GamerHelp has posted "The 8 Most Popular Gaming New Year's Resolution", and I wonder how they determined the "Most Popular" part. All of their resolutions are either complete shit, or something a typical gamer already does anyway. Here's each of their resolutions, and my criticism of them.

I will not automatically play games on the easiest difficulty setting...

Sometimes the temptation to select the easiest difficulty setting (prior to even experiencing how hard the game actually is) is just too overwhelming. This is especially true when you start to doubt your gaming skills and worry about the possibility of getting stuck indefinitely at some later point in the game. We've all been there, but we all also know the consequences of automatically picking the least difficult game setting: the game becomes too easy. You begin letting enemies wail on you because the damage you take is so infinitesimal, you stop caring about preserving ammunition/items, and you ultimately don't have as much fun because you're not faced with any real challenge.

This is more a resolution for game designers than gamer. It should read "As a game designer, I shall not design games which encourage skilled players to automatically select the easiest difficulty setting only to subsequently regret their choice hours later, and be stuck in the unfortunate position of deciding whether to restart the whole game again at a higher difficulty level, or trudging through the existing game at the current difficulty."

Lots of games have managed to do this, and so if your game can't, that's a failing on your part, rather than on your customers. If your games have a clearly separated levels or chapters or whatever you call them, let the player revisit levels they've already cleared, and let them change difficulties between levels (e.g. Halo 3, Guitar Hero). If your game doesn't have clearly separate levels, but is relatively short, then having the player start the whole game over is not a big deal (e.g. Street Fighter, Tetris ). Otherwise, you'll just have to let your player change difficulties in mid-game (e.g. Mass Effect), or else not have any explicit difficulty system at all (e.g. Chrono Trigger).

To address the resolution from another angle, there is no shame in playing a game at its easiest difficulty setting. I wanted to get through Metal Gear Solid 3 because I wanted to know the story, but I wasn't particularly interested in dying and being forced to restart the levels I failed at again. So I played the game on the easiest difficulty, which made the game ridiculously easy, and yet I'm completely satisfied with my experience. Hell, if someone had beaten the MGS3, recorded their playing, and posted their playing as a video on YouTube, I would have been perfectly satisfied with that. I'm playing games for my own personal enjoyment, and if my enjoyment does not involve being challenged at all, then there's no reason to avoid the easiest difficulty setting.

I'll buy more "new games" to support game developers...

When you buy used video games your money goes directly to the game store. Sure, when you're trying to track down more obscure titles or discontinued games, the used section of your local game store is one of your only options. But when you're purchasing a new video game, why not spring for a new copy of the game? It'll only cost you an extra $5 or so and you'll be supporting the hardworking men and women who helped create the game.

Fucking bullshit. There are so many things wrong with this line of reasoning, I'm not even sure to begin. First of all, if I have to spend $60 to buy a new PC game, or $70 to buy a new XBox360 game, then the game had better be worth $60 or $70 respectively. I'm not buying the game as a form of donation or charity for "the hardworking men and women who helped create the game". I'm buying it because I want to be entertained. If I were interested in donating money, there are tons of beggars around my city, and starving children in Africa. Why the hell do these men and women, who certainly have an annual income in excess of $1000, deserve my donations more than those kids in Africa?

Second of all, the majority of the hardworking men and women who helped create the games receive an annual salary. They do NOT receive royalties from games sold. When you buy a retail game, the people who get the most profit out of this are the retail stores, who tend to make a margin of $10-$20. For a $60 game, that's 1/3 of the profit eaten up right away by WalMart, who really have nothing to do with the making of the game. The publisher then takes the remaining $40, and needs to decide how much it keeps for itself, and how much it gives to the developers of the game. Yes, in case you're not familiar with how the video game industry works, one company will actually hire the talent involved in making the game (that means programmers, designers, artists, musicians, voice actors, motion capture actors, etc.) and create the game. That's the developers. Another company will take the game, which they weren't involved in creating in anyway, and then try to sell it. That's the publisher. And guess what, the publisher will take the majority of the $40. Anywhere from $30 to $35. Why? Because the publishers are the big gorillas who get to dictate the rules, and the developers are the small peanuts.

What's the first company you think of when you think of Halo 3? For most people, it'll be Microsoft, who happens to be the publisher. Few people will think of Bungie first (though many will think of them second, after Microsoft immediately pops into their mind), and Bungie is the team that actually made the game. Who made Guitar Hero 3? Most people will immediately say "Activision", but they're the publisher. The developer is Neversoft. Never heard of them? Most people haven't. Why does everyone think of the publishers when they try to remember who was involved when making a game? It's because when you load up the game, the first thing you'll see, before the title screen of the game itself even, is the name of the publisher, in big huge letters. Given this arrangement, who do you think had more negotiating power in bringing the game to reality: the publisher, or the developer? Who do you think gets to demand a bigger slice of the pie at the end of the day?

The publishers actually have a fairly decent excuse to getting more money from each game sale: They typically invest more money into the game itself. Where the developer mainly invests talent and time, the publishers pour the money necessary for, among other things, advertisement, and manufacturing the physical disks, boxes, manuals, etc. of the game. Investing in all of this stuff costs a lot of money, which is why only really big companies (like Activision, EA, Microsoft, Sierra, etc. do it), whereas smaller companies "merely" develop the games.

So when you buy games retail, you're actually helping pretty much everybody except the hardworking men and women who helped to create the game. If you really want to help them, then just download the game off the internet for free, beat it, choose a random name from someone at the end credits, and mail them a check for $60. You'll actually be giving that person $60, which is 12 times more than how much their entire company would receive had you bought it, and probably over 200 times more how much that particular person would receive, once the $5 that the company would have receive got distributed amongst all of their employees.

Third of all, it only costs an extra $5? Are you fucking kidding me? When I buy used games, I buy them at $10, when they originally retailed for around $70, sometimes as high as $90. That's an average savings of $60, and a top savings of $80.

Fourth of all, DRM and copy protection significantly reduce the value of a game for me. If you have any form of copyprotection at all, then I am barely willing to pay more than $10 for your game. Why? Because your game probably only provides about ten dollars worth of entertainment for me, and I won't be able to resell your game later. So if I buy your game, that's $10 down the drain which I will never see again. If you took out the copy protection, then I could resell your game. I would gladly buy your game for $60, because I know I could resell it for $50, and thus end up paying $10, a fair price for the amount of entertainment I got out of it. This is the law of the market. The value of a product is not the price that a seller dictates (which would be $60), but the value at which people will buy it (which would be $10 in my case).

I won't buy any more games until I complete the ones I just bought...

For most gamers, it's unrealistic to think that we'll be able to complete 110% of every game we own, but if we put too many games on the backburner it's easy to completely lose interest in putting forth a decent effort to play through them. Just because Call of Duty 7 was released doesn't mean we have to give up on the game(s) we're playing and run to the store, right?

You're kidding me, right? If your game sucks ass, why should I be forced to sit through your game and finish it to completion? Why am I playing games again? It's for my own personal enjoyment. If I no longer enjoy your game, I will no longer play it. If I find another game more enjoyable than your game, then I will stop playing your game, and play that other guy's game instead. Nobody is forcing you to give up your current games to play CoD7, but nobody should force you to finish your current games before you're allowed to play CoD7 either. Who the fuck is this resolution popular with?!

I won't rely on a single game review when making purchases...

Be it GameSpot, IGN, or AmputeeGaming, we all have a favorite gaming pub, and sometimes we give too much credit to the reviewer's take on a specific game. Obviously, when GameSpot gives a game a "6.0," the game is more than likely a turd. But when a game that you're excited for receives a less than perfect score, do the right thing and check other media outlets and/or ask your friends.

when I first read this heading, I thought the resolution was saying "The number of reviews I shall rely on shall now be zero (i.e. not a single review)". This didn't shock me in the least, because all of the previous resolutions were so dumb, I was pretty much expecting this resolution to be dumb as well. But it turns out that they mean "The number of reviews I shall rely on shall now be greater than one" which again is dumb in that it's so patently obvious, I have a hard time believing anybody needs to have made that resolution in the first place.

Let me take the exact scenario that this resolution is painting. You are highly anticipating a game. You're "excited" about it. That's the resolution's exact wording. This game, somewhere on the internet, received a "less than perfect score". For example, perhaps you were highly anticipating the game Halo 3, when you accidentally stumble upon a blog called "I fucking hate Halo 1 and 2 and am biased against all Microsoft games", who has an article called "My Review of Halo 3", and it gave Halo 3 a 9.9 out of 10 (which, let's face it, is a less than perfect score). Are you going to immediately conclude "Gee, I guess Halo 3 sucks. I'm going to completely erase it from my memory and not even think of getting a second opinion."?

I'm poking a bit of fun at the resolution's wording, but this argument applies even if a well known review site (let's say GameSpot) give a pretty bad score (let's say 4 out of 10) for a game you're really excited about, are you seriously going to just forget about that game? Are there people who really are such mindless sheep that they unquestioningly believe anything a corporation tells them? This resolution is supposedly one of the top 8 most popular gaming resolutions. HOW FUCKING STUPID IS THE AVERAGE PERSON?

I will limit the number of times I call in sick/flake on friends to get in more hours of gaming...

The next GTA or MGS is released and the only time you have to pick up your copy of the game is after work. By the time you manage to slip out of the office, get your ass to GameStop, and return home, you're minutes away from passing out from exhaustion. Before you know it, you're asleep with the controller in your hand and you're barely past the title screen. As a result, you call into work sick, skip school, cancel plans for the following day. Even we've done it at times, but this year we're going to try to keep the number of instances we devote to an entire day of gaming to a minimum.

Fucking meaningless fluff. You know how much the minimum is? Zero. How do I know that? Because there exists people in this universe who are somehow able to go through life without ever skipping work, skipping school, or ditching their friends in order to play videogames. I'm not saying you should never skip work to play videogames. If this is a really amazing videogame, and if you have a shit job, then from a utilitarian point of view, maybe skipping work is worth it. That's your call. My criticism here is that this resolution has no semantic content in it. This is the equivalent of resolving on New Years: "Yeah, I did some bad stuff sometimes last year. This year, I promise to avoid doing bad stuff. Coincidentally, I also avoided doing bad stuff last year, but still ending up doing some bad stuff, 'cause it was just unavoidable. I also suspect that this year it will be unavoidable to do certain bad stuff, which is why I am not promising to do zero bad stuff, but merely to avoid doing bad stuff. I guess, really, that I'm promising to keep doing this year, exactly what I was doing last year. Except I wanna make it sound like I'm improving, 'cause that's the whole point of New Year’s resolutions."

I will do my research before purchasing a game from a well-known developer/franchise...

Every gamer knows the worst thing about popping in a game you're sure will totally rule and finding out it sucks ass is admitting you were wrong. It's true, many times sequels for well-known franchises like Halo are destined to be great games, but even heavy-hitters like Bungie slip up (remember Oni?). The best tactic to avoid this gaming let-down is to check early reviews of games, give it a rent first, or ask around to friends. Relying too heavily on hype can be an Achilles' Heel for gamers; don't become a victim yourself, buddy.

At least here, I can detect that some thought process was going on when the author wrote this resolution. The author seemed to be thinking something like "Hmm... I got fucked over once by being disappointed by a game I was really excited about. How can I avoid this in the future?" So far so good. The author then proceeds with "Oh, I know, I'll..." and then lists some solutions which are completely unworkable. Nice try, though. It's a signal of intelligence among an otherwise noisy sea of stupidity, so it caught my attention. Here are the solutions proposed, and why they don't work.

"Check (early) reviews of the games". First of all, I have no idea why the author wants us to check only the early reviews, but I'm gonna let that drop and assume they mean check any and all reviews. Well, this just brings us back to the resolution about not putting blind faith in reviews that we made 2 resolutions ago. Review sites are occasionally bought out or bribed to give a favourable review to a particular game by the publishers, and even without any such conspiracies, sometimes people just have different tastes in games. Yes, check the reviews, but you're still going to become a victim occasionally, even with this measure of protection.

"Give it a rent first". First of all, almost nobody rents of PC games because of the copy protection shit you have to go through, so if your anticipated game is a PC game, this trick simply won't work. Second, If you're gonna rent a game as precaution against games from a developer/franchise with a well known reputation for delivering spectacularly good games, then surely you would want to rent for games that you have a strong suspicion will be shitty, despite your optimistic hope that it may turn out to be okay, right? Basically, if you think there's a 99% chance that the game rocks, but you're so risk-averse that you're willing to spend money renting it "just in case", then surely if you think there's only a 1% chance that the game rocks, then you should definitely rent it, because the chance for ending up with a shitty game should you buy-without-rending is so much higher with the probably-shitty game than the probably-great one. In other words, this advice is simply saying that you should rent all of your games.

Well, actually, this is exactly what I do (as long as I consider buying a game for $60 and selling it again for $50 to be a form of renting), but it doesn't rescue you from disappointment. You've still spent money on a game that may end up sucking. Not only that, but you're also going against the resolution which says to "please buy new games so as to give more money to the game industry". If you start renting every game before buying them (as I have been doing), then chances are you're going to buy significantly fewer games (as I have been doing), because you'll realize that, at worst, most games suck, and at best, very few games have any replayability in them. There is practically no game worth owning forever, if only because you eventually will no longer have the hardware required to play it (how many of you still have your original NES or Sega Master System, and still play the games you have on them?) Every game will have an expiry date after which you will no longer want to play it. All you have to do is take the retail cost of the game, divide it by the cost to rent it, and that'll tell you the cut-off point after which it makes more economic sense to buy a game than rent it. It costs me about $30 per month to rent a game. Retail games tend to go for $60-$70. That means my cut-off point is 2 months. If I'm going to play a game for over 2 months, then I should buy it. Otherwise, I should rent it. What's the average lifespan of the games I've played? 5 days. I beat Assassin's Creed in 2 days, and collecting flags is not fun. Mario Galaxy? I beat it in a week, and played a bit with Luigi, but really there's no joy in going through the 120 levels I've already beaten. Mass Effect? 4 days. Call Of Duty 4? 2 days, but I'm still goofing around a bit in online play, but I suspect I'll grow tired of it after a week. Orange box? 1 week, which is broken down to something like 1 day for Portal, 2 days for Episode 2, 1 day for Peggle, and the rest for Team Fortress 2. Even one of my favourite games of all time, Chrono Trigger, took me only 24 hours to beat, and only 1 week to get all the endings for. As you can see, the vast majority of games are not playable for over 2 months for me (they can't even reach the 2 week marker), and so I don't bother buying the vast majority of games.

"Ask around to friends". This assumes that your friends have bought the games. If they've merely read reviews, then you have the same problem as if you had just read the reviews directly yourself. If they rented the game, then again you've further reduced your support of the game industry. So what if they've bought the game? Well then, you selfish prick, you've just made your resolution be "Let your friends get fucked over in your place."

I will force myself to delve into other game genres...

Who hasn't said one or more of the following? "I don't have the patience to sit through the endless lines of dialogue to play RPGs." "First-person shooters make me nauseous, so I don't bother with them." "Party games are for wimps and pregnant women." And so on and so forth. We all have our favorite genre, but why limit your gaming experience simply because you're too stubborn to try something different? Hate RPGs? Try Mass Effect. Don't care for the mindless shooting of FPS games? Give BioShock a whirl.

For the record, I have not said one or more of the above, nor any of their variants. But if someone told me "FPS make me nauseous", my immediate reaction would not be to force them to delve into FPSes. That actually sounds pretty cruel: "I know you suffer from epilepsy, but I think if you would just stare into this strobe light, you might learn to enjoy bright, flashing lights. And if you refuse, then you're nothing more but a close minded bigot."

I will participate in online gaming positively and not use it as an outlet for my rage...

Will the day ever come when online gamers stop the immature crap-talking and annoying, useless insults while gaming? Probably not, but toning it down a bit would definitely be appreciated by the gaming majority. Yeah, it's fun once in a while to brag and pat yourself on the back for an awesome frag, or a great double-kill, but all gamers know how easily too much of this type of conversing can become grating very quickly. Enjoying the game, giving props to friends and strangers alike, and being a generally positive online gamer will benefit everyone.

This one's fine, except I suspect the people who need to make this resolution are the least likely to think of themselves as needing to make this resolution.