Last Week Games: Alpha Protocol and FOMO

On Saturday night I beat Alpha Protocol, which I started to play last week. I’m going to save my remarks on the game for a review that I’m hoping to get out by Friday, but for today I wanted to talk about a concept that has been doing the rounds lately: FOMO, how it applies to Alpha Protocol and why, in some cases, FOMO is justified.

Do you fear missing out on Alpha Protocol?

FOMO stands for Fear of Missing Out. This applies to many things including gaming; video games and hobby games. It represents the fear of the idea that the game will become obsolete at some point, so you must spend an ill-proportioned amount of money on it as soon as possible to avoid missing out on the experience it provides. This can lead to several consequences: massive game collections that you may or may not ever play; and rather more seriously some people could put themselves in to major financial difficulty because of their compulsive fear of missing out.

Because, and it’s the simple truth: Games aren’t good forever.

Fortnite is one of the perpetrators of
this with their "Battle Pass..."

If you look after physical games properly, they’ll work forever. But that’s only part of the story. We buy new consoles when they come out, because the consoles we currently own have a limited time before developers and publishers stop making games for them. We have yearly iterations of Call of Duty; which the fan base will buy the week it comes out because that is where the multiplayer community – the lifeblood of any game selling itself on its multiplayer – is going to be. The same is the case with FIFA; once that multiplayer community has moved on to the next game, there’s little reason to stick with the current one. Currently, a lot of the bigger games are doing online events with opportunities to win specific collectables for the game; there’s usually a cost for this but if you don’t pay it then you’ll never get the content; missing out on this is a genuine fear. Personally, I see offers appear on my Steam and GOG wish-lists, where the price of a game that interests me has been reduced – along with the other games in the same series. So, I’ll buy the whole lot knowing that there’s not much chance of buying those games again at the same price. I’ve ended up with nearly a thousand games, and while individually they rarely represent any substantial amount of money, thinking about how much I must have spent in total is something I rarely choose to do.

Lazy to re-use the photo, I know, but it
 turns out this is literally the bit I meant.

How does this apply to Alpha Protocol? While I was researching the last blog, I found that the game had been taken off Steam and other online platforms, because their music license had run out. This was confusing because most big-budget games handle their own soundtracks, so music licensing shouldn’t come into it. That very evening, I played the game again and reached the boss battle with Konstantin Brayko – a Russian gangster obsessed with 80s American Pop Culture, whose fight takes place in disco/ball room with Turn Up the Radio by Autograph blaring out over an overly-large sound system, so that solved the mystery!

I previously mentioned certain games becoming obsolete because the platform those games are played on is superseded by its next iteration. That’s less of a problem than it was in the 90s, because a great many of them are available to download onto PC or the later consoles – but problems arise when we run in to licensing issues like Alpha Protocol. This isn’t surprising; it’s a good game but nowhere near profitable enough for Sega to gain any benefit from renewing the license. But it does mean that if you want to play it now, you’ll have to look for increasingly rare physical copies.

Fear of Missing Out is in many ways an exaggerated effect; the worst it will mean for me is that I won’t get to play one specific game, and it’s not like I’m short of those. But it’s worth considering the issues it raises, how we can miss out on certain experiences if we don’t react to them straight away – and whether it represents a significant problem to those affected by it.