We also again beat our previous record for SVGL polling with 887 votes! You guys are awesome! I asked you whether your emotional relationship to games has changed as you grew out of childhood.
I was under the impression that for most of us, the good old days were the best old days, and that even though games have evolved by leaps and bounds since our youth, it's been hard to recapture that lovin' feeling, whether it's because we're not imaginitive little kiddoes anymore, because we're attached to the past or because today's titles are so sophisticated they leave less room to fill in the blanks.
But that's not true for most of you, apparently -- 43% of respondents said they feel just as emotional about games these days as you did when you were kids. 27% of you said it's just not the same anymore -- but almost the same amount, 23%, said you actually get more out of games emotionally as an adult now that you really "get" what you're doing when you play and why. Just 5% of you said you'd never felt "touched" by games.
I've been really interested in imagination and abstraction lately, if you hadn't noticed -- my last Kotaku feature, between whose lines you probably picked up an aversion to gesture-based control schemes on my part, asserted that classic buttons-and-sticks work well because it's more interesting to abstract interaction in game worlds rather than act it out literally. And it gives you more options, too.
At the same time, when we all discussed Fumito Ueda's work recently, we all concluded that one of the main reasons why his games inspire the imagination so much is because of all of the things they leave unsaid. The quietude and minimalism of ICO and Colossus make you want to fill in the blanks, and that's a big part of why they get your gears turning. I always believed that we're so fond of old games for a similar reason -- when your hero's just a little blob on a screen, when there's no narrative and only a minimal, generalized backstory, it's more fun to make up your own.
Anyway, more on all of this stuff later. Meanwhile, I've got a new poll question for you -- just how big a role do games play in your life? Vote in the right-hand sidebar, please. Can we top the last turnout? Yeah. I think we can. Let's do this thang!
