Is it real? I mean, really real?

I didn't grow up rich. Most of the toys I made were homemade. I remember I actually made myself a little wooden Tommy gun and ran around my parent's yard shooting up the place. I had a few other little things, swords, crossbows, all that I made from the woods behind the house. They were pretty good for a kid with no attention span and only the most rudimentary understanding of power tools.

But what made up for the quality of the items, was the fact that I transported myself when I was using them. I really had a lot of fun, pretending to play war, or building a survival hut out in the middle of "the wilderness" all of 500 feet from my house. But that didn't matter. The sense of accomplishment I felt when I came back in from "winning the war" or "being rescued" wasn't diminished by the fact it wasn't real. I admit, I don't know what it's like to actually accomplish those things, but I'd imagine they're comprable to what I felt.

As I got older, as I think most of us did, I stopped wanting the purely infantile excitement of imagined accomplishment. I wanted to achieve in reality. I started doing better in school, started looking for opportunities to make a difference in my neighborhood, I plugged into a few volunteer organizations, and all with the expectation that I'd find that certain satisfaction that I felt as a kid. I'd say I came close. But as with most nostalgic memories, I never got it quite right....

I think that what I came to realize is that what I needed wasn't a real accomplishment, but rather the feeling of accomplishment. One that was relevant to my context. If I hung out with a bunch of football players and bragged about how I read Sowell's "Basic Economics" when I was 12 I doubt that'd mean the same thing as it would to a bunch of bookworms. Our accomplishments are entirely based off our context. That's why video games are so powerful. Video games not only provide easy to achieve goals, but they provide a context in which those goals are important. When I'm saving the universe, that feels important. Despite the fact that the universe I'm saving is a bunch of ones and zeros on a magnetic disc.

But does the fact that it wasn't real diminish any part of our personal satisfaction? I don't think it does, at least not to a huge extent. Especially when we understand the context of videogames to be something we inheritantly seek out for a sense of satisfaction. Much like a drug, videogames give us the feeling that we want from them. They enable some aprt of our brain to latch on to sensory information and tell us that we're doing a "good job. And that we're achieveing. That feeling, like a drug, is still real. It's a chemical reaction happening in our brain. But the fact is that the reason it's happening isn't what people call "real". But if I played videogames for what was "real" I wouldn't be playing videogames.

The bottom line is that I enjoy the "false" sense of accomplishment I get when I defend Gondor from Sauron. I like it when I hear the Halo announcer tell me I've gotten a "Killing Spree". I feel good when I see "100%" complete on a game's statistic. That means something in my own personal context. Whether or not a college profesor would advocate that this is "meaningful" is irrelevant  I like it. And in the end, that's the entire premise of gaming.

Are we losing our sense of creativity?

Are we running out of good ideas?

I've been gaming for a while, so I've seen the industry develop. While I'm not an expert, just a fan of games, I like to think that we have

Dis gat go blat blat blat

 And recently there's been a startling trend in one of my favorite genres, first person shooters. If you've paid attention to Bungie, who guys who brought us the beloved Halo series, they're working on a new title: Destiny. Destiny is a futuristic first person shooter... Like Halo... Like the last Call of Duty... Like a lot of other games, think Crysis and Aliens: Colonial Marines. We are being confronted with a pattern, we've already made plenty of war games from history, the original Call of Duty's, the Battlefield's, the Red Orchestra's, and before the turn of the century isn't prime real estate for video games. Remember the god awful attempt by the history channel to make a Civil War FPS? Spending a realistic amount of time reloading a musket doesn't sound like an enthralling game play mechanic. And it wasn't.

Unless it's a survival horror game where the lack of action adds to the suspense and overall atmosphere, FPS games tend to require more action packed, fast pace, ball breaking, combat. Players enjoy being immersed into a warzone, where their alertness and relaxes are on call for survival. It's the thrill of being integrated into a living situation, where your participation impacts the outcome of the battle. Think about Planetside 2. MMOFPS's aren't common, but since I started playing Planetside, I completely see the advantage and disadvantage. The advantage is that you are literally part of an alive battle field. Armored convoys, air support, infantry movements, all unscripted and genuine results of individuals, give the player the sense that they are really in a war. I also feel completely useless. With over a hundred people in a battle, your kill or two wont change much in the grand sceme of things. Especially when their spawn point is right behind them, just as far away as yours is. Even Planetside shows us the imitations of our "strip mining" of settings. It's set in the future, where you can deploy anywhere on a planet by clicking a button called "instant action". It drops you into combat (which is necessary for MMOFPS's cause who wants to walk all that way?) but what happens in a game where you don't have that technology in the setting? How would you make a WWII game? Parachutes? Maybe. But I think this is evidence of a more systemic problem.

Game mechanics can't be divorced from their setting. Otherwise people will complain that the game doesn't make sense. But with the expectations of excitement players have from their gaming experience, are game developers being limited to futuristic settings to satisfy those expectations?