about why you will buy an NGP. But this is by no means an isolated incident; game sites are filled with list articles like this offering you “reasons to sell your Wii”, “reasons not to buy an [x]”, “reasons why the [y] is rubbish” (I’m paraphrasing, obviously). It’s a curious offshoot of fanboyism that some game sites seem to be voluntarily perpetuating—presumably because it encourages “discussion”. Discussion means hits. Hits mean ad revenue. That’s what it’s all about for many of these sites these days, after all.

Sometimes I think there’s a market for a site that treats things with the kind of wild-eyed enthusiasm that we as kids and teens in the 90s used to show for every new and exciting thing. Remember when Starfox/Starwing came out and it looked like games we’d been playing on home computers for years but everyone still loved it because it hadn’t been done on a console before? Remember when the Atari Lynx had hardware sprite scaling? Remember when you were gobsmacked about how many layers of parallax scrolling Shadow of the Beast on the Amiga had? Yeah. That. I want that back.

Perhaps it’s symptomatic of the fact that technology advances have slowed somewhat since those days. An oft-quoted line with every new generation of gaming technology is “it’s difficult to imagine how graphics could possibly get any better than this”, or “[x developer] claims they’re using 100% of the [y console]’s power”. But then someone does something cool. It might not be as huge a leap as that between, say, the SNES and the PS1. But it’s still an improvement, and something that I, personally, feel is still worth getting excited about.

For so-called “enthusiast press”, sometimes we’re not very enthusiastic.

[Thanks to @Alex_Connolly for inspiring today’s comic.]