As someone who has played countless hours of video games, I feel it's safe at this point to call myself an expert on certain things about them. I'm no programmer or professional e-sports player, but I've been at this for almost 20 years and have had my share of experiences. I've written an article on my top 10 favorite games, but I thought I'd talk this week about how this genre of entertainment itself has changed, for better or worse, in the time I've been playing, as well as what needs to change in order to make gaming better for us all.

First off, I joined the scene playing video games in 1999. Back then, things were simpler: Final Fantasy 7 was only 2 years old, the Nintendo 64 era of 3D graphics and complex narratives in games were just budding, and the internet was a shell of its current self. While certain RPGs like Chrono Trigger or the previously listed Final Fantasy series had winding and complicated narratives, gameplay was still relatively accessible. I spent most of these years playing Super Mario World and Tetris, both of which have very little story--if any, in Tetris's case--but the gameplay was addictive and simple. The desire to beat levels or high scores was enticing and kept the player's attention for long enough without getting them too frustrated. No one really complained about the length of levels or that there was no compelling story to keep them emotionally invested; we just played because jumping off the heads of our enemies or blasting someone with the golden gun in GoldenEye007 was fun.

Then, Sega lost the console war to PlayStation, and Microsoft released the original Xbox. At this point, games were beginning to show more promise with decent gameplay AND an interesting story. Perfect Dark and Halo's sci-fi shooter narratives provided good gameplay for beginners and veterans, as well as giving us a reason to care about whether or not we finished the single player. On top of this, LAN parties began becoming the norm, and people would begin hooking up consoles in each others' houses and playing for fun as often as they could. Leagues began to form for games like Smash and Halo, and soon the e-sports underworld had formed.

So why are these details important to what I'm talking about? Well, they are the little things that make or break a game by modern day standards. Consumers and "professional" reviewers alike are constantly complaining about which games have good stories and gameplay while simultaneously only looking for things that stimulate their most basic instincts for earning rewards, like a chimp with a banana.

Games that strive to cover too many avenues of the genre end up becoming masters of none and fail completely. Or worse yet, many games are released practically broken in order to screw the consumer out of money and make the developer seem successful on paper. Day one patches are the norm for games now, whereas before they were never heard of. Games just existed. You bought it, popped it in the console, and it worked. Glitches and mediocre mechanics are abundant in half-assed games like No Man's Sky and many of the newest Assassin's Creed titles to the point where Sean Murray of Hello Games became a meme about failure overnight, and Ubisoft had to put the AC franchise on hiatus to stop making it look like they were only in the video game business just to dig into the consumer's pocket for a lackluster series. Games like AC or Call of Duty are not fun to play because they are cranked out far too often with far too little pay-off or changes to the player's experience. They are meant for fanboys of the series who will defend it until the day they die, or for people with very short attention spans and very large bank accounts: the kind of people they want to attract.

On the other hand, many series like Mass Effect or Dragon Age have become popular because they are cinematic in nature and rely heavily on character dialogue to enhance the plot and consumer's playtime. But, a controversial opinion has arisen recently where some people who play these games feel that there should be a skip button during gameplay in order to get to the cutscenes or places in the game where your characters makes choices about what dialogue to say. They want to see what happens in order to connect more with the character they've created.

To these people, I say go fuck yourself. You want a movie or a dating sim, not an actual game. Gameplay is meant to represent the acts you perform that develop and empower your character through their actions. Skipping it defeats the purpose entirely. It's like someone handing you the coloring book but no crayons.

Companies like Bioware suffer because they put too much emphasis on character and how much the community will react to their product to the point where the only thing people care about in Mass Effect is who you romanced. Mass Effect Andromeda released recently, and there are an abundance of issues with the game, namely graphical errors. Characters are ACTUALLY firing guns backwards, and many of the models don't even look believable like they're supposed to because of how cartoon-y the facial animators made them look. NPCs will even walk into walls, or each other, or worse yet: off of the nearest ledge. In addition, many of their romances are too cookie-cutter, or simplified so that they become what the audience is accustomed to seeing in other movies. They don't try to do anything different other than giving you the option to suck face with an alien--how original. But I digress.

I'm simplifying a lot of these things for time and for the reader's sake, but my point is that there has to be a balance in video game land. Titles like the Witcher 3, Ori and the Blind Forest, and Super Mario Galaxy are great because they balance story with gameplay and they trust the gamer's intelligence. Breath of the Wild came out recently too, and while the Nintendo Switch's launch has been rocky, the game is a critical and commercial success because it's open world and trusts that the gamer is not an idiot. It doesn't beat you over the head with tutorial like Skyward Sword did, and it has a simple enough story placed in a beautiful world that keeps the gamer's attention. The ability to pick up and use so many weapons, cook various recipes to restore your health, and change into clothes you've earned as loot is unheard of in such a beloved franchise as Zelda. The same goes for Pokemon Sun and Moon, which trust that the trainer playing will pick up on the rules of the numerous island challenges, and doesn't require you to use the annoying HMs (or Hidden Machines, like Rock Smash) in order to progress through the game. While I'm not a fan of how many of the Mega Stones, like my beloved Galladite, aren't available and the rest remain behind the Battle Tree's strict 64BP in-game paywall, the gameplay and story are intense and have me wanting to battle the Ultra Beasts and the Island Kahunas over and over again.

My message to developers is this: Trust your product. Give it the time it deserves. Trust the gamer, they're not stupid (Why do you think Advanced Warfare did so poorly?). Let's drop all the debate and go back to simply having fun, what do you say?