vote for a boring america

Back in the old days (i.e. 15 years ago), video games were still in their infancy. There were a lot of game companies struggling to make it, but common theme pervaded all the games: in order for game companies to sell more game, they needed to make it more fun. More exciting. More addicting.

Fast Forward to the present.

Tonight, as I worked on my project (implementing motion capture to play a student built computer game), we got into a discussion with someone who came to test the game. He was asked if he played Halo 2, and he just shook his head and said he can't go there. Can't. Not won't, can't. Why? Because of one game in junior year of college, he almost failed the entire year. He stayed up all night playing it, skipped class the next day, slept through the day, got up, and since he had no homework to do, started playing again. For 3 days. He finally went to the lab to work on a presentation that was due the next day. Unfortunately for him, this was right when Quake 3 demo came out. Someone so fortuitously decided to install it on all the lab's machines. And they played. And played. Until 20 min before they had to present. They got up there, shrugged their shoulders and said, we don't have anything. The professor was forced to fail his group. Now, he stays away from any game he knows will consume him (read: any game that's TOO fun).

Has anyone ever heard of WoW? World of Warcraft, a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game)? I have never played it, nor will I. Why? Because it'll suck up too much time. You pay (a monthly fee) to play and essentially you live out an alternate life in the game. You have a character, you collect stuff, kill people, buy things, make friends, kill more people, collect more stuff, buy more stuff, make more friends, etc. If I didn't spend time playing the game, I would feel like I was wasting my money. And other people would be advancing in the game while I accomplished meaningful goals in my life.

Or perhaps you've heard of people dying from playing too many video games.

Conclusion: video games are too addicting. They have gone from being not fun enough and trying to sell as many as possible, to being too fun and addicting and causing people to die. Of course, it's still the person's fault that decided playing video games was more important than eating or sleeping, but don't you think we've gone a little too far?

This is an official call to arms for game programmers/designers/industry execs. Make games boring. For the sake of our country and our children's children, please stop making fun games. I for one, will do everything I can to make only boring games.