Tell me if this sounds familiar: You dive into a big, modern blockbuster on day-one—maybe it’s an open-world RPG like Assassin’s Creed Shadows or a loot-heavy action-adventure with lots of items and numbers to keep track of like Monster Hunter Wilds—and you’re having a great time, but life gets in the way. By the ten hour mark you stop playing every day. After 15 hours you get caught up in something else entirely.
Weeks go by. Maybe months. When you finally have some free time again, download all the updates you missed, and boot up the game once more, you realize you have no idea what you were doing or why. You’ve forgotten all the controls. Why are you so far away from the objective marker? How the hell do you even kill things in this game? Eventually you give up and just go scroll TikTok for an hour.
I have no data to back this up, by it certainly feels like this experience is becoming more and more prevalent. In part, that’s because games are getting way more complex than they were in the PS1 or even the Xbox 360 days. For me personally, it’s partly because I’m way older than I used to be and my brain is slowly turning into sludge. Hideo Kojima, the creator of Metal Gear who’s team is getting ready to ship Death Stranding 2 next month, has an idea to turn this entire cycle of defeat into a game.
On the latest episode of his podcast (via IGN), the game director mentions a “forgetting game” where players would have to play through quickly to avoid losing ground. The main character would forget information and abilities the longer you stay away from the game. They might not know their role in the story, or even how to fire a gun. Abandon the game for long enough and the character wouldn’t be able to move at all. “Players would have to take a week off work or school to play it,” Kojima said.
As many have pointed out, this is just real life for lots of us now. Most modern games now essentially have a “forgetting mode” on by default, though some attempt to remedy the issue by providing optional recaps on what players were recently doing, or ongoing tutorials they can easily return to if they forget how to play. Often the friction remains, however. I can’t even imagine how bad it would be if my character was just as lost as I was. We’d be the gaming equivalent of lotus eaters, idly listening to the ambient soundtrack while the clock ticked by.
It’s hardly the first time Kojima has wanted to mess around with the real-world passage of time inside of one of his games. He explained in the latest podcast that he had thought of making Sam Porter’s hair grow in Death Stranding 2 when players are logged off, but didn’t want to make a “big star” like Norman Reedus “look uncool.” Fans of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, meanwhile, will recall the fight with sniper The End. It’s a tough encounter players can completely bypass if they just wait several days in the real world until the enemy dies of old age. It’ll be interesting to see how it’s captured in the Delta remake coming this summer.
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