The Omni-Death of Gaming

Sony just announced that from the beginning of 2028 (which, a reminder if you’re reading this shortly after I post it - that’s not a long time away, despite that it feels like it) they will discontinue production on new Playstation games on disc. Digital is the only way to play new Playstation games from year after next on.

This has been a long time coming, of course. Xbox tried to get ahead of the competition to disastrous results with their Xbox One launch approximately one million years ago now. But things are different. These days, the majority of games, even on console, are bought digitally. So much so that base models of current Playstations simply do not come with optical drives - if you want one, you have to buy it and install it separately.

It’s raised exactly the kind of depressed screams from certain types of gamers (me, I’m that type of gamer) as you’d expect.

And it got me thinking.

Note: it’s important to clarify that in this post I’ll be referring to gaming (the hobby with various internal subcultures attached to it) as distinct from the act of playing a video game.

I Got Next

You agreed to meet after school. Or maybe after work. Or maybe at a vaguely specific time, perhaps after lunch on a Sunday.

On the way, you check your wallet or purse and note how many coins you have. Proper coins. Games coins. In Australia it’d be Gold Coins, but maybe for you that’s Quarters. How many games is that? What about notes you can hand to the attendant to get more of these tokens of limited-time gaming?

You walk into the arcade and you’re hit with a barrage of sounds and scents, not all good but somehow all comforting. Your eyes adjusting to the largely CRT-lit room with intentionally ineffectual low-key drop lighting above row after row of video arcade machines.

You scan the room. You’re partly looking for the friends you said you’d meet, but you’re also partly checking for… changes. Which machines are shut off with makeshift paper over their screen indicating they’re awaiting repairs, which empty spaces now exist where once there were machines and, most excitingly, which new machines have turned up.

You could play games at home, on your little 8 bit cartridge console, or perhaps over at that friend’s place - the one who has a 16-bit console - but those games can’t hold a candle to arcade games. The graphics are better. The experiences are better. There are so many people around, all into the same things as you. You could strike up a conversation with almost any of them, probably, and have a new friend in moments.

You’re also checking to see who is around of, well, not your friends, but arcade regulars. In one corner there’s some combination of the fighter gamers, hovering over and the Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat cabinets, coins sitting beside the current players indicating that someone else loitering nearby has next game, to play against the winner.

You meander over to the double-set of GTI Club racing cabinets. Your friends aren’t here yet, but you want to get a game or two in anyway, to remind yourself how it feels. You pick the right-most sitdwn cabinet, not out of any superstition but because you know the left-most cabinet’s all-important handbrake lever is ever so slightly looser, and in a game as heavy on the handbrake-turns as GTI Club that’s not ideal.

Wordlessly, as you finish your first race, a stranger you don’t know sits down in the other machine and the coin-drop noise plays. You glance over to see someone a little bit younger than you. They don’t make eye contact.

You’ll play with them until your friends turns up in half an hour, and then maybe you’ll move on to something vintage like Space Invaders, or perhaps a few rounds at Mortal Kombat, even though you know you’ll never win at that.

Progress Bar

You step onto the train carriage, smelling the burnt carbon of all the braking the old electric train did to pull into this station. You board, finding the least-torn seat and sitting down. It’s twenty minutes to your station, so you reach into the plastic bag you’re carrying and retrieve the large, colourful cardboard box and unseal it.

Inside you find a large cloth map, a tantalising glimpse of the world you’re about to explore. Briefly glancing at it, you’re fascinated to note that its labels aren’t in English, but instead in the runic language you vaguely recall from a previous game in the series. Tucking the map away carefully, you briefly flick through the installation guide leaflet and a small but surprisingly nice looking pamphlet advertising other games by the same publisher; you’ll read that later.

Then comes the main course, a beautifully constructed game manual, written in entirely diegetic form, its cover embossed with the simple logo of the game in question.

You almost miss your stop from reading it.

You walk faster than usual home from the train station, fighting the urge to keep reading the manual as you meander through suburbia back to where your home computer sits, powered off.

Getting home, you immediately flick the big red power switch with a satisfying ‘clack’, hoping nobody comes home and needs to use it before you get a good few hours with your new purchase.

Carefully retrieving one of the 3.5" floppy disks from the box, you insert the one labelled “Disk 1” and begin the text-mode install program. Slowly, and with much clunking fanfare from the lone floppy drive in the system your dad bought two years before, you briefly watch the progress bar creep up from 0% to 1, then 2, then finally 3.

It’s going to take a while, so you retrieve the manual again from the box on the desk beside you, opening up to the page you bookmarked with your game’s receipt, careful not to dog-ear or in any way damage the beautiful booklet you continue the read as the game is copied from numerous disks to the whirring platter-drive.

You’ve not even played yet, and you’ve immersed yourself in the fictional world of this video game.

The Line

You arrive around 11 o’clock, walking through the empty shopping mall as part of a small but steady stream of people who are also walking past the cleaners on ride-on floor buffers trying to remove the worst results of the day’s commerce.

Riding the escalator up a floor, you see some of the people entering peeling off to the nearby cinema, no doubt catching a late night screening of whatever dogshit superhero stuff is still being farted out at cinemas. Surely that fad will end soon… oh well.

Walking around the corner, you see it - a line which, will in reality is probably just twenty or so people, makes your heart both sink and soar. Sure, it seems long, and all you can think is oh christ, will I get to play this damn thing before tomorrow morning?, but you also see a friend of yours, who waves excitedly and gestures - he saved you a spot.

You get a clear for taking cuts to get several spots from the back of the line, but when the two of you start excitedly talking about the game the people behind you join in, and soon you’ve made a new friend.

“What are you going to do first?”

“I hear the map is three times as big.”

“Did you read the preview in Official Playstation Magazine?” asks one of the people you don’t know.

You dutifully open your bag, producing the magazine in question to the delight of everyone. You got it for the preview, despite knowing you’ll be buying it on Xbox. It’ll be the odd one out on your shelf of other magazines, but that’s fine. It’ll be there if you ever want to go back to it.

“It has unique screen shots!” you say, flipping through the pages to get to the article in question.

In the process, you pass a review of another game which came out last month.

“Oh, have you played that one?” one of the people you don’t know asks.

“Not yet,” you say, gesturing to your friend. “But he has.”

By the time midnight rolls around, the line is four times as long, and instead of being near the back and even then only because you got cuts, you’re instead in the front quarter of the line, and feeling pretty good about it. The line wraps all the way around into the damn food court.

Then, finally, the shutters go up and no less than four of the games store registers are open. One other staff member begins to beckon people to the registers, and sealed copies of the new game start getting rung up and placed in unique “Midnight Launch” plastic bags printed just for the occasion - to show you were there.

Some people get the regular edition, but not you. You planned for this. You got one of the limited edition special versions, coming in a big cardboard box full of goodies. The others? They just get the map. You get the branded safe deposit box (you’ll later sit that beside your console to store spare cables, batteries and controllers), the official gym bag, the art book, and numerous other small trinkets and tchotchkes.

Omni-Death

These are all experiences that are largely dead now.

Arcades still exist, but either as boutiques attached to failing bars or as rooms full of trinket-machines that dispense prizes if you hit a plastic ball with another plastic ball.

Midnight Launches have been on the way out along with physical media. Who wants to wait in line to then have to install the game at home and barely get 5 minutes in before 2am, when you can have the game pre-loaded and fire it up the moment midnight rolls around?

There’s a lot of reasons the discontinuation of physical media for consoles is a bad thing. The most notable one, to me, isn’t even having no maps or manuals or cases to put on your shelf for visitors to judge you on. It’s that for so many people in the increasingly large lower-bracket of income, borrowing disc games from friends who finished them, or buying them second-hand was the only way they got to play games most of the time.

But second hand games don’t earn the publisher money directly. Combine that with digital convenience, and this was absolutely always coming.

And so these physical media experiences will go away, making gaming more expensive, more locked-in, and less… tactile.

I’ll never stop playing games, in the way most people never stop watching movies, even if they drift away from the cinema experience. But at least cinemas are still there.

However, I can’t help but feel that this is yet another item in a long conga-line of things that make the social experience and hobby of ‘gaming’ become something that no longer exists in a form that brings me joy.