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The Eternal Divide
By: Miles Cressman
Man, I hate tourists. I spent a week in Gatlinburg, Tennessee for a less-than-marvelous family reunion. Don't ask me why they chose such a backwoods, redneck location. I still don't know to this day. Fun fact: 3,800 people live in Gatlinburg, 100,000 rent a cabin on any given night. The cabin we stayed in was fairly accommodating, with Wi-Fi throughout the place, as well as big TVs in every room. The lush Smoky Mountain National Forest met our eyes, lingered in scent, and felt earthy to the touch. While the mountain range is flat compared to the Cascades, of which I'm accustomed to, the feeling of being somewhere up high did not seem half as exhilarating to me as it did to my Floridian relatives. I figured that this would be our entire experience. Nowhere could the trees stop being visually arresting as they expanded for hundreds of miles in every direction. There weren't even any large cities in proximity - Knoxville being at least seventy miles away. Apparently some of my relatives had been in the area before, but that Gatlinburg was a bygone era. To them, Gatlinburg was still a quaint town in a rather large valley that was approximately twenty miles away from the tallest mountain in the Smokies.
When I first entered the city, at around 10PM at night, the place was filled. People filed along the streets in droves. Everyone was out, and you could tell they were tourists: complete imbeciles with "I <3 NY" plastered on their attire. Maybe that's a bit hypocritical; I was a tourist too. The city itself was nothing but small streets with door-to-door shops. There were at least four different weapon shops, and about 50 restaurants in a very small space. Odds and ends shops littered the area selling all manner of useless trinkets and curios. It was obvious the city had expanded into much more over the course of several generations. The sidewalks were more packed than downtown Portland, Oregon on a good day. One-lane streets had intervals of traffic jams throughout the day. Many of the streets were designed in such a manner that one could get lost just because of the diagonally-winding roads. Ah yes, I have a point to all this, right?
The place was a cesspool. It was designed purely to draw people in for their cheap rides and uninspiring attractions. There's even a Ripley's Believe-it-or-Not. Well, guess what? I believe that the city itself became too big for its britches. An attraction called "Ober Gatlinburg" is a well-known place of interest that put Gatlinburg on the map. In all of its glory, it's just a gondola system that takes you up about thirty-five hundred feet into the mountains. There, you get off the gondola and can ride a ski lift or scenic chairlift up to the top of Mt. Harrison, approximately sixty-one hundred feet up. You can tell the place was a rip-off: $2 cans of soda from the vending machine, litter everywhere, and a boring $50 chairlift ride. Large families would ride up this chairlift and then ride back down, ignoring the scenery and instead focusing on the "infinite" excitement of a chairlift. What was probably a great, scenic mountain became a tourist trap. That was all Gatlinburg was: popularity to the utmost limit, but with a very little amount of quality.
In videogames, we look at the mainstream titles and often forget the quality we can obtain in niche and underrated titles. While much of this editorial has me coming off as hypocritical, at least hear me out. For a rather noteworthy example, Square-Enix can be compared to what my Gatlinburg experience was. Just recently, they've announced so many Final Fantasy-related projects that it would make your head spin. Countless spin-offs, remakes, ports, and sequels were shoveled down the pipeline with little care, regret, or remorse. Like the Ober Gatlinburg Tram descending in elevation, Square-Enix has lowered its standards to produce more of the titles they know gamers will gobble up without question. Like whipped, mindless slaves, gamers will flock to stores and pick up the latest Final Fantasy [insert number here] remake/port/sequel. This doesn't just start and end with that franchise, either. Every game they're creating or working on seems to feel like yesteryear painted with a new look or a slightly updated graphical engine. Gatlinburg tried to keep up with the times, by using the exact same method. In a lot of ways, it feels like a very old town given plastic surgery one too many times.
While I enjoyed old games like Final Fantasy IV immensely, even on the PlayStation and Game Boy Advance, I can't help but cringe when they decided to make it 3D for the DS. It hit's a certain nerve in me that I can't quite explain. Their new corporate gaming agenda just smacks of the bitter aftertaste that the annual Madden game brings with each release. With all honesty, I'm sure that the DS port will be an enjoyable version of the game. However, will gamers remember the good ole' 2D days of said game? Many gamers these days will never know what past games were like, nor feel the need to revisit them with the newfangled HD graphics we get these days. Even outside of graphics, name brand alone can often keep gamers from purchasing a title that may be for an older system, have slightly inferior graphics, or maybe have "classic" gameplay with new twists. Every day I remember my Gatlinburg excursion, I try to picture the town as if it was much smaller. I try and see if I can erase the sheer multitude of people pervading the area, taking up oxygen by the truckload. The memory is tainted as are the popular, crowd-drawing titles regurgitated from months of hype and hundreds of screenshots and videos. They delude gamers into thinking that these are the only games they should buy, play, and experience. The gamers of today will never remember the games of old, nor will they pass up a new, shiny game for something that really breaks the mold.
The tourists of Gatlinburg could care less about what the town used to be. They don't need to look back on how the location was founded, nor the rich history that the town was woven from. They like to think they're in a quaint town, living in Gatlinburg's past. Instead, they're oblivious to the twisted décor of popularity, tourism, and cheapness. There's only so much time that I can hold on to the past, and refuse to move in to a brand new future. I know at some point I'll try out these popular, over hyped works of "art." However, much like that tourist trap, I can't help but have a bitter taste from the Dionysian wine of popularity. A sort-of silver lining can be had from all this darkness.
What I figured would be quite the niche, unpopular title, turns out to be extremely popular. I'm talking about Persona 3. Released from under the glorious umbrella of Atlus, the game seemed destined to fade into obscurity. On the contrary, the game has exploded in popularity, completely outshining its predecessors. I'm fairly delighted by this news, but maybe I'm a little hesitant about it all. I had so wished that the series would gain popularity in the US, but another part of me thinks that with popularity will come some cop-out to please the awaiting fans. Who knows what the future holds? However, I stand firmly on the side of quality, versus popularity. My favorite titles have been unpopular, underrated, and overlooked. The hypocrite inside me can't help but play a popular title and maybe enjoy it for what it is, but I know that the real enjoyment I've found is only in places and experiences unmarked by popularity.
-- Miles Cressman
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