Gamers these days are spoiled. Widescreen LCDs larger than 32 in. and they want to hog it all to themselves. Why, back in my day.....
Here I go talking about my age... I can remember getting almost 10 friends together, huddled around a 20 in. standard definition TV taking turns playing 4-player Goldeneye 007 on N64. Some of my fondest memories of competitive multiplayer gaming. Sure, the screen real estate was small, and we had to take turns passing the controller around, but we all had a blast hanging out together. We'd cheer eachother on, yell insults, give high fives, try our best to dethrone that one kid who just would not lose (Randy, if you're reading this...) and eat some pizza. For console gaming, split screen was the only way to do multiplayer, and we loved it.
That sure has changed. TVs are bigger, graphics are sharper, frame rates are faster, processors are more powerful... You'd think that 4-player split screen would just be the coolest thing ever. But the idea of having your friends over to hang out seems to have been kicked to the side in favor of the new cool kid in console town: online gaming.
Now that people can play with their friends and still have the whole screen to themselves, that seems to be what people want. I know, it's absolutely terrible to play on a smaller screen with some of the details of your gun lost, and a lot of people don't want to make that kind of sacrifice. So instead we sacrifice togetherness, trading insults over headsets without having any real physical interaction with each other. High fives are over rated.
I grew up a console gamer, so online gaming had always been foreign to me. When I first bought my XBox 360, I couldn't wait to get on XBox LIVE and take on the world in Halo 3. At the time, I was the only one of my friends to own a large LCD TV or an XBox, so my friends would come over and play with me. I had caught the online gaming bug, and eventually my friends bought their own XBox's and LIVE subscriptions, and soon no one ever came over anymore. If we were already hanging out and decided we wanted to play Halo, it meant that everyone would go home and we would meet up online and play. After a while, I realized just how stupid this concept was. I ended up dropping XBox LIVE and selling my XBox 360 in favor of something with inferior (but free) online play: a PS3.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy meeting up people online to play games, especially since it's hard to get people over all the time, and some people don't even live in the same state. However, to simply replace split screen with online gaming is just... sad. I crave the social interaction of gaming, of being together and sharing something we all love to do.
And maybe it's just my experience, and maybe people all over the world really love playing split screen and my friends just suck....
3 comments:
As someone who deals with middle schoolers and technology for a living, I too mourn the loss of having people together to play games. It's become a mission of mine to not let the LAN Party or even the "Halo Party" die out, so when I was asked to help organize a "game day" for the school's leadership club I was super excited. Essentially they wanted to use the 12 SD TV's that are collecting dust in the instrument room to hook up some Xbox's and play System Link.
We were only able to convince ONE student to bring an Xbox in and contribute. Everyone else said "but why would we do that if we could play online?" I tried to express those same sentiments you did up there but they just didn't get it.
We had the first game day yesterday with a Wii, 3 Xbox's (two belonging to teachers) with 7 controllers and 2 Kinects - it was a smashing success. I feel confident we'll have a LOT more participation next time around.
The Kinect was a huge hit as well and seeing kids playing it helps demonstrate where that equipment really shines. Unfortunately we couldn't play anything M-Rated since permission slips didn't go out in time, but we learned a lot and built some hype for the next time around.
Join in the crusade to keep console parties alive! Maybe that should be a Facebook page "Help support this endangered party!"
Oh by the way, this post is totally gonna be one of the articles my students can choose to write about when they do essays next week.
Dood, awesome. I'll be famous in Orlando.
Bring back the split screen partay!
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