[Time-sinks] Computer and board games

Computer and board games will be the subject for part 5 of the opening post series on this blog. Two posts in a day! Can you tell it's the weekend and I've got nothing to do?

Computer games, once the hobby of only geeks such as myself, have become something of a mainstream pastime in recent years. A greater and greater percentage of the population are playing board games, as the generation that grew up with them continues to play on the new generation of consoles (PC gaming is another story). In my opinion this is a good thing. Board games, on the other hand, have almost gone in the other direction. The old scene of families sitting down to board games of an evening or at the weekend is, in my experience, in steady decline. Traditional boardgames, such as Monotony (sorry, Monopoly) and Scrabble are being usurped by 'German-style' games, and becoming more geeky in the process. Or possibly that's just the sense that I get from people I know, although recent games night socials with the lifesaving club have proven surprisingly popular.

I arrived later to the console party than many of my friends. I'd had PC games for quite a few years; mostly turn-based strategy games, at which I sucked, but also an amazing game called 'Pyscho Pinball' that you had to run through DOS! I even owned a bright yellow example of the original Game Boy brick, as well as a Game Boy Pocket. All of my friends, however, were talking about games that they played on the Megadrives, Saturns, SNESs etc. I knew about consoles, and desperately wanted one. Many were the days during my primary school years on which I would go to my friend David's house after school and fritter away an hour or so playing on his SNES. And whenever we went to Toys 'R' Us, my brother and I would immediately head for the display and demonstration consoles.

When everyone started to get excited about the Playstation and the N64, I decided that the time had come. I asked for an N64 for Christmas (choosing it over the Playstation because of the cool 3D graphics), actually got one, and have since worked my way through every new generation of Nintendo consoles. I still have that N64 and all of it's games in a box in my room though., as well as the Game Boy Advance that I picked up. In the last couple of years I have also succumbed to the lure of the XBox 360, and in fact that's become my main console since my brother took the Wii to university with him (and promptly had it stolen). 

The Metroid Prime series is a work of genius. Three of my favourite games of all time, they perfectly blend exploration,

 puzzle solving, item collecting, and shooting aliens. (Credit: gamerlive.tv)

My games of choice have historically clumped into two genres: racing games, and first person shooters. I've also dabbled in fighting games, but the only two that have ever held my interest are the Smash Brothers and Soul Calibre series, and had a brief foray into Guitar Hero/Rock Band, although they were far too expensive for me to buy. Having said all of that, my favourite sets of games are probably the Mario, Zelda and Metroid series, which fit into none of these categories. Ah well, what can you do. I tend to spend at least half an hour a day playing computer games, and a couple of hours a day on those rare weekends that see me actually at home. I find it a great way to wind down just before I go to bed.

The main reason for the choice of the FPS genre is simple. Gaming has always been a fairly social activity for me. As I mentioned in my post on wargaming, I used to spend days at a time gathered with friends at each others' houses. In the evenings, and late into the night, we'd gather around the console for multiplayer deathmatches, laughing our heads off at the ridiculous things that happened. The combination of the games, four friends in the same room, and our senses of humour led to many a happy hour. One of the things that I find disappointing about more recent games and consoles is that there has been a dramatic shift away from this multiple players on one console scenario, and towards the online multiplayer paradigm. To me, playing games with people, often strangers, that I don't know and can't see is simply not the same as playing games with my friends in the same room. There are some games that support both, or even the two things in tandem (which is awesome and absolutely to be pursued), but they seem to increasingly be the minority.

Timesplitters: Future Perfect splitscreen. Ah those were the days.

 Flame tag with 3 friends at 2 in the morning was a hoot. (Credit: http://timesplitters-world.de/)

As far as board games go, my family was one of those that did play games of a weekend. My favourite games were Cluedo, for the puzzle solving aspect, and Rummikub (a game which deserved to be far more widely known than it is), for the way that you could pull of long strings of tile manipulation to swing the game back in your favour. Many was the holiday on which we would spend an evening or rainy day with some board games, whiling away the hours somewhere in the UK.

When I went to university I joined the Warwick Sci-Fi society, possibly the most incorrectly named society that I have ever encountered. At the first meeting I attended I quickly realised that it was really a board games society, but with games that were like nothing I'd ever seen before. That was my introduction to so-called 'German-style' games, and I have to say that they are generally much better than any traditional games that I have played. The rules have more depth and more strategy to them in many cases, and there are often multiple ways in which you can win the games. I spent four happy years learning and playing a wide variety of games. I lost far more than I ever won, which was occasionally frustrating, but it was almost always a lot of fun. The downside to leaving Warwick was that I actually had to buy my own copies of some of my favourite games! Whilst part of Sci-Fi I'd simply relies on the copies that the society owned, or on the vast collection of my friend James.

Ticket to Ride - one of my favourite 'German-style' games. Deceptively simple rules, with a lot of hidden strategy

and a healthy dose of screwing over the other players. (Credit: pevans.co.uk)

It's taken me a while to get back into board games since starting at St Andrews. Every time I visit James we play at least two different games, but up here I haven't get the chance to play many. The afore-mentioned problem of buying my own copies was responsible for most of the drought - given the choice between board games or wargaming models I'd usually pick the later. The lack of a board game society didn't help either. But in the last year or so I've started picking up some games, and enjoying them all over again. I've even been introducing my friends to them, and have discovered that some of the games are more widely known than I thought. I choose to take this as a sign that board games are on starting to make a comeback in popular culture, with the removal of the traditional games of which everyone was bored, and their replacement by more interesting games.