Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of the recent video games after having been sort of excluded from this console generation by way of owning a Wii instead of one of the HD consoles. What’s more, I had kind of given up on console gaming after becoming fairly disenchanted with the repetition I was seeing in the last generation- too many games that weren’t reaching for something more, too many games that just couldn’t seem to break that threshold between game and creative- and yes, artistic- entertainment medium. Now that I’ve kind of caught up with what’s going on in the electronic gaming field, I’m finding that there are a lot of new experiences, concepts, and tremendous advances in presentation that, as a kid who literally grew up with video games, I’m kind of blown away by and didn’t expect.

Who would have thought back in 1985, when we were playing SUPER MARIO BROS. ad infinitum that in 2009 we’d be playing a game that let us be Batman in a story as good as any the comic book as ever offered complete with the compelling possibility that maybe the Caped Crusader is himself a little batty, or a game that offers us a chance to play as an active participant in the evolution of the Beatles and their music? Could we have ever imagined a video game that puts us in the shoes of a CIA operative assigned to work alongside Russian terrorists committing an atrocious act of mass murder- while causing the player to question the first-person shooter mentality, real-world political ramifications, and personal morals? It’s obvious that video games have made tremendous strides in what they can depict and how, and even though some core concepts tend to remain constant it is also clear that video games have come a long, long way from PONG, SUPER MARIO BROS. and DOOM.

Because I’ve been spending a lot of time catching up with console gaming I have to admit that the leisure time formerly spent focused on board games has suffered. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I still love board games and I am a die hard hobbyist to the very last. But between really digging into what’s going on with video games and a general, growing sense of creative stagnation and repetition among board game publishers and designers, I’ve come to realize that in many ways the hobby games medium is hitting up against something. And I can’t quite decide if it’s simply a plateau from which the medium can spring forward or if it is more ominously a ceiling, an indication that we have reached a stage where board, card, and miniatures games have done practically all that they really can given the specific limitations that define the format. Broken down to essentials and ignoring obvious advances in presentation and streamlining, hobby games really haven’t come as far as you’d think from their 1970s and 1980s forbearers.

The question that I’ve been mulling over isn’t one that has a definite answer but it’s a very serious one that I think everyone involved in the hobby on any level should consider- have hobby games shown us all that they can? Have we reached a point where, even when we’re playing even the latest, hot-off-the-presses game, we’re basically doing the same things over and over again but in new drag? In last week’s column regarding AGE OF CONAN and the shockingly indifferent response it seems to have generated, one of the issues that came up in the discussion about the article over at Fortress:Ameritrash was that it may simply have been one “dudes on a map” game too many, that market saturation may have claimed it as a casualty. And I think I kind of agree with that. It was more of doing the same things that we’ve done in countless other games. Who care if Conan’s picture was on the box or a jumble sale of “clever” Eurogame mechanics were folded into the batter- it was just more of the same, and anyone with any of the other recent “dudes on a map” style games likely felt that it was redundant with other games. It simply didn’t do anything new, but what it did try to do new was also repetitive and imitative of other games.

But saturation and redundancy is present in pretty much any creative medium, it’s practically inevitable. Among people who don’t really play video games, including many board gamers, you’ll hear that all video game shooters are the same. I used to say that in the years between HALF-LIFE 2 and MODERN WARFARE 2. But that was before I played games like BIOSHOCK or the GEARS OF WAR games. In these games, I’ve seen some really great storytelling, some compellingly rich subtexts, and interesting moral and emotional issues- matters that were previously either crudely handled in video games at best, completely absent at worst. Maybe you cried when Sephiroth killed Aeris, but I thought it was maudlin and cheap given the presentation and context. But when Dominic finds his wife in GEARS OF WAR 2 and there’s this big tough guy whimpering “Marcus! I don’t know what to do!”- I felt something.

Sure, a lot of shooter video games may have done the same thing as WOLFENSTEIN 3D in raw mechanical terms, but there is so much more complexity and- yes- sophistication that has enabled games like these to transcend the simplicity and bluntness of older titles and become something more. They’re not just blips and bloops on the screen, they’re not just kid’s stuff, and we are at a point where video games can convey meaning and explore new frontiers of emotion, fantasy, and experience without being bound to restrictive medium limitations.

Board games, so far, simply haven’t been able to do that even after decades of development. They are still, regardless of theme, all about blunt mechanics. They’re the bleeps and bloops—mathematical, positional, or relational abstractions used to either define thematic content or that exist solely as mechanics and nothing more. Subtexts or in-game emotional responses are practically unheard of in the medium, although they do exist. DUNE managed to preserve the ecological message of the novels fairly well- why else would the Sandworm show up where fighting over Spice is happening? BATTLESTAR GALACTICA captures the political overtones of fear and paranoia, also in the show, extremely well. And WAR ON TERROR uses its mechanics as political satire. But games that do these things, things that I think indicate a sense of reaching for something more with the medium and going beyond the limitations of format- are very rare.

I’m coming to the conclusion that I’m not sure if we’re going to assess games as creative, authored content, if board games are capable of doing much more than what they have already done in the past. It’s not hard for anyone who has been around the hobby for a while to pick up any recent game and figure out where its influences lie. It’s extremely rare to pick one up and feel like it came from out of nowhere. The result is that even great games like TALISMAN and ARKHAM HORROR have a natural redundancy. Does ARKHAM HORROR really do anything that TALISMAN doesn’t do beyond the additional mechanics and executive theme? Conceptually, there is a lot of crossover. And I can’t help but wonder if that’s a sign that board games only have so far they can take us.