I’ve spent the past weekplaying through the original Dead Space trilogy, but I don’t have digital copies of the games, I have physical ones that I got in the Xbox 360 era. It occurred to me as I cracked open the case of the original Dead Space to load it into myXbox Series Xthat I couldn’t remember the last time I did that.
The second the case opened, I was flooded with sense memories, remembering every game I had ever loaded into my Xbox 360,every manual I had paged through, every disc I inspected for scratches and imperfections. It was basically just like that scene at the end of Ratatouille when the critic has his heart warmed.
I know that there area million reasons why digital gaming is great, but I can’t help but miss the way physical games made me feel. Part of that is just nostalgia, but there was something to the art of physical gaming that’s been lost in the digital age. Physical games just hit different.
The Physical Ritual Of Gaming
Opening the case forDead Spacedidn’t just fill me with nostalgia for my library of Xbox 360 titles; it reminded me of the feelings of excitement that came hand-in-hand with the ritual of getting games back in the day. Everyone who’s old enough has some version of a story where their parent or older sibling orsomeonedrove them to a game store, they got a game, and then spent the rest of the drive homereading the manual. There’s nostalgia connected to those memories, certainly, but also, if that happened to me now, it would still rule.
I miss the physical ritual that went into playing games. You had to physically get them, there were pieces of them to inspect and enjoy. I used to like quizzing myself on the Spanish on the back of the boxes when I was in high school learning Spanish for real. There were more ways than just playing games and talking about them to enjoy the hobby, more tactile experiences to be had with gaming than just the ones experienced through controllers.
After finishing the original Dead Space,I cracked open Dead Space 2and was reminded of another excitement of the joy of the physical age: when you opened a game, and found that it was on two discs. Finding out a game you’re excited about takes two discs to play is incredibly electrifying. There isn’t any rational motivation for this since plenty of great games are available on a single disc, but your mind starts to race when you discover two separate discs in a game case –as if it’s justtoogood to be contained on a single CD.
The ‘Package’ Of Gaming Has Changed
A lot has been said about how gaming is ‘boring’ now, and a lot of people have moved on from the hobby as they’ve gotten older. Some of that is due to changing interests and plenty of other valid reasons. But, I thinka lack of physical media in the gaming spacemakes the entire experience of playing games a little less tangible, a little less special.
It is far more exciting for me to go toa midnight release of a video gamethan it is to simply download the game as soon as it goes live. There’s no community in that, there’s no sense of shared excitement. I never went to midnight releases with giant groups of friends and never made any sort of long-lasting friendships as a result of them, but there was something so energizing about going to a physical location with people who were just as excited as you.
Going to buy games, in general, was a lesson in delayed gratification and the joy of excitement. You couldn’t just have the game you wanted the second you wanted it, you were forced to think about it, and the excitement got more and more palpable as you got closer to home.
You can still buy physical games if you want to, I do from time to time, butthere’s something a little anticlimactic about them now. It’s not that I’m older; I still love the drive home with a freshly purchased game in the passenger seat. It’s that the package has changed. Not just the physical package, although I definitely miss the manuals that came with games, but the ‘package’ of playing games is different. Community building is done almost entirely online, not in crowded GameStops at 11:30 at night. There is no excitement that comes when you find out that Mass Effect 2 is “so complex it has to be on two discs.”
Nostalgia dictates so much of how we feel about gaming, but while I’m willing to say that there’s plenty of nostalgia baked into this argument, I also think that the gaming community might be better off if physical gaming was still a major staple of the industry. That way, when people get mad at me about my gaming opinions, I might have a community of people I met at a midnight release to meet up with in real lifeto touch grass together.
