Video games

On 23 November, the video game World of Warcraft celebrates its 20th anniversary. That’s no small thing. By most metrics, it is the most successful video game of its type in history. At its peak, it had more than 12 million active subscribers, and in its two-decade-and-counting lifetime it has made more than three times as much money as the highest-grossing Hollywood movie of all time. Yet many, if not most, of you will never have heard of it or will have only the dimmest idea what it is. As someone who has played this daft game for several hours a week for years, I commend it to your attention, then – because a) there’s much innocent joy to be had in playing it, and b) World of Warcraft and games like it are an unignorable part of the cultural landscape.

Grade: A- I usually try to write about new games, but indulge me in addressing Blizzard’s open-world dungeon crawler Diablo IV this week even though it came out last year. Why? Because along with simultaneously trying to save American democracy and make humanity an interplanetary species, Elon Musk’s third preoccupation is Diablo IV. When he’s not tweeting about the first two things, he’s tweeting clips of himself roaring through Diablo’s endgame content, slaying hordes of very high-level demons in timed dungeon runs. He’s good at this, and since it takes getting on for a solid week without eating or sleeping even to reach the endgame, he’s sinking a lot of time into it. ‘Finished faster after masterworking my rod three times,’ he tweets, proudly.

Grade: A Remember the mad 1970s TV series Monkey? Here, excitingly, is the closest you’ll get to it in videogame form. In a pre-credit sequence, you are the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, and you not only fly about on a little cloud but suffer from that headache-inducing circlet on your bonce. The main game is set much later. Sun Wukong is locked in a stone egg and you take command of a monkey warrior – the Destined One – in search of the magic objects which will revive him.   Black Myth: Wukong is the first AAA blockbuster game to come out of China, and it’s what I believe the young people call a stone-cold banger.

Grade: B Readers of a certain age (mine, roughly) may have fond memories of 1993’s Sam & Max Hit the Road – a joyously silly and absorbing two-dimensional point-and-click adventure starring the ‘Freelance Police’: a tubby cartoon Irish wolfhound called Sam and his partner Max, a ‘hyperkinetic rabbity thing’ with a propensity for random violence. It was Itchy & Scratchy meets Raymond Chandler, with puzzles to solve and wisecracks to enjoy. Point-and-click has gone the way of the abacus, but much of the feel of the original franchise is to be found in this remastered version of the final game in the series. As it opens, our heroes are locked in the brig of a spaceship commanded by General Skun-ka’pe, a megalomaniac space-gorilla in quest of the Toys of Power.

Grade: B+ Games can be exciting, puzzling, scary, competitive and – occasionally – moving. Can they be funny? Not often. But this lovingly crafted indie cartoon adventure has a creditable bash at it. The protagonist is an oval-headed yellow homunculus in a shirt and tie, as if Family Guy’s Stewie Griffin, Dilbert and a minor Simpsons character had been squished in a particle collider. He is dispatched to the fictional Yorkshire town of Barnsworth by his boss to do... something. But the mayor won’t meet him so he finds himself wandering around the town. ‘Thank goodness you’re here!’ say various townspeople in ee-bah-gum accents, before inviting you to help them out of some absurd pickle. It’s not clear why they’re so pleased to see you.

Grade: B+ Looter-shooters, match-three games, dragons and spaceships... Sometimes you despair of video games doing the same thing again and again – and then a lone developer gets a severe bump on the head and produces something completely batty.  Vampire Therapist is a comedic adventure-story therapy-simulation starring a vampire, except he’s also a cowboy, and he’s training to be a cognitive behavioural therapist in the backroom of a German nightclub under the tutelage of a 3,000-year-old bisexual vampire who was romantic with Marcus Aurelius back in the day.  Our hero was a bad vamp in the Wild West for many years, you see, but he fell in with the Transcendentalists and learned to ‘walk a better path’. Now he hopes to persuade others to do the same.

Grade: A ‘God games’, as they used to be called, have a storied history. SimCity, Civilisation and the excellently sadistic Dungeon Keeper have all been responsible for many a PhD thesis being delivered late. The Almighty seems to have smiled on the latest iteration of the genre. The product of a one-man-band independent developer, Greg Styczen, its current pre-release version scored a million downloads on the first day it was available. You can see why. It’s made with such care and love. You take the role of a medieval lord of the manor – choose a surly avatar and a coat of arms – who starts with a handful of peasant families in a tented encampment in a drizzly forest. Zoom down and watch them as they drag timber about with their mangy ox.

The American artist and critic Brad Troemel once pointed out that art galleries have all turned into a kind of adult daycare, and ever since then I haven’t been able to visit a gallery without noticing it. Nearly two decades ago, Carsten Höller installed a set of big aluminium slides in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, and they were undeniably good fun because going down slides is fun. It’s also fun, although maybe for a different type of person, to ask if going down slides counts as art. These days, though, you can hardly move for this stuff. The world is already interactive. You walk around in it. You can steal things from shops Last summer the Turbine Hall hosted a set of giant building blocks by Rasheed Araeen.

Grade: B+ Most video games challenge the player’s problem-solving skills, reaction time or hand-eye co-ordination. But a handful of them offer satisfactions of a different sort: the gentlest of difficulty curves and the calming pleasure, instead, of a mildly absorbing repetitive task which whiles away the idle hour in the way you might pass it flicking through a set of worry beads or making a cat’s cradle with a ball of string. The unexpected sleeper hit House Flipper (2018) was one such. It was boring, but in a good way. Its sleeker, prettier sequel has had the wisdom not to depart far from the formula. The premise is that you travel around a breezy seaside town sprucing up properties for profit. You start small.

Grade: A- One thing videogames are surprisingly good at is scaring the willies out of you. Claustrophobia, unease, jump-scares, anxious-making camera-angles... Gamers of my generation will not have forgotten the spooky crackle of the Geiger counter in Silent Hill; nor needing fresh trousers after that dog jumps through the window in the first Resident Evil. The granddaddy of them all was Alone in the Dark – which, when it came out in 1992, essentially invented the survival horror genre. It sent you crawling through a spooky old mansion solving puzzles, fretting about your inventory and being jumped by sluggish monsters. Now a lavish and loving reboot stars B+-listers David Harbour and Jodie Comer. The former is grizzled PI Edward Carnby; the latter his employer Emily Hartwood.

Starfield is intermittently, unexpectedly profound. As my custom spaceship lands on one of the game’s thousand planets, and my customized character steps into the neon lights of a strange alien city, I’m struck by the sheer scale of this digital universe. This is the game I dreamed of as a sci-fi nerd child and teen, burying myself in The Icarus Hunt, The Long Earth, Foundation, Hyperion, Dune and boundless other sci-fi novels that transported me from a rural Australian library and into space. And here I am, transported there again, through an Asus M16 gaming laptop. There’s a big galaxy out there, and it’s yours to explore. And yet, however vast, it’s a desolate universe.

My wife argues with the children about video games. I argue with the children about video games. The children argue with each other about video games. Consequently, I argue with my wife about video games. It is a total nightmare – and it’s one that in various versions will be replicated in houses with young children up and down the country. The problem, in part, is a cultural divide. It frustrates me, too, when the children refuse to come off Rocket League or Fifa when they’re told to (‘I’m in the middle of a game!’). I’m also wary of the addictive nature of these things. But at the same time I can absolutely see the point of them; as my outgoing, intelligent, football-loving, film-making wife cannot.

The Sims is now trans-inclusive! Electronic Arts, the gaming company behind the wildly successful Sims franchise, added the ability to give your custom sims double mastectomy scars, tucking underwear, and chest binders in the latest update to The Sims 4. The new Create a Sim options are available for teen, young adult and adult sims. Teen sims attend high school in the game, so Electronic Arts is subtly promoting the idea of "top surgery" — or lopping off healthy breasts so that females may appear physically more male — for minors. According to one study, chest reconstruction surgeries for minors in the United States rose by nearly 400 percent between 2016 and 2019. https://twitter.com/make_it_sizzle/status/1620553289078284288?

Three years ago, I killed several thousand people over the course of a single weekend. Late into the night, I ran around butchering everyone I saw, until by the end I didn’t even feel anything any more. Just methodically powering through it all, through the wet sounds of splattering heads, bodies crumpling, shiny slicks of blood. I thought I was past caring. But when I finally went to bed, I couldn’t sleep, and in my dreams I was haunted by all the men I’d killed. I saw their brains exploding, again and again and again. In my defence, I’d had a bad week. It was December: a grotty English winter, not particularly cold but still utterly grim. The kind of winter that seems to stick to everything, like a layer of congealed grease. I was worried about money.

When the Soviet Union still existed, visitors to Eastern Europe would smuggle illegal books and magazines to visitors. As the Chinese government announces that young people are to be banned from playing video games for more than three hours a week, it is tempting to imagine people sneaking copies of Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto into the PRC — perhaps inside DVD cases of lavish propaganda films such as The Founding of a Republic. OK, I’m aging myself here. I know most gamers now play online. I also know the Chinese are big fans. More than half the population enjoy gaming and China has the world’s most substantial market for games.