Why I Quit Destiny and You Should Too

WHY I QUIT DESTINY AND YOU SHOULD TOO

Or Why I Wanted to Get the Bungie Off My Back

After hitting level 20 for the second time, I realized something about Destiny: This game can go suck a lemon.

Despite all of the minds and the money behind it, Destiny is a mindless slog with no point and seemingly no end. It is somehow the apex and the nadir of all of gaming history. And, most importantly, it's a game that basically asks its players to act like junkies to make it work. There's a reason Jeff Gerstmann is already nominating this as  2014's Most Disappointing Game of the Year.

Meet your new dealer.

My basic problem is how Destiny handles it's loot system. "Loot," for those of you who do not know, is what the game gives you for completing certain tasks. Kill a guy? Maybe you'll get some loot. Finish a dungeon? Maybe you'll get some more loot. And so on. The game revolves around it. A lot of games do. World of Warcraft is a billion dollar industry built around it. The Borderlands series has entire algorithms built in support of loot. More recently, the critical hit Diablo III was based around the game dropping loot at your feet. Loot hunts can work. My problem is not that Destiny has loot, it is how it treats its loot system and, in turn, how it treats its players.

I've heard terms like hitting the “pleasure center” of the brain and “serotonin bump.” It's a conversation that doesn't sit very far from other terms like “loot lust” and another favorite neologism “binge watching.” Whether these people meant it or not, they've described the mechanisms of chemical addiction. That was the exact moment that I realized that I need to quit Destiny. I needed to get clean.

The biology of addiction is a funny thing. There's a lot of holier-than-thou pontificating that say that addiction isn't a disease and that it's "a choice." These people, you understand, are assholes. While we all have choices in our lives and sometimes we really wiff them (like buying a hundred dollar version of a Bungie game, for example), the fact is that addiction has real chemical effects on the brain. On a certain level, you aren't making choices, you're responding to evolutionary triggers. 

While I won't bore you with the details (nor do I remember most of them), the long and short of it is, if you have the right genetics and the right behaviors, after a certain point your brain will be unable to distinguish between healthy behaviors that it should reward and detrimental behaviors.

And, like I said, it's a funny thing. This isn't a bad thing. Your brain is engineered to work this way for a reason. Your lizard brain, when you, say, eat something or have sex or run away from a predator, the pleasure center of your brain gives you a bump. It's biology's little way of saying “Hey, good work, buddy. We didn't get eaten by a leopard today Here's a little something special.”

Pictured: Destiny players collecting
precious "Light."

What I've just described is the exact mechanic that Destiny needs to make the game work. It doesn't reward you emotionally or intellectually. It doesn't tell a stimulating story, it doesn't pluck at your heart strings. It depends entirely upon you cranking away at the same levels over and over again in the vain hope of scoring a proper high-- or in this case, some sweet Legendaries. Except that the Legendaries never come. Ever, meaning that Destiny is a drug, it's a bad drug.

When Destiny came out, I heard a quote, I'm pretty sure it was from Leigh Alexander (but I can't for the life of me find it on twitter), which was that the game doesn't have a heart*. She's right. Destiny has not heart. Most theaters of operation do not have hearts. It's a movie set. A false backdrop. The only thing that grips you is this fake reward loop that they've half-baked into the game. Once you see how hollow and sad that is, the only thing you're left with is hulking, anodyne work of art. Destiny has all of the life shooting gallery in an empty burn ward.

I'm also reminded of a scene in The Simpsons episode "Homer's Enemy." In the scene Martin shows off his fancy model of a nuclear power plant. Mr. Burns is not impressed.

MARTIN

Behold, the power plant of the future, today!

BURNS
Yuck. Too cold and sterile. Where's the heart?

MARTIN
But it really generates power. It, it's lighting this room right now.

He turns a knob, dimming the auditorium lights.

BURNS
You lose. Get off my property.

Destiny could have used some racing stripes.

But I think about other games? Aren't they all inherently empty? Are not all games just “games?” No they aren't. What are you, dense?

When I quit Destiny, I shifted my focus back to the first game I picked up for my PS4: The Last of Us. Without going into a review in a review, I'll say that it's awesome and leave it at that (but also it has just about the best stealth system of this generation). It's a very different game than Destiny and it is going after different goals, but, just as a game, The Last of Us is so much more rewarding.

What makes The Last of Us different? Well, first off, it just is, damnit**.

More substantially, it's a real experience, one punctuated by great characters, a fully realized world, and great game play. While Destiny shares the same kind of tight character control and wonderful art direction, it game falls short because none of it fits together. Instead it relies on the most base, thoughtless nature of its player. A coma patient could have as much energy invested in Destiny as I do. The same can't be said about The Last of Us because, well, that sequence where you're Ellie in the town is really hard and I'd like to see a coma patient pull that one off on Hard!

Goddamn that game is good.

But, anyways. . .

If you enjoy chasing the dragon on your next gen console of choice, I'm glad for you. I'm glad somebody is having fun around around. As for me, I have things to do. Important things to do. Things like reading, writing, socializing, and maybe, just maybe, abusing actual, real life drugs, ones that actually fucking work. I want more than what Destiny provides. Or maybe I'm just looking for something that doesn't think of me as a mark. Whatever the case may be, I am reminded of a quote from The Wire, that other great epic on the drug war, that sums up my feelings:

“You cannot lose if you do not play.”

*She cites Fallout: New Vegas as a game that, if messy, had heart out the whazoo, and goddamnit I want to play that game right now.

**Come this year's crop of Game of the Year awards I doubt Destiny will collect anywhere near the amount of accolades that The Last of Us did. If it does then there is no God and we deserve all of the calamities we having coming to us.

James Kislingbury writes, podcasts, and is 20 days clean from Destiny.

So, You've Made a Huge Mistake.

I decided to enter into the glorious future that has been promised. I bought a Playstation for.

I made a big, dumb mistake: I bought a Playstation 4.

God help me, I bought a Playstation 4.

Now, now, let me explain myself. There's a confluence of factors involved. First of all, I had some Amazon gift points burning a hole in my pocket from an unrelated charge that I had to make on my credit charge. Secondly, The Last of Us is a game that I desperately wanted to play that I never had the chance to (and it was just re-released on the PS4). Then there's Destiny, a game with so much money and hype behind it, that it actually generates its own gravitational field. That seems like a good way to avoid my responsibilities (and in space!). Lastly, buying a Playstation 4 is but one mistake in a long line of mistakes. It's not so much a silly decision as it is a pathological one.

Now that it's all said and done and hooked up, you know what impresses me most so far about this whole thing?

The menus.

I bet this thing is just bleeding radiation.

They're so cool. They're slick. They're easy to use. They're all right there in front of you. They aren't hidden behind “blades” and you don't have to swipe through nine of them to get to what you want. Mot importantly, they move at the speed of a button press. What a concept! It's nice and it's a little thing like this that makes me think that I made the right choice. I mean, it has to be. It just has to be.

Having said that, I can't tell if it's an indictment of the system's features (and lack there of) or if it's an example of how I'm allowing the littler, dumber things in life to bring me pleasure. I mean, two years ago, before my retail job completely ground my dreams into dust, all of the little things in life were just that: Little things.

It's finding a dime or seeing that the show you like has a new season on Netflix. It's finding out that your bank account has twenty more bucks than you thought it did. It's a baby or a puppy showing up at work. Two years ago I wouldn't have batted an eye at these things. But now? That's the only thing that's keeping me going.

The big things don't quite cut it. They often come with big disappointments. You invested all of this time, money, and effort and then you find out that its defective. Or its slow. Or that one feature you were really looking forward to is busted as hell. And all of this knowledge cost you somewhere in the neighborhood of five-hundred dollars. Free things, the little, every day things that you find around your life do not do this to you. They can't.

And today? Today I saw a French bulldog puppy and I petted it and it was the best day I've had in a long, long time. I petted the hell out of that dog.

I realize that's more or less the size of the future: It's a whole lot of little things, adding up to you eventually dying.

That's all this sort of thing ever is. It's putting a brand new telephone in your house. It's trying out this gramophone thing. It's making sex movies with your home 8mm. It's playing the song you want in the order you want to listen to them in! It's the incremental additions that actually make up the future. Rarely ever is it some revelation that changes everything. And that revelation certainly isn't going to be a box of plastic that turns mathematics into distraction (because you are still going to die).

Behold, puny fleshbags! The future!

Yet, it's neat to have something new in your life. The Playstation 4 is neat, and as dumb as video games are, as pointless as killing digital zombies is, as regressive as screaming at a TV because I was “killed” by an illiterate 12 year old, as little as this progresses me in either a professional or financial way, it's still kind of neat. Just a little bit.

It's grabbing the future by the horns because you can. It's seeing that as expensive and as slick as it all is, behind it is the same, comforting, familiar ideas that you've always seen. It plays movies. It plays games. It runs out of batteries. It can't connect to the internet. It breaks. It impresses your nephew. It's the future. It's here, it's kind of fun, and it isn't scary at all. And that's kind of neat.

Right?

Well, for four hundred bucks it damn well better be. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go get beaten up by some aliens for a couple of hours because I'm working towards getting a new scarf.