Video game nostalgia

Digital distribution vs Boxed Versions and Shops!

Photo by Arturo Rey on Unsplash

I belong to those who have already started collecting games and consoles which belong to a past reality that I experienced as a child in the sense of its visual culture, but I did not have the financial opportunity to possess them back then. The only limitation right now to get more is the space in the flat! :) Besides that, I am willing to invest more time and expertise in bringing some chipsets back again to life and some old pixels on the screen. Of course I spend most of the time daily on consoles of the latest generation and the purchase of a PS4 is a matter of time until the next deliverables. Though, as every 30 year old gamer who respects his hobby, or more properly to say, his way of life, I tend to romanticize many of its aspects that keep me sometimes away from following fully the trends and staying a retro guy. Not in the sense that the past was blindly better, rather than by seeking for a more humane approach to the current culture of video games.

I do like to collect games — as well as books, but that belongs to another blog entry — and definitely I loved the arrival of ebay, amazon and so many other e-shops in the market that offer incredible dusted stuff from the past in both nice prices and challenging ones. Nevertheless, I recall moments of searching for stores with used stuff, seeking for which in other cities or even countries, and scanning their long shelves for any game that might interest me. Of course, the precondition for such a journey or act of masochism is the fetish for acquiring the boxed version of any game that seems interesting for my collection! I certainly have always on my mind that there is always the questionable regarding its legality way of downloading emulators and roms, or waiting until they maybe sometime are distributed digitally in the PSN, Xbox live or Nintendo eshop, in order to play them in my consoles of the current generation. Of course, in some cases where the games and their corresponding console are no more officially commercially available products, I do not know exactly whether it constitutes a crime the act of downloading a rom and executing it in an emulator. I am working on that…

But anyway, fact is, that I hear and read that people nowadays do like to buy only online, and not even the boxed version of a game, but preferably the digitally distributed one. In the PC world this tendency is even huger! Of course these are two aspects, but refer to the same initial concept.

One, is the box in the store! I do buy games online too, since prices are cheaper, but I do like visiting stores, looking around the shelves full of visual overload of rendered graphics and video game instances displayed on posters or covers, but most importantly, in order to come in contact with other human beings who share the same interest with me, regardless of whether they are little children who interact amazingly with the gamepad of Wii U in front of a 3x3 window screen, or fathers waiting in the line holding their baby child and a game for themselves, or younger geeks seeking for any latest FPS. Besides, the only opportunity to experience any other social convention in any scale is annually in the Gamescom, which is massive.

Two, is the box itself! This issue is much bigger than this blog entry or any abstract thoughts comparing to its real dimensions that arise along with the current market economy. No need to go in any details, the future of sales in video games is constituted of actually digital purchases, digital updates and downloadable content in the sense of buying the rights to play a certain instance of it, rather than buying it. This tendency extinguishes of course the need for physical stores and extrudes the existence of a game in a cloud based experience that is rented for a certain time and partly only, since any DLC should be purchased separately. The used games are maybe the last frontier before the elimination of the physical state of this industry. But if we consider the Apple way, digital is most likely the future.

The irony to which I would like to conclude is the amazing social tools on the one hand that are offered nowadays to any gamer and the establishment of huge social communities around the video games, and on the other hand, the lack of physical human contact. I was playing online NFS: The Run last night and after many racing sessions I logged out and added added as PSN friends all the guys playing previously with, who directly sent me invitation for more NFS sessions, which was really cool. But I miss the small conventions around shelves in magazine or video game stores. I miss the split screen, and I definitely believe that the magic “Share” button of the Dualshock 4 is the bad omen for the sofa-multiplayer games… but this shall be the next part of the nostalgia!

Until then,

keep playing