Writing Four - Persuasive Writing - Video Games

Persuasive Writing
Old and New Video Games
By: Deylah McCarty

Since I was a kid, I’ve played video games that are challenging. I really enjoy the harder games because they provide more opportunities to think rather than sitting there and pressing buttons. Games that were made in my childhood were usually challenging and tricky. As I grew older, however, the games did not grow harder. Instead, they grew much easier, which was very disappointing for me.

The newer games that were coming out were getting easier and easier. It was taking me a very short time to beat them, while the older ones had taken me years to finish. In older games, you have one mission at a time; very simple. In the newer games, you always have two or more things to do at once and it became extremely frustrating. An example of this would be: Brave Fencer Musashi versus Kingdom Hearts 2. In Musashi, you have one mission at a time, and you can take as long as you want to finish it. In Kingdom Hearts 2, you have numerous things to do at once and often can get overloaded with missions. In KH2 there are different worlds you can visit, and often it gets frustrating trying to figure out which one to go to first. This also applies to the graphics in the game.

The graphics in newer games are often very confusing. A great example of this is in Kingdom Hearts 2. During battles, you often can barely see what’s happening because of all the fancy attacks that everyone can do. The monster(s), you, and your two allies attacking at once adds up to one giant mass of exploding color and confusion. The only reason I can manage to understand what’s happening is because of my video game experience, but if I were playing it for the first time I would be highly frustrated. In older games, their archaic graphics may be annoying, but to make up for it the gaming quality and plot is very good. In newer games, they flaunt their graphics so much that the storyline is cliché and the gameplay is boring. Because of this, the thinking level required for older games is much higher than that of newer games.

After playing so many new games, I began noticing I was predicting practically everything that was going to happen and how I was going to win. It was disappointing that the plots were all structured the same way and there were rarely any surprises. A good representation of this would be The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning. In this game, the graphics are beautiful, but the plot is very predictable and the game was only a little challenging for me. A predictable plot in a video game usually goes something like this: there’s an evil person you have to beat, and in order to get to them you must go through many useless perils to different areas until finally you find them in their evil lair and defeat them. This very unoriginal plot is fairly common and can get very irritating after a while.

In older games, the menu systems used in the game were usually complex, such as in RPG games where you can use magic and items. In Final Fantasy 8, you can use something called ‘junctioning,’ which enables you to junction magic, items, or even guardian creatures to a character to enhance their strength and abilities. There are countless variations to what you can do to one character. In another game, Final Fantasy 10, the menu system is very simple and not confusing in the least. Menu systems are getting progressively easier, until the point where all you have to do is equip a character with a single item to enhance them.

In the gaming world, there is always going to be a period where new games fade into the distance and get replaced with better games. It is inevitable. Because of this, there is always going to be games that are good, and games that are bad, games that are easy, and games that are hard. It is up to you to decide now: which kind would you rather choose?