Downloadable Content for video games is probably here to stay, despite the cries of some fans that developers are no longer shipping the whole game, but instead, asking gamers to pay full price for a half-finished game and providing the rest of the game in small downloadable chunks (for a price, of course).

Of course, not all gamers are pissed about DLC. Some like it, because it means their favorite games receive more updates than they probably would have if the developers weren’t still making money from the game. It also goes without saying that developers like it. After spending months (years?) developing the tools to easily add content to a game, they can take those tools, after the game is out, and pipe out some hot new content to players. In terms of time investment, it’s a pretty sweet gig.

But there’s no doubt, DLC is changing the face of gaming, both the way gamers and developers see games. Whether it’s good or bad remains to be seen.

To show how DLC is changing gaming, let’s pretend we’re the Prince of Persia (from The Sands of Time iteration) for a minute and do a little rewinding into the past. For you older gamers who remember the original Super Mario Bros. (yes, on Nintendo), I’m talking to you.

Think back to the first time you played Super Mario Bros. Don’t worry, I’m not going to romanticize it and talk about the awe you felt or anything cheesy like that. Nah, SMB is just an easy game to pick for this example because it’s iconic and most of us played it when we were young.

So when you think of playing SMB, what do you think of? Strip away all those years of playing games and think about what it was like to play SMB. Think about the first level. You start out, run out of the castle – kill that first goomba, get the mushroom that makes you big, jump over the first pipe, and so on, jumping and squashing enemies until you get to the end of the level.

The thing about the original SMB is that the first level never changes, no matter how many times you’ve played the game, or how far you’ve gotten – you always start by killing that first goomba and getting that first mushroom.

There are a million things that made SMB a great game and I don’t want to list them all here. Instead, I’d like to say that there were two main things that made it a great game: good mechanics and good level design. It’s easy to see that now.

But what about when we were kids? Back then we didn’t separate mechanics from level design. We didn’t see them as two different things. We saw them together, as Super Mario Bros. Mario always jumped the same when you hit the button and the first level was always the same. That first level was SMB. Mario jumping was SMB. The whole package was the game.

Well, technology has progressed a lot since the old NES days, and gaming has changed, too. But DLC could be one of the biggest changes yet. It’s a big deal because it gives gamers the clear distinction between game mechanics and game content. It helps gamers separate Mario jumping and shooting fireballs from SMB level 1, stage 1, with that first goomba and first mushroom.

Let’s go back to that SMB game for a minute, but add DLC. Now, after you beat all 8 levels of SMB, you can download another 8 levels – a whole new adventure after you beat the first story. A new super-power: the raccoon tail. A new main character to play as: Yoshi. Or whatever.

Suddenly, that first level of SMB doesn’t seem so iconic, does it? It’s the first level of the first chapter, but there’s also a first level of the DLC chapter. And maybe another one after that. And maybe his fireball attack doesn’t seem like the ultimate weapon anymore, since the raccoon tail is more powerful. And Mario is great, sure, but Yoshi jumps higher and can eat people and spit them out again.

It’s not the same game anymore. Now SMB is a set of mechanics and levels, powers, and characters are just content to go with those mechanics. They are separate entities. They don’t seem to hold together as well as a cohesive whole.

Well, that didn’t happen to SMB. So let’s go back to the present now, where DLC exists. Right now a gamer buys a game from the shelf and plays it, beats it (or doesn’t), and then heads to the Internet to get some DLC. Another fifty levels, or a new area, or a character outfit – whatever, it doesn’t matter.

But once that DLC is added, the player is able to see the split between mechanics and content more easily. The game ceases to have iconic scenes since it is no longer a complete and finished masterpiece, an immutable thing that can be conquered and finished, but a ball of digital clay that can be changed at any time.

Because here’s the thing: DLC always either feels tacked on or it completes a game that should have been complete when the player bought it, with the possible exception of episodic gaming. But the game was either purposefully short and cut so that DLC could be added – or, the DLC is an epilogue, an extra mode, a thing separate from the whole experience. An afterthought. And afterthoughts can never feel as iconic as the original experience.

But they can ruin the original experience, by demonstrating to players that the collections of content and mechanics and graphics and music that make up their favorite games are just that – collections. They aren’t highly polished masterpieces. They aren’t carefully collected and arranged. They’re whatever made the shipping deadline.

Coz the rest just got slapped into DLC.

And even if that’s not true, if the original game release was a full experience and amazing and all the DLC’s were great an worth the money – it doesn’t matter. DLC changes games so they are no longer static things, but fluid things.

20 years from now, will gamers be looking back and saying, “Man, that 4th DLC for Jimbo and the Rocket Whale, man, that’s what sealed the package for me. That game was great” or will they still be holding up the old classics because the old classics were easier to define as complete?

I’m not sure. Because it’s easy to say what Super Mario Bros is. It’s a guy who jumps. It’s that first level with the goomba and the mushroom and makes you big. But what is Fallout 3? Is it the mechanics? The original release? The game of the year edition? The DLC? The feeling the game evokes? That screenshot of the Brotherhood guy standing there with a gun looking all menacing? Who really knows?

I’m not saying DLC is good or bad. And it’s been pretty successful monetarily so it’s probably here to stay. But it makes games different. It turns games from polished, completed art, into mechanical systems separated from their content. It makes them fluid. It makes it hard to define what’s “cannon” and what isn’t.

And I’m not sure how I feel about that. I want to like it because the potential for great things is there.

But I’m just not sure how.

I love writing and I love being a writer. Even if I never get anything into traditional print or make any money for it, I’ll probably keep doing it because writing is my favorite thing to do. It also keeps me mentally stable (well, as mentally stable as a writer can be) – if I don’t write I get cantankerous, irritable, and socially withdrawn. I don’t have it, I get serious withdrawals. Who cares – I wouldn’t trade it for ANYTHING.

However, it does have its drawbacks. Fear of failure is the top of the list, as well as social comparison. But those things are well documented (by better writers than me), so there’s no sense retreading old ground. Instead, I want to talk about one of the minor drawbacks to being a writer (though it might be a boon, if you’re the half-full glass sort), and that’s something I call writing the self. Hold on to your hats, we’re about to get all deep and shit (ha!).

The thing about writers is that they are both creators of culture and also perhaps those most easily swayed by it. The reason for this is that writers exist in the realm of ideas more than non-writers, if for no other reason than we spend long hours thinking up stuff that doesn’t exist and pretending it does. It means that other stuff that doesn’t exist can hold great sway over us, since imaginary stuff is very real to us.

This is fine and all well and good – it allows writing to happen – but it also makes us more susceptible to powerful ideas that we didn’t imagine, ideas that someone else imagined, like social concepts. Justice and love are just as imaginary as the characters in a novel, both are ideas and can have an effect on our lives, but have no physical location in the “real world.” (I don’t want to get into a debate here about love and justice existing or not existing here: show me a handful of justice and you’ll prove me wrong. Until then, just chill and listen to my armchair philosophizing. These things are ideas. The fact that they are so pervasive just makes them POWERFUL ideas.)

There are many social ideas we’ve given cultural power by adopting, but the one I want to discuss here is the idea of being an adult, and why it can be problematic. The thing is, writers believe so strongly in the power of imaginary ideas that we have no problem taking an imaginary idea and believing it has a bigger effect on our lives than someone who didn’t spend so much time imagining things.

The idea that I’ve become an adult is something I’ve done my best to adopt, but because I didn’t know what exactly being an adult entailed, when it seemed like it was time for me to be an adult, I reached for cultural markers, imaginary standards, and did my best to emulate them.

This involved two things: the completion of common adult milestones (college, real job, paying bills, etc.), and a reach into the religious mythos of the past, specifically Paul’s 1st letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13, verse 11.

Both the milestones and the biblical advice are imaginary ideas, but because I am a writer (someone who entertains imaginary ideas on a regular basis), it was easy for me to accede to the cultural power of these ideas. I made them my own. In effect, I took ideas and wrote my self.

I’m not sure if other writers have struggled with this or not, but it seems my experience that my association with imaginary things has made commonly accepted social concepts very easy to adopt without knowing it. They just sort of sneak their way in, and invoke very powerful feelings, because I take imaginary things seriously. The problem with that is that adopting ideas without knowing it can lead to some very strange results.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved Lego blocks and comic books. If I had to guess why, I’d say it was because I love the power of imagination contained in the mediums. Building a Lego castle is very similar to writing – blocks of ABS plastic can be arranged in countless different forms, but the blocks stay the same. I feel like words are similar (even though words do change, over many years).

I wasn’t a poor kid growing up, but I wasn’t rich, either. So when I got a new Lego set, or a new comic books, I would have fun with it, but also spend hours flipping through the included Lego catalog, or list of comic book back issues I missed, and tell myself that when I grew up I would buy all the Legos and comic books I wanted.

Then, of course, I did grow up, or at least, I got older. It happens to everyone. But beyond that, I wrote myself as an adult, adopted all the ideas that I thought would make me an adult. But I still wanted Legos and comic books. So I bought them.

It’s funny: I avoided Legos and comic books for so long because I’d written onto my self that adults don’t want those things anymore. But then, once I saw that the whole idea of an adult was just a cultural ideal I’d adopted, it was imaginary, and I’m susceptible to imaginary things, I bought a bunch of Legos and comic books and enjoyed the hell out of them. I rewrote what I thought an adult was, or maybe just said to hell with it, and didn’t worry about being an “adult” anymore. I’m not sure which it was.

Either way, it frightens me how easy it was, once I started thinking about it, to rewrite things I thought I knew about myself. Thinking about it further, the ease I had, rewriting my adopted idea of what an adult is, I wonder if that’s the reason that writers and artists seem like they are always on the forefront of “causes” and why they sometimes seem to be the strongest proponents those causes, only to switch to something else 15 minutes later.

I guess you could call that wishy-washy. I think I’d call it rewriting the self. The thing is, the imaginary is so strong for us, and we develop such fluency with it, that trying on multiple ideologies like suits or hats (or pick your favorite clothing simile) is easy. This rewriting of the self is probably why I love the internet so much, because without physicality, it’s easy to rewrite who I am to the rest of the world.
I don’t know, myself by talking about writers doing this I’m grouping in more people than should be lumped in. Maybe it’s not writers. Maybe it’s just my generation. Maybe it’s just me. I’m not sure.

I’m just surprised by how it is to rewrite the self, when the rest of the world seems to struggle with it so much.

-m.