Avoiding the Gaming Media Deluge
When I was a kid, I used to devour every bit of gaming media I could. I was collecting GamePro issues, watching everything on GameTrailers, perusing through GameFAQs without somehow not becoming a piece of trash, and checking IGN literally every single day.
This made sense because as a kid everything was fun and new and exciting, so I didn't mind watching the (still incredible) My Hands trailer for FFXIII a bazillion times. On top of this, I didn't have much in the way of disposable income, so a lot of the time I was looking at media for games that I was never going to play. I was just excited about the medium, so I was happy to look at whatever I could.
Now I am pushing 30 and I've hit the inverse lately. I don't watch or read much of anything if I'm interested in a game. I stopped checking out gameplay walkthroughs, I'm not scrolling through Reddit threads. If I see a game I think might be interesting, I say, "huh, that looks interesting!", add it to my list of games that look interesting, and move on.
That goes double for games I know I'm interested in. While I am losing my mind waiting for Wo Long to come out this Friday, I haven't looked at any gameplay outside of what's shown in the three or four minute trailers. Same with Octopath Traveler 2, Harvestella, and Like a Dragon: Ishin!
The reason for this is two-fold. The first is that """discourse""" in the gaming sphere is absolute trash. Seeing people decide how they feel about a game before it's even in anyone's hands (cough, cough, Forspoken) makes reading about them extremely annoying. I have been very pleasantly surprised by games that were getting dogged on in the usual Twitter circles because I didn't see what they were saying until after the fact.
The second reason, and probably the more important one, is that games have become a lot more fun to play when I don't know everything about them before starting it. I didn't really know how karakuri worked in Wild Hearts, so building one to hard counter the King Tusk in the opening hours of the game made me incredibly excited. The same can be said of Harvestella. I had no idea that game had a job system, so when I ended up learning that it did, and also that there were like 12 jobs to unlock, I was looking forward to digging into them ASAP.
Another good example of this as a whole is Hi-Fi Rush. That game is heat, and has also been incredibly well-received. I think a big part of that is the game's surprise release. This isn't viable for every game, but the fact that it was allowed to release immediately let people boot it up and take it for what it is, and not the imaginary game that would be built in their heads if they had to wait for it to release a few months, or even weeks down the line.
So yeah, not knowing stuff is awesome and I'm a big fan of it. It feels good to be surprised by games again. I think I believed that I needed to keep up with every aspect of the game industry because it's one of my biggest hobbies, but that isn't true. Plus now I'm playing games a lot more than talking about them, so that's good (uh except for this blog, lol).