I do not consider myself a person with an acquired taste of retro video games. Every year, I help run an anime & gaming convention and going on our sixth year, I have always wondered why the retro games department receives more space and equipment than the tournaments section, the events I plan and organize.
For 2011, our Retro Games department lead claims he has every single gaming console in his possession, a feat even PAX has not accomplish, and wants to offer them up for display as a glorious display of video game history. I was flabbergasted at this man’s zeal for old games and could not understand this man’s desire to embrace outdated hardware. Save points, cartridges, low frame rates, and archaic graphics, how could anyone want these things? Still, every year, I go to his retro games panel where he serves Shasta while playing an all Rush mix tape. He mainly flexes of his knowledge of old games more than anything, but I realized something. After hearing his yearly dissertation about retro games, I noticed the wide breadth of escapist themes retro games had. Space exploration, plumbers jumping on mushrooms, fish with human faces, retro games have more creativity than the modern generation, and that makes them fantastic.
After this year’s E3 an avalanche of gun fantasy games were announced for the future and I could not be any less enthused. Of course, Portal 2, Rayman Origins, Epic Mickey, and a whole subset of games showed how creative the video game medium can be and fill me with anticipation, power fantasy games are the primary force driving the video game industry. Whether the games comes from the Eastern or Western Hemisphere, some effeminate man with rococo hair and big swords, or marine that runs purely on kick-assery, they are all themes that give players a power fantasy in the role of an idyllic hero. I’m sure if I shoot the glowing spot on the alien enough times or kill hundreds of disfigured mutants will give me inexplicable satisfaction but recently that feeling has started to give me diminishing returns. I started to realize, it’s not because I’m falling out of love with video games, but I am starting to hate the over-saturated wish fulfillment genre.
I am not an extraordinary individual, far from it, I consider myself a completely average nationalized Chinese American who was born in Kansas and grew up in the South. The South, being rural Georgia where shooting is a more useful skill than reading, distrust anyone whose skin color darker than #ffffff,and sweet tea is not iced tea with sugar in it. A checklist of Asian racial slurs is in my possession and I have heard every one slung at my direction. I say Asian because being the South, the difference between the many countries in Asia is not made. I once shocked a girl when I told her I come from a Japanese, Chinese, and Asian background. She had a stunned look on her face that resembled the press’s reaction to Ubisoft’s Battle Tag. A police officer, unprovoked, once stopped me in a movie parking lot and interpreted my action of opening the car door for my white girlfriend, not as act of gentlemanly behavior but as a crime of kidnapping. I understand the frustrations of being a misunderstood youth. My entire life has taken place in America yet I am not considered American simply because I have small eyes and tanned skin.
My American birth creates social awkwardness with my family members who were not born in the United States. During my family visit to Taiwan, my relatives stared at me like an absolute foreigner. I was born in an American hospital, I attended American schools, and I wore American clothes. Despite my blood being entirely made of Asian cells, I was not considered to be Chinese. Not American, not Chinese, I know what it feels like to be an outcast.
Along with my tangled birth, I was the stereotypical mad at the world teenager in high school. Reputation is everything for high school students and mine was known to many. The graduating class I was a part of was only 58, so secrets were a novelty to me. I was a video game connoisseur and people knew. Dark Age of Camelot, Halo, angry tirades of “OMG the American version of Dragon Ball Z is so lame compared to the Japanese version”, and sex lessons from a pirated VHS tape of Devil Hunter Yoko, were the defining characteristics of my reputation. Big surprise, I wasn’t the most popular kid in high school.
My birth puts me in a purgatorial spot for racial identity and my nerdy high school reputation would make me the target demographic for power fantasies who dominate the market. The reason why I don’t buy into the gun filled fantasy is because I grew out of the desire to vent my wrath in a virtual world. I eventually realized it doesn’t matter how my nationality is labeled, because in the end no one cares. Maturity made its way to me my high school junior year and I realized I was the one building artificial social barriers with my gaming habits. I was a bratty narcissist who thought the whole world was against me when none of it was true. The power fantasy genre thrives off this feeling.
Power fantasy escapism has its place in video games but I feel it takes too much of the spotlight. Video games can be a diverse entertainment medium but after typhoon of shooters blowing their way this fall, it seems like a video games are primarily a source to grow a generation of narcissist players where they need to play the hero with a gun in one hand and girl in the other. I grew out of that fantasy a long time, and while it doesn’t make me better than anyone, it’s the reason why power fantasy does not appeal to me.
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