Goodbye, Video Games
The End, not Game Over
I am an Asian man, therefore, I love video games. Note that I don’t have to add the heterosexual category.
My first electronic game was a pirated copy of Paperboy, which I played after I returned from school holiday at grandma’s house and found out that there was a family computer. The library kept on growing along with the hardware: speakers, Hard Disk, more expensive monitors, sound card, VGA card, and eventually, CD-ROM drive.
Growing up in Asia meant growing up with a mixture of pirated and original media. School holidays in Singapore meant a chance to buy Nintendo Game Boy games, which I mostly couldn’t finish. A trip to Australia meant I returned with incompatible Super Nintendo cartridges (PAL) that couldn’t get into my North American console (NTSC). Eventually, that one was solved by an adapter.
There was a space of two to three years when original PC games, imported from Singapore, were finally available, but that all vanished by the Asian Financial Crisis that began in July 1997. Perhaps the abundance of pirated video games available in the late 1990s served as a public tranquilizer, along with pirated movies and free broadcast of European football (Indonesia never ran out of money for that one). The 1998 World Cup in June could have been a factor that ended the May riots.
Then, college in Australia, and I was pampered with all the original PC and console video games. Like many other Asian men (not all but many), I spent more money on video games than on fashion and sports. The original, Australian ones, while other Indonesian students looked for pirated copies from Indonesia.
I was in a strange spectrum of having more video games than average Australians did, but they were original Australian copies. Meanwhile, the otakus, white and Asian alike, had imported Japanese or Hong Kong versions, while, as I said, other Indonesians saw no point in buying the original Australian edition.
In those days of pre-digital distribution, Australian home entertainment attached itself to Europe, which meant that the discs, be it for movies or video games, followed the European distribution dates, and those discs must be shipped from Europe to Australia. Which meant that new arrivals in Australia could be months or a year behind the release dates in Asia. Which means that buying Australian could be too Europoor for an Asian.
Why do Asian men like video games? Maybe it’s the synthesis of technology and fantasy. As half of the video games are made by Japanese companies, it’s an avenue where Asians can see themselves as the protagonist. The social aspects are there, although I think in general it’s easier for white people (or even Indonesians, in my experience) to share the controllers and be silly than Chinese and other East Asians are.
I love sports video games for their ability to rewrite sports history or reenact them, while inserting fictional athletes into the fray. I love historical video games for the same reason. I love action-adventure video games for the ability to walk and drive around the city, especially after I returned to Indonesia, and certainly for the power fantasy.
And that is why video gaming is the worst kind of entertainment: Very long investment in time and energy, good chance of being unfinished, and when you do finish it, the conclusion is unsatisfactory. Eager to capture all the best entertainment could offer, for years, I made a list of the top ten albums, books, movies, TV series, and video games to consume.
One can complete an album in one hour. One movie in two. A TV season in a month or half. A book…some in three days, others longer than three months. Video games? It’s meant to be consumed as long as possible. Arcade video games of the 20th century were meant to swallow coins. When renting video games from Blockbuster was encouraged in the 2000s, both publishers and stores didn’t want games to be completed in hours, the way movies are. Video games can be overtly easy for fun (and no one admires someone who completes a game with Easy difficulty), but they’re designed as a time sink.
And it has sunk thousands of hours of my life. It has left me unfulfilled. Video games are the expensive Sisyphus stone you’ve bought yourself, not as a punishment but as a promise of entertainment.
CD & DVD stores had stopped existing by the late 2010s. In Indonesia, it’s a funny story: They were in constant struggle in the 21st century, fighting losing battles against the pirated stores existing under…certain patronage. Then the government, which is always in touch with American media companies, made streaming affordable and abundant by the late 2010s. Piracy was killed instantly by both the removal of the patronage and the market. Indonesian video game stores had even sold original copies imported from Singapore by the early 2010s, earlier than original Blu-Ray discs, that are never available here.
Also killed were the media stores, and it was the same story around the world. Visiting disc stores in Singapore in the late 2010s was depressing, as the main customers were elderly Chinese looking for karaoke discs and nerdy women looking for Japanese series not yet on streaming (that problem was soon addressed). The film buffs were obviously in independent stores, and they would scoff at my MCU taste.
So, video game stores were my happy place. The place for straight Asian men, single or in a relationship. The little piece of Tokyo or Hong Kong, wherever you are. What was that feeling when you held a wrapped plastic case containing the disc? Enter this fantasy world of intrigue and adventure, and triumph there or die trying. You’ll play there in loneliness, but it doesn’t matter because it has all the audiovisual magic you won’t get in real life or a book, and the active participation you don’t have from movies.
Even in video games, addiction to video games was a sign of immaturity and an asocial life. You’d play with the most horrible, racist, and sexist people around. You’d be rude to your own family. If you were a dad and playing video games, you were ruining your family’s future the way you watch sports, or the Francis Ford Coppola collection didn’t.
The clash came with the Gamergate of the mid-2010s. Video game critics were changing from dude geekiness to girl geekiness. Eventually, production also changed, following the practice of Hollywood production and fiction publishing.
It was cool when I was swimming in the Yes, She Can spirit of the late 2010s. Not so cool after 2020. Games, like TV and movies, became heavy-handed. Became strange and preachy. Became uninteresting. Became boring and expensive at the same time. It’s quasi-queered, more in the degree of Young Adult literature or contemporary TV series.
Certainly, video gaming in the 2020s is very expensive, with a video game priced above 50 USD. When I was trading my PlayStation 4 console for the slimmer, 2016 model back in 2021, a poor man and his son were buying a pre-owned Pro Evolution Soccer 2020 disc for USD 15 in cash, and seemed confused when he asked about the 2021 edition, and the staff said it’s gone all digital.
It was a sobering memory when I collected my PlayStation 5 2024 model in April 2024, and all the discs had reached a million rupiah, USD 60. It’s a global phenomenon, and it is true that even in the developed world, poor families can no longer afford to play PlayStation or Xbox the way their parents could in the 1990s and 2000s.
Perhaps it’s the result of unionization. Perhaps the technologies are that expensive. Perhaps it’s always more expensive than eggs and socks and Netflix.
USD 60 for a game. That’s more expensive than a monthly subscription to a premium Substack account, isn’t it? That’s certainly more expensive than a premium Netflix subscription. Heck, I have annual streaming subscriptions cheaper than that.
Incidentally, PlayStation (no, Xbox and Xbox Game Pass are not officially available in Indonesia) offers a half-assed subscription service called PlayStation Plus. The medium tier, offering access to recent games, is about USD 70 a year.
Poor video game stores. I just hope they still have regular customers, but all the joys (if one can say that word) were completely sapped by expensive products that are not fun at all. You can say that the big bosses of video game corporations are the winners, with hundreds of staff laid off over the years. Yeah, perhaps, but for some strange reason, those staff also hate me on Bluesky. Early this year, I searched for the accounts of writers of my favorite game series (it’s Mass Effect) who just got fired on Bluesky, only to find that all of them had blocked me. Never meet your idols, for they have hated you before they know you.
No love lost then. My money will go to Substack, and there is a great way to stream all the games ever made and get to the end: YouTube. Perhaps it’s no more than interactive fiction and alternative sports results. Money saved, time saved, energy saved, and I do finally get the joy out of video games.