I Think Consoles Intimidate Me (A Rant on Social Gaming)
So I picked up an XBox 360 yesterday and I've found that I'm having a hard time adjusting to playing a console again.
I think it is just that I play MMOs too much. For the past five years, 95% of my gaming time has been in an MMO. For the years before that, 75% of my gaming time was in MUDs. Sure, I'd play a bit more console games before then, but I always had a console and TV in the room with my computer. Now the computer is in the office and the TV and console are in the living room so I'm playing one or the other, not both anymore.
Looking through my gaming collection, I find most of it is made up of various RPGs. From the Final Fantasy's to Chrono Cross to Shadow Hearts to .Hack to Kingdom Hearts, most of my previous console games are JRPGs. The action games I play such as Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike, Call of Duty are all superior to me on the computer, but even those games fight for computer time vs MMOs.
All in all, the last decade of my life has been dominated by very social gaming. Now don't get me wrong, I understand that the XBox 360 has some social networking tools, but the pale in comparison to those on the computer. The last couple consoles I have owned have been the Playstation, the Playstation 2, and the Wii (which I later sold because it is a terrible console and Nintendo hates gamers). None of those three consoles are known for social gaming. They are all for either single player games or playing games right next to someone else in the room.
With the time I've put into the 360 so far, when I start playing a game I feel a strange lack of satisfaction because I don't feel a community around me like I do when I play MMOs. I've even seen this as of lately when I'd try to play a single player game on the PC like The Witcher of Fallout 3. I'll put in an hour or two in the game and then just start thinking about how I wish I could be chatting with my buddies in WoW. Granted, if I go log into WoW, it would be very unlikely I got anything accomplished or even if I did any actually talking with friends. But I still have that feeling of community just being in the game. MMOs are the only way I feel like games are alive anymore.
This is all really putting a damper on my playing of other games.