Try to imagine the life of a time gone by.  It was a time of people reading games magazines, sitting in their bedrooms watching loading screens, and hearing the screeching noise of cassette-tape decks playing code that would result in a race for the mute button.  These were the days before the behemoth publishers such as EA and Valve became commonly known.  Yes, the late 80s and early 90s are fondly remembered by some of us due to the simplicity of life, and generally low expectations of games.

We can relate to Grand Theft Auto : Vice City’s radio adverts for the Degenatron video game system, where you control the green dot in your race to defeat the monstrous red square!  In those days, games were much more arcade-like in their design, since there weren’t large budgets to afford mainstream media advertising, and the arcades were where many kids and adults alike spent their change.  The graphics there were often far superior to what you could have in your own house, so you were happy with the often-poor home conversions of games.

If you ask a cross section of people, you will find a large amount of diversity in their choices of the golden age of gaming — when things took a leap forward and the expectations of gamers changed.  To some, it is the Wii with its casual gaming, and the XBox 360 / PS3 with the move to HD graphics.  To others, it’s the 16-bit era of the Super Nintendo and Sega Megadrive, with great conversions of Street Fighter 2.  To me, it is the 32-bit era of the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn.

This was when the hardware reached the stage where developers were making games on CD and making full use of the larger capacity of storage space available.  The following generation, however, saw the PC make a push from being something to replace your typewriter to representing itself as a solid games machine.  During the late 90’s and early years of the 21^st century, the online gaming scene pushed things from local multiplayer with a few mates to anonymous gaming with the world, and online patching and expansion became the norm.

Since games designers have had the opportunity to push more and more programming into their titles, a precedent has been set where we often feel a product is devalued if it contains a main storyline that can be completed in a relatively short time.  With the arcade-style games of old, they were usually completed in a couple of hours.  Even one of the most classic games of all time, Sonic the Hedgehog, can be completed in little over an hour without skipping any levels.  Super Mario Bros. 3 can be completed much faster if you use the warps to get to the last world straightaway.

Today’s gamers are surprised if they bring a game home, unwrap it and insert the disc into the drive and are not expected to immediately download a patch.  With the ruthless market expectations, developers are expected to commit to a release date and stick to it (with the obvious exception of Duke Nukem Forever!).

This means that games are churned out to meet sales, but are often unfinished.  Resident Evil 5, for example, caused a big media backlash for announcing that its online versus mode was going to be released as DLC instead of part of the main game.

So with games systems featuring increasingly important online components, patches have become commonplace, and this has opened the door for increasingly large hard drive space allocation.  Of course, games prices have risen to help subsidise the mounting development costs associated with these demands.  As a result, gamers expect to be rewarded with a good value return on their investment.

Twitter’s @MonicaRosalyn gave me her thoughts :

You definitely want to get your money’s worth from a purchase.  When you’re spending the sort of money that games cost these days, you feel you need to invest a lot time in them and it’s disappointing when you have finished the game in a couple of days.

So how do the game designers tailor their games to repay that investment?  Some push for an involving storyline, emotionally attaching you to charismatic people such as Nathan Drake, John Marston, or Lieutenant Commander John (or Jane) Shepard.  Some try to achieve the same idea, but fail to make the protagonist likeable.  Grand Theft Auto 4 would have been better received if Niko Bellic wasn’t instantly forgettable.

Although the character is an important aspect of the game, modern day RPGs have taught us that you can, to a certain degree, role-play and develop characters in your own styling.  You might choose to play Fallout 3 as a psychopath, homicidally murdering people in their sleep and insulting everyone you speak to.  (Telling a woman she was bats**t crazy was hilarious to me!)  If nothing else, it lets us mold the story to our own choosing, rather than dictating a linear path in the style of games like Uncharted 3.  I have previously written about being a recovering World of Warcraft addict, and so asked Monica how important the story is to a current MMO player.

As a MMORPG player the main game is not really started until you reach the top levels. There has to be a fair balance between the story of the game as you reach the top levels, and the content you unlock when you get there.  You also need some direction with your quests.  Although we like to explore the environments, it can be very disheartening when you don’t have a clue where you need to go for the latest quest you picked up.

It’s very important to have a main storyline so that you know what the aim of the game is and you know what you are fighting for! After all, you are most likely playing the role of a hero (or villain) whose aim is to save (or destroy) the world!

Amongst the titles in her gaming library, Monica plays Final Fantasy XI.  As with all MMOs, a lot of the draw that brings us back to these games is the community.  We have both spent hours in our respective games completely ignoring any questing because we are too busy using them as expensive online chat rooms.  I’m pretty sure that’s not what the developers had in mind, but as long as we keep paying them their monthly subscription fees, I don’t think they’ll stop us!

Sometimes you just sit at the keys and don't want to go out and kill things.

Of course there are plenty of free to play titles now, which operate on micro-transactions.  This type of retail means that you are, in effect, playing a massive pizza base of a demo, with the option of adding extra toppings through purchasing character slots, classes, and in some cases (notably Lord of the Rings Online), even quests!

This does allow you to try and actually play the game for free, all the time ignoring that constant carrot on a string dangling in front of your eyes, offering instant access to top-level gear, but amazingly, Sony appears to have made quite a lot of money in PlayStation Home by selling clothes for avatars, and Microsoft has tempted lots of users to buy that Lightsaber for their avatar.

It’s now mid-January, and I racked up a decent list of games completed in 2011.  Since I wrote my investigation into games rental services, I have played many games that I would never have touched, and have been quietly surprised by the content of some of them.  With the mass media advertising of certain games (Skyrim, Battlefield 3, Zelda: Skyward Sword), it is very easy to ignore budget titles.  Titles like Bastion have proved that you don’t need to invest £40 to be drawn into a good game, and that there are plenty of options out there for the modern gamer.  Do yourself a favour and try some indie games on Steam, XBLA and PSN.  It’s not all Plants vs Zombies and Angry Birds.  If we don’t support small developers, we will just have endless sequels flooding the market.

Monica is a part-time library assistant who is working towards becoming a web developer. Her hobbies include computer gaming and fitness (she is qualified in level 2 Fitness Instructing!).  You can follow her on Twitter by searching for @MonicaRosalyn, and check out her blog which is at http://michaelhoward.net/monicablog/ .

If you know of anyone that may have an unhealthy addiction to massively multiplayer online roleplaying games, don’t worry too much.  After a few years, this will turn to boredom as their friends move on to other games and the community they enjoy disappears.