Looking Forward

Last week, my major focus was on the past – the pleasures and perils of nostalgia, of retrieving and re-playing the past. This week, I wish to examine the temporality of engagement in another direction. This is where my own research really starts coming into play – as I am currently exploring fan anticipation surrounding the The Hobbit film adaptations, I now have a great opportunity to apply my research to a different type of text – the videogame.

For those of us who like games, we get excited about playing upcoming titles. The waiting period may be torturous, but it can also be a rewarding period. We build up expectations; ask ourselves questions about what the game will be like, eagerly count down the days until it’s released… Sometimes the game will live up to our expectations, sometimes it may not – but as soon as we play the game we’ve been waiting weeks or months for, a large part of the experience is over. True, it replaced by a new, arguably more important part of the experience - that of actually experiencing the title. But I know for myself that part of the fun of gaming involves the period long before and after the playing.

In looking forward to a game, we may turn to various sources of information. It could be a gaming magazine, or promotional material distributed by the company - but most likely these days, this source will be the Internet. There is no shortage of material available online for us to pursue our interest in an upcoming title. We have gaming websites such as IGN and Gamestop, which offer previews, videos and images of games months before we get to play them for ourselves. We could turn to sites like Youtube for video previews. We could also turn to the multitude of fan-created websites specifically focused on gathering information on the games we’re most interested in.

However, just as dangers may exist in retrospective engagement with games, so looking forward to new releases in not without its perils. In my next post, I will offer some examples of my own experience of ‘pre-gaming’. Part of being a videogame fan, as I have suggested, is realising that the experience transcends the simple act of playing the game. It is often not as simple as just dashing into a store, grabbing the nearest title off the shelf, shoving it into our gaming systems and playing it from start to end. It could be that simple – and many without much awareness of gaming would argue it is – But very often the process will involve more thought, more effort and more time than such claims could possibly allow for. It is certainly the case for the fans of The Hobbit that I am following through online discussion boards – and it is certainly the case for me. But just as nostalgia is a fine thing that should be encouraged, as there is nothing more pleasurable than suddenly remembering something wonderful from one’s past, I suggested that too much looking back is potentially harmful to those memories. Precisely the same thing is true of pre-gaming. Looking forward is fun, but as I will discuss in more detail tomorrow, too much looking forward is capable of tarnishing one’s experience with the final product.