Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Why I Bother With Consoles!

I’ve hit more technical issues with my computer lately, which has been a little frustrating. I’ve realized now that continuing to operate a power supply using a load that you know for a fact taxes it beyond safe measure is a bad idea after my third catastrophic system failure in under a year. Mostly I’m angry at ASUS’ tech support, which insisted that I perform all sorts of zany tests to be sure that my motherboard was the malfunctioning part, responsible douchebags that they are. As one of the rare members of the old guard of PC gamers this leaves me in an awkward position. I no longer have a machine capable of running titles like Modern Warfare II. Hell, my only operational PC can barely run Heroes of Newerth. The original Bioshock looks like a slideshow and even X-Com has some technical issues on it.

But since I’m a gamer this hasn’t stopped me from playing games. I’ve spent the last week leaving my house in order to play them, which is incredibly fucking weird. I’ve journeyed deep into a friend’s parent’s basement to play D&D, a sentence I’d avoided until this point in my life and hoped to never have to utter at the ripe old age of 25. I even went out into the harsh glare of the sun and played a sort of ball based game which involved kicking and running. I understand it’s called “kick the ball” and that it is often engaged in by a children aged six to forty, assuming those children aren’t social pariahs killing time in a town which is actually called Fish Hoek in South Africa. But the biggest sort of replacement gaming that I’ve been involved with lately has been on my consoles.

Non-gamers might not see much of a difference between the two activities. I’m sitting in the same chair, pissing away time doing very similar things. Hell, some of the games are even the same. But for some reason I have a very different experience sitting and playing console games. Part of it is the physical distance, sure. And the larger TV and the sound system that isn’t a pair of duct taped headphones. But a bigger part is the actual experience of playing the games.

The most obvious (and physical) part of that experience is how I input commands. While I can use an X-Box controller to input information on my PC I never ever do it. Instead I’m bound to the keyboard and mouse, my old, precise stalwarts. Doing anything else seems wrong. Console controls always feel slippery to me, forcing me to motion dramatically when I’d shift my reticule slightly in a PC game. A brute I’d normally headshot mid-charge is dealt with with a quick sidestep and a melee attack on my 360. I miss easy shots with sniper rifles in Mass Effect 2 and sweep assault rifle fire I’d meticulously squeeze off with a keyboard. I’m not a neophyte with a controller, and there are certain games I feel considerably more comfortable playing with a controller, but for many of the console exclusives I find myself roped into I feel uncomfortable with a controller in hand.

Of course I’d feel far, far worse trying to use a keyboard to leap from platform to platform or to cut through hordes of baddies using chain blades. And while I know I’m the only person who feels this way, Force Unleashed was a game entirely made by the X-Box’s controller for me. Sure the controls were clumsy, but that tricky double fisted obfuscation that the X-Box offered up made me feel just like a neophyte of the force, using my hands while I struggle to grasp objects with my mind. It’s all too easy to shit all over the console controller but there is a certain elegance to designing a game to suit its many buttons, and it makes me think of the good old days when I’d map joystick buttons for flight sims. It’s just that the controller makes for such a different experience, its physicality and manual nature changing the way I immerse myself in a game. And it’s much, much less prominent than the other major factor in how I experience console games.

Far more prominent is the manner in which consoles force me to focus on a single activity. Normally when I play games I’m hopping from action to action. I’ll speak with a friend while searching Wikipedia before I play a card in Spectromancer. I’ll window my HoN game and watch Funny or Die clips while the game loads. I’ll skip in and out of conversations with friends on Steam in the midst of a Modern Warfare firefight, cursing them out when I die. I’ll talk shit and alt tab to research bands while playing Sins of a Solar Empire with an open Skype channel. On my PC it takes an effort to be bored as I leap from task to task and thought to thought. There is always something to be doing.

Consoles, on the other hand, lock my attention down. If I play certain games I can do things like watch TV shows or movies while I’m in-game. As I’ve said before, I think this is the best way to play Mass Effect 2, a game which demands roughly the same amount of attention and intellect as most episodes of 24 in the first place, sprinkling violence and diplomacy in wherever it seems to build the best degree of dramatic tension without any real sense for story. But for the most part consoles want all of my attention. Brutal Legend, a game completely native to the console, demands constant attention, building up a nuanced and complicated world that I always want to be watching and experiencing. Halo: ODST crafts an entire city for me to play inside, filled with invading aliens and mysterious clues. It even has a neat little noir story about growing up and falling for a girl and all that crazy Phillip Marlowe stuff video games have so much trouble grasping.

This immersion can be a powerful thing when the virtual experience using it is nuanced and developed enough. Many of my sessions in Assassin’s Creed only ended when my controller stopped responding in my hand, its battery drained. Even Prince of Persia, for all the problems I had with it, did an excellent job of creating an evocative and immersive world that I actually wanted to spend time in. But when the world doesn’t hold up to full immersion the experience can be incredibly poor.

The best example I can imagine comes from the abysmal Alone in the Dark reboot. Amidst a host of almost unforgivable technological issues, Alone in the Dark, a game which ostensibly aspired to immersion, completely failed at making players feel like they were part of any sort of world at all. They had so much to build off of: a real city, a well established and beloved property and a set of mechanics which should have made players feel like they were set dead in the middle of the action. Instead it was a frustrating collection of fail states and glitches that reeked of a rushed release date and an underfunded team. And because I played it on a console I was completely immersed in every single shitty design decision and bug. An experience that might’ve been passable was instead miserable. In the grand scheme of things Alone in the Dark wasn’t really much worse than Overlord II, a game I played to completion and even enjoyed a little, but because I played it on a console Alone in the Dark remains a black eye for me as a gamer, even after I played it to completion.

This immersion certainly isn’t something the PC loses. I can just as easily remove all the distractions from my PC gaming experience, but it is something that consoles almost seem to force on players. In some cases this can be a powerful choice. ODST, for example, might not be nearly as effective if I could swap out music for the moody beats Bungie has already attached to the game. Brutal Legend also takes advantage of this, using sound and music to greater effect than any other game I’ve played on a console in recent memory. But it is something developers need to be more aware of when they’re designing games for consoles. Ideally developers would be doing their all to make every single game world they create a wholly functioning fictional entity unto itself, but that’s never going to happen as long as games like Mass Effect 2 and Modern Warfare 2 sell appallingly large numbers of copies. But when developers are trying to push consumers to purchase these games on consoles their ability to immerse me becomes much more important. The best console games, the games that sell consoles, are games that operate on this principle of immersion.

Factors like these aren’t necessarily what makes consoles significant for everyone. But they are the elements that consoles offer me as a gamer that are exclusive to them as a platform. And by working with their ability to strictly regulate my ability to input commands and focus on tasks while I’m playing instead of against these factors console games become a great deal more effective, at times, than even their PC counterparts.