Stamps and Assault Rifles

(originally written 3/21)

I’m a gamer… that’s my hobby. It’s a common hobby these days, and seems as if it’s becoming more popular than a lot of old fashioned hobbies… or it is an old fashioned hobby just in a new package?

Consider collection hobbies. Stamps, Coca-Cola products, Pez dispensers. People spend TONS of money, search eBay religiously and fly halfway across the country just to have that one, perfect piece that completes or fills their collection. Gamers like me might look at them and say they are obsessive and are almost like the “hoarders” one might see in A&E. Guess what…gamers collect too…

Granted, it’s not collection in any physical, fill-your-garage form, but in some games we are inexplicably motivated to collect.

On its most apparent level, one could take the Pokemon franchise for example. In it, players are encouraged to “catch ‘em all” and thusly explore the entire pixel landscape until they do and in the end have a checklist of 150 or so digital creatures all checked off. Whoopy-doo.

Now…Pokemon is marketed to kids and pre-teen. We “mature” gamers surely don’t succumb to this fruitless collecting of digital trinkets!!!

Wrong…

In 1997, Blizzard Entertainment released what would become a very popular action role-playing game franchise called Diablo. In this game players click through dungeon after dungeon, slaying demons in hopes of saving the town of Tristram from the devil himself. This feat could be done in a matter of hours, so why would I want to pay $50 for a short game? Surely there would be nothing to entice me to play through it again. Oh, but there was… You see the levels themselves were randomly generated so it never played the same way twice, but that was only a minor reason you came back. No, the main reason you delved back into the Abyss again was the LOOT!!! Weapons and armor that would drop from the monsters and pop out of the treasure chest were also randomly generated. Each new sword that fell could possibly deal more damage than your current one, or it could enhance a different ability than the last. This excitement of finding new and better loot is nothing different than when the Coke enthusiast finds that rare 1972 Santa Clause Special Holiday Edition bottle that had the misprinted ingredient listing. It keeps you lusting for more.

Then there are the “achievement whores”.

In 2005, when Microsoft released the Xbox 360, they also updated Xbox Live, their multiplayer gaming service, with the new feature called the “Gamer Score.” In every Xbox 360 game, players can achieve certain milestones inside of normal game play. These achievements each carry their own weight in points and add to your cumulative gamer score. The result? A larger and larger number. These achievements serve no more purpose than bragging rights amongst your Xbox friends. There is no leaderboard, so you can’t write it off as a meta-game on top of the games you play. They do not serve as a currency with which you can acquire any goods physical or digital. All they do is serve to show what more or less you have done than your friends.

And people will play the CRAPPIEST games to score easy achievements just to say they have them.

All that said… as of today my gamer score is 2,275 and I’m about to jump into a game of Borderlands to see if I can find a combat rifle that has a larger ammo magazine than the one I’m carrying now. Isn’t collecting a blast?