Before you begin to scroll down to angrily write in the comments section about the (potentially) inflammatory topic selection, I would like to mention 3 off-the-cuff, completely random things about myself in relation to my history with games. Not merely for the all-important "street cred", but to show you that, like you, I have a genuine emotional investment in the future of our hobby. 1) There is an imported Shadow of the Colossus: Roar of the Earth soundtrack CD currently spinning in my personal vehicle's CD player. I played it for my girlfriend recently whilst driving out to her parent's house; as a mainly Wii-centric so-called "casual gamer" and one-time collegiate music major, she is still in amazement that music from "these video games" could send chills down her spine and her arm hairs to stand on end. It was seemingly unfathomable for anything from a video game to be able to elicit an emotional response on the level of Beethoven, Mozart, Puccini and other classical composers. I told her that there are at least 100 more soundtracks like that in the 25-plus year history of video games that more than have that capability. She nodded in agreement, and I then proceeded to switch to the track for Colossi XIII. 2) For some reason, even with the jewel case and game having long since disappeared, I still have my original StarCraft CD Installation Key memorized completely in the back of my long-term memory, able to be recalled at will. In this day and age when people (including myself) can barely even remember their own cell phone numbers, this number has for some reason stuck since 1998. 3619-47063-5007. Try it. 3) To this day, I still think of the line "Madre de DIOS! Es el Pollo Diablo!!!!!" whenever I stumble into a room that has dramatic Telemundo tuned in on the TV. Thanks, Curse of Monkey Island.... Gaming, amazingly, and against innumerable odds, has now become a major modern pasttime, a brilliant time sink on par with any other form of leisure that has come before and since. I, like many of you, have grown up with this pasttime as an integral part of my own personal culture, a major pillar of my upbringing that has helped shape my personality and my general outlook on life. I've seen it first-hand as video games have crawled out of primordial pixels and simple 4-track MIDI chiptunes to evolve into a medium that has almost literally exploded into general mainstream acceptance. However, with that acceptance, the face of gaming has changed many, many times...and with those changes, it has begun to carve itself back into a niche that it seems frighteningly comfortable settling itself into. With the advent of the Internet, a whole world of possibilities unfolded itself upon us. It is an invention that has been instrumental in connecting millions upon millions of people throughout the world (and being the basis for how this editorial is distributed, obviously). It has shaped our interactions with each other, as well as our interactions with our chosen artistic mediums...and oddly enough, arguably not for the best. Where once there was socialization and communication between people that required a modicum of emotional involvement, in this day and age, a little too much of human interaction is made in forgettable, one-note exchanges, compartmentalized and compressed into mere hollow comments on a social networking site, a two-sentence misspelled text message on a cell phone, a quick chuckle at a YouTube video... ...and yes, even a single round of Call of Duty or Halo. With the advent of true broadband-enabled online gameplay for consoles, and living in a world increasingly more interested in the Here and the Now, a lot of gamers (and, subsequently, the games being designed for them) are shifting into primarily multiplayer-focused experiences. They are becoming more interested in the sugar rush of the next kill, the impatience for the next round, the hamster-wheel addiction of pointlessly levelling an avatar (a device used as a crutch by one too many designers for their vanilla multiplayer these days) than in any particularly memorable experience. Mind you, this is not a supreme dismissal of multiplayer gaming as a lesser form of entertainment, or a complete hammering of proven franchises. Some of the most fun experiences I have ever had with video games have been in the raucous company of both good friends and complete strangers. Trying for hours to get my 14.4k modem to connect for a DukeMatch. Entire weekends spent in front of a Nintendo 64, four grubby sets of mitts on controllers running around a Facility in Goldeneye. Realizing large-scale simulated war in Battlefield 1942. Experimenting with a madhouse of modifications for Half-Life. System-linked Halo after the launch of Xbox. The first time I heard the rest of the gaming world speak on my original Xbox Live headset playing MechAssault. Besides, regardless of my opinion on how it's being handled, modern incentive-based multiplayer design decisions are in our games nowadays for a reason, and if added smartly, are actually quite brilliant at providing us a fantastic reason to stick with a game. The problem does not stem from developers trying new tactics to cultivate communities for their respective games. The main problem, unfortunately, comes from us, the gamers ourselves. Humor yourself with an experiment; Go out and buy a multiplayer console game from, say, two or three years ago. Or even possibly just a bit more than 6 months ago. Make it a brilliant one, such as Team Fortress 2 in the Orange Box, or Unreal Championship III, or even Splinter Cell: Conviction. Maybe dig into one of the acclaimed board or card games not named Uno on the Xbox Live Arcade or PSN. Then, peer into the vast wasteland of emptiness that is the server population. See the problem yet? Even with every other game nowadays being designed with a persistent character or levelling/unlock system to try and maintain interest, and even if that system is intelligently designed around truly compelling multiplayer content, the gamer of today is more concerned with the Next Big Thing. The community at large moves like a swarm of locusts from the Here and Now to the next Here and Now, leaving potentially two to three-plus years of extremely hard work and hundreds of man-hours left to obscurity, an unadorned husk of a relic destined to sit not in museums and archives, but in bargain bins and used game piles, one that no one has any memory or recollection of, no emotional connection to whatsoever. We don't forget the scenes from our favorite movies. Lyrics and musical melodies from our favorite music stick with us for the rest of our lives. A striking classic painting or photograph is worth a thousand words, etched into memory, unable to be unseen. But the newest games are beginning to be considered only as online Bloodsports with Bloodsport 2.0 brushing aside 1.0 as merely an obsolete timesink. Nothing more. In other words, it's becoming Disposable Culture. It's not just the multiplayer side of things that's suffering, either, for even the single-player modes in modern gaming are beginning to plumb to the depths of instant gratification. In the shadow of the mind-melting financial success of Call of Duty, quite a few developers have begun to make similar fire-and-forget single-player experiences without lasting substance, be it style-based or otherwise. Instead of a comprehensive, memorable experience you can reflect on for months or even years at a time after you shut off the box of your choosing, an alarming amount of single-player content is devolving into a series of just the moments, with nothing but fluff and filler in between. Here's the moment where you get to drive the tank! Time to fly the rocket ship into space! Sniper rifle section! Now here comes the part where you sneak up and stab the guy in the face! Big explosion, sweet! Wait, what just happened in between? What were the character's names? And why can't I remember that five-second ending the developers phoned in? Disposable. An even sadder development was brought about to single-player gaming via the rise of Achievements/Trophies/Useless Bragging Right Knicknacks. Now, thanks to those, even if the developer has made a valiant effort to make something worthy of remembrance, an increasing number of us simply treat it as another hamster-wheel to run through. Instead of taking the time to absorb a compelling experience and reflect upon it, we simply restart the checkpoints and skip all the cutscenes again and again in order to get these arbitrary badges via pure repetition and brain-numbing force of persistence. So that's the rub of a lot of games these days. Instead of seeing and comprehending the painstaking effort put into a great single-player experience, we bash our heads into it for Pavlovian rewards, a wash-through without emotional investment. Instead of enjoying the tenseness of surviving together in a co-op horde mode, or having the chance to experience a story in a brand-new and engaging co-operative method, we exploit the AI glitches for maximum Pavlov profits and impatiently mash buttons and talk smack through the cinematics. And finally, when we finish all of that and come to those unique competitive multiplayer modes, we leave it after a week or a month, fired and forgotten, out of sight and out of mind, simply to move on to the Next. Big. Thing. I've read and thought about all the potential arguments, conversed with and listened to people from all walks of life, dissected all of the logic and reasonings behind this. The bottom line is this; it is becoming like this not simply by way of greedy, monolithic corporations, but by us, the proverbial Punks with Paychecks, that apparently could just care less. We send the creators the message these days with our wallets and our online man-hours that all we want is the Next Big Thing, the next big high, the next online killing field. Another hot-shot devoid of merit and substance, unworthy of being discussed in any serious form by the generations to come when ours has passed the world by. A logical description of Disposable Culture, sadly, if you ask me. And we only have ourselves to blame. It's all on us. Our faults. Thankfully, it isn't all doom and gloom. Even though these Off-Brain, On-Trigger "experiences" are what an ever-larger number of gamers crave nowadays, there are still developers who are attempting to take the risks and push the envelopes for the better, on all fronts, and luckily there are a sizable number of recent examples to choose from. From the free-flowing, well-scripted action-adventure of Uncharted to the subtext-laden thoughtfulness and horrors of BioShock; from the tactical cooperative espionage of Splinter Cell: Conviction to the tense and unique cat-and-mouse hunts of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood's competitive multiplayer mode; even from the quiet introspection and unsettling themes of indie hits Braid and Limbo to the riotous old-school brawls of Castle Crashers and the mad dashes of Super Meat Boy, our cups literally runneth over. These days, there are more chances than ever for developers to surprise us, to make us care about the experiences that they make for years to come, to help shape us and our culture, our personalities, our outlooks on life. Let's just hope that we're willing to let them.