Social Environments

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oFvYokMSIo&NR

Above is the link to the old commercial I refer to in the post.

A week ago, I was watching old commercials for the original Nintendo system. It was interesting to see such a drastic difference in the way video games were marketed and how the standard for games has changed considering the quickly advancing technology and the competitive market. The old commercials featured kids getting excited and high-fiving each other, and the objective of this specific commercial was to sell the entire entertainment system package together, including "rob" who apparently helped the gaming experience (I do not remember the "rob" feature) but was not necessary. Contemporary commercials are cinematic and try to sell a game or console as ground-breaking, the next big thing in graphics and response to controls, packed with features like DVD and online capabilities. Comparatively, they do not show the children playing them, they try to keep the plot line mysterious prompting the gamer to look it up himself, and they do not stress the multi-player features as the original commercials had. It seems the gaming community has become so advanced and the economy stable enough that people can afford at least one console that the experience has completely changed from one where you used to go to a friend's house to share a console to one that I believe marketers are trying to create: a solitary gaming experience (especially in adventure games) where every single person has their own copy of the game. These observations are all pretty obvious I am sure, but it just dawned on me when I was watching those commercials how different my gaming experience used to be. For me personally, it was much more social because we would go to arcades together or visit a friend with a console. Now, friends come over for certain games, like an all-nighter of guitar hero, but after about a week the game is old and the friends have all moved on to something else.

The social aspect of playing video games makes me think of World of Warcraft as well. The online game sucked in my roommate's boyfriend for two years, where he would constantly refer to his guild as his friends and would talk to us about these people of whom he knew tons about their personality yet had never met in person. I do not necessarily think this is a bad thing, making friends through guilds online, however in Ben's case he would do nothing else and lost most of his social abilities when he would hang out with us tangible people. It is interesting to see how the social environment of video games is becoming more virtual through online gaming than it used to be. One of the positive aspects of this is being able to connect with people from different continents which can change your gamin experience as far as level of play and even entertainment.

Overall I think that bringing the arcade games to the home console and allowing people to connect to each other through mmorpgs are exciting steps forward. I suppose it is just nostalgia for the way I used to play games with my friends and see them every afternoon during the summer to just sit around and take turns trying to beat different levels or going to the arcade to play Mortal Kombat on those huge machines.