10 Things Video Games Need To STOP Doing

As an art form, video games have changed every year, and every change has brought with it an evolution. Higher fidelity graphics, for example, make games a lot prettier than they used to, but they also mean that characters can be imbued with a certain subtlety now, and things like wounds and inventory can actually be modelled on the character rather than tucked away in text menus.

But with every step forward, it seems we carry with us things that should have been left in the past. Things that could easily be changed but are done a certain way because it's easy; things that make publishers more money in the short-term, at the expense of their long-term fans.

Things that developers show a weird sense of pride in, despite it gatekeeping their communities. Strange little conventions that games seem to be stuck with because that's how it's always been done.

If we kept to the way things have always been done then every game character would have three lives and a crippling inability to walk to the left.

Dear Developers,

Loving the game you've made, especially the excellently designed boss encounters that break up the regular flow of gameplay in just the right places.

I died a lot on one of them, I admit. It took quite a while to master the different patterns of attack and learn the subtle tells you programmed in. Honestly, I would have had it down a lot quicker, but you put a fifteen-minute cutscene in front of that battle. I can't tell you how many times I watched that cutscene, but I can quote it word for word. In fact, let me just add a video to this email that shows me spitefully spitting the words at the screen during the cutscene. My ex-wife used this video in our divorce case and now I'm not allowed to see my kids.

I understand that you want to get the story you worked hard on across to everyone playing the game, but that's no excuse for not dropping a checkpoint after the battle or perhaps making the cutscene skippable.

Here's an idea for any game developer out there: You know how the system settings stay in a game across playthroughs? Use that save space to sync which cutscenes have already been watched, then allow us to skip those we've already seen before.