Why I Won’t Be Buying a PS5

Do I really want the future of gaming to be the future I’m worried about? 

BY: NOAH FARBERMAN

Photo by Noah Farberman // THE UNDERGROUND

My relationship with gaming is complicated. I dislike online gaming but I respect it when it’s done well. I dislike playing horror games or watching YouTubers play horror games, but I like to sit with my friends while they play. I dislike a lot of Triple A content until I play them alone, and I dislike feeling like I’m immature for liking video games but I also agree that unless I’m planning on making a career out of it, casual gaming might be immature. But I also think watching TV is immature, by that logic. Same rules apply to movies and books. Entertainment is immature, right? I mean, why should Borderlands, the Telltale Series, be any lesser than American Vandal on Netflix? Why should Cooking Mama be condemned while Gordan Ramsey gets mainstream acclaim? 

I don’t think it should, personally. I see entertainment as entertainment. If I start to feel like gaming isn’t a productive use of time, I usually won’t be watching TV either. During the months I’m not gaming, I’m also not watching. I’ll usually return back to books, where at least I know I’m enhancing my prose ability. And the writing I produce while I’m in my reading states has consistently proven to be better. I mean, my hand-eye strength is nice to have⸺gaming over the years has trained me to pick up any controller and adapt to it very quickly⸺but typing is a separate motor skill, and my handwriting still sucks. 

TV and movies have trained me to see patterns in narratives, to understand good and bad dialogue. Working on a movie set taught me shot composition, the importance of grading, audio, pre-planning. And again, the scripts and sketches I’ll write while I’m watching a lot of comedy/TV prove to be stronger than when I’m out of touch. Music taught me rhyme; I might struggle with beats and rhythm, but not nearly as much as I would have if I never got into comedy rap, and my love for flow in writing comes from my com-musical upbringing. But at the same time, a lot of the games I play are readable, with strong narratives, and even stronger choices. It’s through gaming that I learned how characters have the opportunity to do infinite things, but I get to choose what they do. Gaming, if anything, inspired me to write more than the stories I’ve read or the shows I watched. 

When it comes to the social aspect, it’s great. Meeting and making friends with gamers is the easiest thing in the world. You already have a shared interest and activity. Gamers can spend days together, days that feel like hours, of nonstop never boring fun. The friends I had in high school were gamers. Every day at lunch would be a chance to play Regicide in Halo 4 or Smash Ultimate in the later years. At the cottage we’d demolish Black Ops 1 Zombies and on weekends we’d spend hours feeding each other cheat codes in San Andreas. The friends I have now are poets, writers, some of them still gamers, but we talk about what we're reading, what we’re writing, and writing opportunities. 

Photo by Noah Farberman // THE UNDERGROUND

I’m not nearly as social as I used to be; most of the conversations I have are slightly productive in focus. But I love those conversations. I feel so lucky to have the friends I do right now and to be able to maintain those connections through our shared focuses. And I really haven’t missed the social aspect of gaming. But I don’t think that’s anything new, I mean I’ve never been one to play games online. And the games I played alone were always heavily story-based. The best part of social gaming for me was always the shared enjoyment, goals, camaraderie of the game party. We were all on a team, even when competing, in a way that I didn’t really get elsewhere. The online game had neither thing, no intriguing narrative or immediate connective bond. I’m not saying the art form is lost on me. Games like Journey™ used the necessary online capacity to enhance the storytelling, making the game impossible to win without cooperation, not to be cheap but to express a hidden message about the occasional need for others. And Overwatch was just plain fun when it came out, I don’t regret the maybe 20 hours I spent as Winston the Scientist. But when it comes to COD, Fortnite, heck even Tabletop Sim with those former high school friends, the need just isn’t there. 

Horror is my love genre. The four best horror movies I’ve seen in my life came out the past two years, two movies from Ari Aster and two from Robert Eggers. If you were unlucky enough to have met me after I watched Midsommar for the THIRD TIME IN THEATRES (THAT’S A 2.5 HOUR MOVIE NORMALLY, THE DIRECTOR’S CUT WAS 3 HOURS) you might have called me “obsessed with Midsommar,” seeing as I brought it up in almost every conversation. At one point in time I was also very impressed (though never to an equal degree of my film love Midsommar) with the choice based slasher-horror game Until Dawn. It was a game that had Rami Malek, Hayden Penatierre, and the blonde girl from Camp Rock all doing very well-animated mocap. The choices on that first play through were intense and vast, the horror was SCARY, and the story was VERY GOOD. And even on a second playthrough, when it was revealed that the choices weren’t as vast as we thought, we (the friend I stayed up all night to play it through with) had almost just as much fun playing the game for its quick-time events and with the self-set goal of trying to keep everyone alive. It was amazing, it felt like a movie we could control. Like Harold and Kumar escape from Guantanamo Bay’s choose your own adventure DVD special but with collectables and achievements and slightly less replayability. 

Photo courtesy of Playstation

And even Supermassive’s (the company that made Until Dawn) next game, The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan, proved to be of almost equal narrative fun, though much weaker in terms of quality and much stronger when it came to choices. But you give me an RE, a Silent Hill, anything Amnesia and I’m out by the first act. I’m not denying that Outlast looks and feels great, but it’s too difficult and the story is not worth the effort for me. But the appeal of those games was never really to enjoy them alone, because what’s fun about balancing between frustrated and terrified by yourself on a Wednesday? For me, nothing. I liked gaming with my friends, though, so when I’m invited to grind through some horror “fun” I was never one to shy away (from the invite, I’d rarely accept the controls). When I say I don’t like horror games, it’s not without putting the effort in. I’ve never enjoyed stealth gameplay and being scared isn’t as worth it when the story isn’t there. I don’t like PT for the same reason I don’t like the first Halloween movie. All show, no story. 

Horror is a group activity, but RPGs, action adventures, and point and clicks are personal. As soon as I share a game like that with anyone, the appeal vanishes for me. This was my thing. My inventory, characters, narrative. I don’t want anyone else’s opinions, help, or input. Animal Crossing is almost a perfect game for me. I could just relax in my isolated town, my annoying neighbours, and expensive loans keeping me calm and happy. I don’t know what happened, but by the third irl friend I visited, the game stopped being fun. I put it down and haven’t touched it since. The same has happened with Persona and Pokemon. But it also happened with books. I remember a time where I’d be one hundred pages into a book and someone else who’d also read it pointed something out, or talked about it, it was something miniscule and shouldn’t have mattered, but suddenly the world wasn’t mine alone anymore. It’s an affliction I’ve overcome since,, in all aspects except gaming, because gaming is the only one of those fields where the art is immediately interactive. I like to feel in control, at least some places, and gaming offered that. 

Now writing offers that better. 

I don’t think playing video games is immature. I don’t think reading is immature. Or watching TV or listening to music. I think entertainment is a privilege, in all forms. And I think certain groups or personality types gravitate towards those different mediums. The motor skills that video games develop and require make the medium inherently harder to connect with. The statistics that show how gaming is, in majority, a male dominated industry is deferring. And the cost of play alienates another huge portion of possible audience. I don’t think gaming is immature, but I do think it’s a niche in itself. A niche that doesn’t do enough for me anymore. When the PS5 comes out I’ll want it. Heck, I’m working hard to stop myself from getting Last of Us 2 and Battle for Bikini Bottom as we speak. But I won’t get it. Not because I won’t like the games, the social pressure, or the social aspects, but because I will. I just know that those things aren’t a priority anymore, and I don’t want them to be. I haven’t eaten ice cream in over two years. Not a bite. No froyo, dairy free, gelato, sorbet, none of it. I might miss ice cream but I don’t miss feeling unhealthy. I don’t miss spending the money. And I still spend time with the people in my life who eat ice cream. Change happens. Whether it’s a choice or a new reality. It happens.

Not buying the new console isn’t a choice for right now. It’s a choice for the future.