I knew for a long time that PlayStation Plus was a great deal. At first, it just wasn't a great deal for me.
Now that I have it, it's still a great deal, but I'm at odds with the way it has steadily changed my gaming habits.
Back in the summer of 2010 when Sony announced PlayStation Plus, the addition of the Instant Game Collection rotation created one of the best deals in gaming, even if it boiled down to a Gamefly-like digital service where someone else picked out the rental games every month.
Since then the catalog has grown for several years, to the point that if one owned Sony platforms and an internet connection, the service could practically provide enough games to last a customer indefinitely. The longer the subscription, naturally, the more choices and variety in games become available. By design PlayStation Plus rewards those who have subscribed the longest. While I appreciated the design and intent, I had little desire to buy-in since I prefer physical copies and played my 360 much more often at the time.
Fast forward a few years, MS's focus on Kinect, and a promotion that allowed me to pick up PS Plus for a free year, and I find myself with every Sony system and a quickly growing backlog of games only visible from a menu. Given the PS4's requirement of PS Plus for online play, I took advantage of 2013's Black Friday, and let's just say I'll have Plus for... awhile.
Especially compared to the very meager Games with Gold feature added to Live, Plus is still easily one of the best deals in gaming, and at this point it would be silly for me to argue otherwise since I've greatly enjoyed many of the free games and discounts provided, not to mention the online fun on PS4. However, video games developing into an entertainment service as opposed to an entertainment product still goes against my personal philosophy and Plus is a poster child for such an implementation.
This change is not just rhetorical, much as I would like it to be. I've found that I now plan my gaming around what is announced for free each month on the service. It's not always intentional, and of course it could easily be argued that a simple matter of willpower should break this trend. In fact, many years ago I had to break my habit of playing for Achievements instead of fun, a practice I slowly developed and struggled hard to eventually overcome. The difference, at least in part, is that Achievements only tied into a virtual scoreboard and not my personal list of desired gaming experiences. While it was a surprisingly tough mental addiction to break, once I did it was easy to 'play what I want to play' instead of 'play what I bizarrely feel I should play for arbitrary score regardless of if I'm having fun.'
When it comes to Plus, games I would have perhaps desired to play later are front and center, and there is a greater incentive to play them before they get lost in the digital pile, a list that sticks out less than the physical copies of games on our shelves. I know that I'm far less likely to dig up a game from a digital back-catalog than a game temporarily forgotten on the shelf. In fact a cursory glance at my 360 XBLA games reminded me that I never completed
Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, a game I had once eagerly awaited, excitedly played for a few hours (including a nifty co-op mode) and somehow promptly forgot about. I'm correcting that now, and shaking my head at how it happened, and I know that exact scenario has played out a number of times.
I could just 'play what I want' but as the back catalog builds and the hard drive space shrinks (especially on PS4) I find myself once again picking and choosing experiences based more on what's on the Instant Game Collection rotation before it disappears. I tag every game to download so it's not completely gone from my grasp, but I know if I have to search previous downloads to find it, it's even less likely to be played than if it only existed on hard drive.
Having fake cases to display for digital copies of games may seem silly, but now I genuinely understand the idea. Once it's out of sight, it's out of mind, even for desirable games.
Of course this is all silly. It's just games on a service, and it's quite a silly complaint to fuss about how there are so many games popping up I want to play that I'm letting many slip through my limited attention. If that were the only problem, I'd just shrug and move on.
The real problem for me, though, goes back to intentionality. Back in the glory days of the NES and SNES, my friends and I would pour over every new (pre-internet) gaming magazine. Each picture of a game we wanted grew our expectations. Even when a game was released, limited funds meant sometimes those previews and reviews were the extent of our experience with a game for quite some time, and it built up the desire and passion to really get as much out of the experience as possible. The tempered wait, the lofty expectations, the
intentionality of playing games meant that even the poor quality ones were often savored, and the great ones were truly cherished.
The opposite of this, for me, are Steam sales. I'd be a hypocrite for griping about buying access to dozens (or hundreds) of great indie and big name games for a few bucks apiece. Yet this complete saturation of immediate gaming breaks down the intentionality of gaming. In a few short years, these sales have made having a backlog like mine very commonplace. Sure, a game can be picked and downloaded easily from the digital library list, but how many folks are intentionally savoring each, or even a few, of those games the way we used to before such access was available?
During the original PlayStation era, I knew a fellow who would rent each game as it was released, play through it as fast as possible, and return it for something he hadn't yet 'beat.' I hadn't thought much about it until I began asking him about the actual games he played.
"How did you like
Vandal Hearts?"
"Who?"
"
Vandal Hearts. You said you finished it last week."
"That the one with the squares?"
"The one with th- What? Squares?"
"Yeah, didn't you have to move each guy on little squares?"
"...yeah, sort of? I liked how in the story-"
"Yeah, I don't remember the story. That was like two games ago."
"Seriously? You don't even remember when-"
"I remember, like, the cool Mr. T with a gun for an arm. He was cool."
"Gun for a-... that was
Final Fantasy VII!!"
"Was it? Oh, I remember that one. It had the bike, right? I wanted to just stay on the bike. That was cool."
"I... have to go cry in a corner for awhile now."
"You should totally sell your old Nintendo crap and buy
Madden."
"Great. I'm about to have to cry in the corner of a jail cell."
That's a paraphrase, but the idea is there. He was the original games-as-service customer. He played through each game as a notch on a scoreboard, and moved on. And as much as that's not me, I respect that's just how some folks game. That's their entertainment, their unwind, their free-time preference.
This approach does, however, work against the 'games as an art media,' but that's another article. More to the point, I have no desire to engage in video games this way; I want to intentionally experience individual game creations. I'm not looking to elevate
Bomberman to Shakespeare, but I do want to make sure that when I play a video game I'm not going to look back at the last hour and think, 'that wasn't what I wanted to spend my free time doing.' And I find that games-as-service models, such as PlayStation Plus, tend to rewrite my gaming time to match its schedule instead of me proactively choosing how to spend my time.
Will I be able to break myself of this tendency like my Gamerscore pursuit before it? Or has Plus become a fixture I'll wrap my gaming around until those servers are shut off and I lose every game I never got around to? Am I trapped in a game providing service the same way monthly paid MMOs 'trap' me into feeling I have to play enough each week to justify the cost? Does it really matter?
The first step of intentionality is to identify the factors involved, both static and dynamic. So here's step one, and that answers the last question; any pursuit that improves understanding of the self is a worthwhile venture, especially when video games can be involved.
