I am a competitive person. I rather play against a human being and see how I can improve then get stuck into a math/algorithm battle vs programmers. Solitaire is fine for a bit but all single player games feel like solitaire due to my desire to compete against others and myself.
I've played computer games since the 1980s, considerable hours as a single player. I hadn't realized I was bored that whole time.
Just to add: I prefer single player games. Multiplayer is a commitment. And I've been there. I put thousands of hours into Everquest and I've also put over a thousand hours into Fallout: Las Vegas. I've completed Doom. I was Elite in Elite. Finished Gran Torismo, Burnout 1 & 2. The Getaway - all great single player experiences. More recently the F.E.A.R series back to back.
You can't lump single player games into a single experience.
I was also an Elite in Elite with the STUPID prism for copyright stupidity. I also made a few thousand dollars in RTS games in the 90s.
Single player = figure out the math/winning algorithm
Multiplayer = Competition. Playing against humans with the same rules. I am to old for basketball now my competition juices get to flow in less then 3 minutes. I jump into a game play for 5 to 60 minutes and then I can just walk away.
They're fine as long as they're short enough that the novelty does not wear off. On the other hand, I can play any realtime multiplayer game without ever getting bored of it.
Multiplayer games are also boring. I just bought Battlefield 1, because I read there was a great solo campaign. I hope it will be fun, and I've no intention to multiplay that.
I'm 36, and I really did like war games before they were that much multiplayer oriented. Call of Duty and Battlefield series had great solo campaigns, jadis. Then for a decade, there was this multiplayer trend. Being obliterated by teenagers, cursing your mom, being much greater than you. That was no fun at all.
When I buy a game (especially a ~70€ worth game), I expect to have fun. I guess I'm not a great gamer, I can't spend 8 hours a day playing, so I suck at multiplayer shooting games. But I LOVE solo campaigns. I can quit, then rejoin 2 hours later, I can become better, finish a hard mission, and I'm happy with myself.
I can't do this on multiplayer campaigns. Those kids are way better than me, so much better than I can't get fun.
Single player games are great, also. I LOVED Metal Gear Solid V, even if it was not finished. I loved it because I could play alone, replay if I failed a mission, redo it better if I wanted to.
I'm not a great player, but I still want to have fun. So multplayer games are not for me, and that's a shame.
> I can't do this on multiplayer campaigns. Those kids are way better than me, so much better than I can't get fun
This is failed design. I eventually gave up on Call of Duty because while the control and bite-sized (multiplayer) games were great, there were such fundamental flaws in skill matching and team-work that it was un-enjoyable once the novelty was gone.
I compare this to Overwatch and hope games will continue in this direction. Matchmaking is much more balanced and team-work is far more important. It still has a long way to go, especially in rooting out toxic players and making it easier to spontaneously group with players you like -- but its an improvement and hopefully a trend that will continue.
The question becomes what did MGS:V get correct? Even in an unfinished state I have been judging every game I've played since by comparison.
I think it breaks down into a few categories;
1. Excellent controls. Probably the tightest and least obtrusive controls I've used in a long time.
2. Great characters. While the story itself isn't that great (because it's unfinished), the characters really drive the plot.
3. Amazing ambiance. I really felt that I was in Afghanistan and there were Russians I was trying to avoid. I eavesdrop on their conversations, hearing them yelling orders to each other, and even see them adapting to my tactics between missions.
What makes this game a great single player campaign is ... Weight. Everything has consequences because you care about the characters. Most AAA games don't have characters anyone remembers or cares about.
You may want to try the multiplayer gaming in Battlefield 1 as well. I haven't tried the released version yet, but the beta was literally the only multiplayer FPS that I had enjoyed up until that point.
Because of the objectives, it is possible to contribute even if you aren't getting tons of kills and the game as a whole felt much more balanced than CoD. Even if the other players are much better, you can still get a few kills in and help your team.
In short: Generic modern military shooter #123781 that completely misses the point of idiosyncrasies of the one thing that somewhat sets it apart from the rest of the bunch: The fact it is set in WW1. Look at Medal of Honor (well, it's WW2 and therefore somewhat of a Nazi popper, but what do you expect) for a decent WW shooter campaign; I actually don't recall any significant WW1 shooter at the moment...
And as someone who is decently competent in competitive shooters (~2000 hours of Counter-Strike Source): Yeah, competition can be fierce even on "normal servers", but if you can keep up you'll get rewarded for it with a mixture of familiarity and challenging gameplay. And playing in "rough environments" has battle-hardened me I suppose. Dieing 10 times to superior opponents in a row barely moves me at all anymore, so if you don't get discouraged too quickly you may well find your frustration will wane with time.
Multiplayer games sadly are much more time consuming, and the older you get, the harder it is to find a regular schedule and buddies to play with. Been there, done that. I even play WoW these days mostly solo - I love the game, but can't facilitate raiding into my schedule.
Thankfully most multiplayer games are coming with quick play/quick match. I can load the game, and in 2 clicks be matched with people who are roughly the same skill level as me. It's not perfect, but it's definitely more accessible than say raiding in WoW, or spending an hour playing a ranked game of League of Legends.
I love games, and I was expecting another article bashing video games in their current state, and that isn't what was written here.
The entire POV for the article is from a traditional video gamer (you know, people who like games) trying to understand her friends who are not appealed to by what she considers traditional video games, and how understanding your audience is key to unlocking the market.
What if you could get everyone who isnt interested in traditional games to understand what they are all about, the entire Skyrim subplot in the article is a person who loves video games trying to share her love.
I really hate to say this, but you clearly did not read the article.
> I was expecting another article bashing video games in their current state, and that isn't what was written here
> We want games that aren't gritty, toxic pseudo-realistic pseudo-masculine nonsense nor frustrating time wasters that leave you feeling dead inside.
Right at the conclusion. And don't forget the necessary reference to games being made for white males by white males. I don't think she hates games like gp, otherwise she wouldn't have worked in the industry for so long, but clearly she isn't seeing the forest for the cheap, easy to market and produce rehash trees.
If you want to remove all the other context, like the life of making said video games, and the thoughtfulness put everywhere else in the article, sure.
The context is clearly "Hey, I really like video games but people like me clearly dont, why is that?"
>I've devoted my life-no exaggeration-to video games for 14 years, working on titles such as Company of Heroes, a few Assassin's Creeds, and Child of Light.
Why do you think I removed the context? I understand her points, and I know there are a lot of video games like those she describes, but I disagree with her conclusions. Any industry is going to have the braindead blockbusters that get pumped out every 1-2 years, and gaming is no exception. I just believe there is plenty beyond that, there are a lot of amazing games out today that don't fit into that model. Papers Please, which she mentions in the article. Anything by Amanita Design. Do you want me to go through my Steam library after I get off work?
This was not written by someone who hates video games. This was written by a woman who has worked in the games industry for some time, and has been lead programmer on notable titles. She is exploring why some of her friends find games uninteresting, and to what extent poor designs and limited scopes can be blamed for the fact.
This captures a lot of what I've been feeling lately. I can't stand most games, they just make me anxious and I will quit playing them after a few hours or even minutes. Too much stress and surface experiences has had me looking in the other direction. Take, for example, GTA 5. I've probably spent more hours riding cars and bikes in GTA5's beautiful countryside and outback than playing actual missions. Just hours and hours of riding during rain or sunshine, dawn or dusk, in the city or the most remote mountains. It's beautiful and serene and made me realize that I don't really need dozens of hours of frantic gameplay. But as amazing as those experiences are, they aren't the core focus of GTA5 and that's a missed opportunity.
I am ready for video games with these beautiful moments - and please keep them short! I don't want to spend hours and hours on a game anymore, at least not traditional ones - but I have no idea where to find them.
I don't like playing single player games at all because I can't get into the story. I'm always down for multiplayer games from MMOs to MOBAs to FPS probably because it's competitive and just more fun in general since I'm not competing against AI but real human beings.
Interesting. Note however there are storyless (or minimal story) single player games, and also single player games without an AI. No/minimal story: puzzle games, abstract games, board games, sandbox/exploration. No AI: adventures.
I was about to recommend RDR, because I feel the same way about it. I intentionally avoid taking the 'fast way' to places and ride my horse everywhere. I gather herbs, hunt, take on side-quests, or just enjoy the ride. It's very zen.
This was actually one of the reasons I loved No Man's Sky. I will spend some time finding a nice planet, and then I will just hike to and fro places. Sometimes it's very much like walking through some of Roger Dean's work, and can feel nice and peaceful.
I was surprised how much I got into the "walking simulator" Dear Esther. It just had beautiful art direction and sort of semi-random nonsensical voice over that gave it a bit of atmosphere. It turns a lot of people off for being pretentious and having zero gameplay, but I still really enjoyed it just to ogle the scenery. It was only about an hour long.
For me a big part of games being boring is the lack of cheats and codes that come with the game. Developers/Game companies have decided HOW they want me to play the game and that irks the crap out of me. Take for example GTA5, I can only turn on invincibility for 5 minutes without having to reapply the code. What is the point of the limit? Can't I define the way I'd like to play the game? Sometimes cheating is fun and can be creative. Cheat codes could make a game like Assassin's Creed playable to those that just don't like the repetitiveness.
The sense of achievement just fades off with age. For a lot of games equal time sunk with progress(, without going all in on the fun of grinding, thats something different for me), most games mechanics just start to feel like the artificial speed bumps they are, only meant to stretch or distract from a hopefully existing story and setting.
Game progress of story-heavy offline games should be unlockable at will without importing save games. Or there should be some kind of an AI play mode, where you only take over that autopilot if you seem interested or just like to watch.
For most linear games with an actual story a youtube replay, including fast forwards, will be as good as the thing itself. This might as well explain a part of the let's play success.
It doesn't even have to be considered "cheat codes" if adequately factored into the difficulty level. I feel like some of the backlash against old school cheat codes (all the games we used to play in "god mode" or with things like the Game Genie) is as much the terminology "cheat code" and the idea that it is "hacking" or "breaking" the game.
Most games seem to stick to some simple linear variation of a difficulty model: Easy, Medium, Hard, ... Why aren't there more options? Why aren't there more custom options? For many games, why is "easy" have to be so "hard" as a baseline. If I want to play a game as a 100% power trip, why not let me?
I recently started playing Saints Row 4. In the casual mode, its an easy game with an overpowered protagonist. It's really relaxing when a game gives every weapon in the beginning and let us choose the way to use them.
I agree, I think Saints Row has been a particularly good franchise at realizing that it can be a ridiculous power fantasy and lean into that and have fun with it. It even includes things other games would consider "cheat codes" as eventual unlocks, and that also adds to the fun and the mayhem. SR4 even does the best job of directly integrating that into the explicit appeal and story line in its "superhero powers" progression work.
Simple - don't buy AAA (apart from very few select titles) because 99% of those is rehashed garbage and cliches
Buy gamess from small studios, made by a few people or even one guy, usually a lot of them are in Steam Early Access (yes, it is risky, some of them get abandoned or just never improve much)
For me this is like a reneissance in gaming. Have a look at Factorio, Starbound, Rimworld, Banished, Pillars of Eternity, SotS:The Pit, ARK:Survival Evolved, 7 Days to Die, Hearthlands. Some of those have multiplayer and are something else completely to play with a few friends
A whole lot of people don't even know there is entire world besides CoD or 50th fucking Asassins Creed...
I also play Dota 2 on and off, since multiplayer interactions in it are so intense and so unpredictable
And I think that's the biggest problem: The entry-games that we present are mostly boring shooters, and the like. Non-gamers aren't going to spend time figuring out what kind of game they want, aside from friends recommending something, they'll probably just try what is popular or advertised.
I think movies have this same problem. Your weekly superhero blockbuster's are fun, they definitely aren't everyone's cup of tea. But if you weren't ever really into movies, and started jumping in, you'd think that's all there was.
I also play Dota 2 on and off, since multiplayer interactions in it are so intense and so unpredictable
It's a shame to see how AAA companies have butchered the Dota-like genre. There's Valve's Dota 2 which is the shining example of what the genre should be and then there's all these garbage rehashes out there that have just tried to dumb down the game or introduce some kind of gimmick or cliche.
AAA games are just a race to the bottom in terms of design. They just try to appeal to the lowest common denominator and games get more shallow and casual with each iteration.
I'm not talking about games overall, just games made by AAA companies. There's certainly still games that cater to a hardcore/competitive audience but you have to look a little harder for them and they're usually coming from indie developers. But for a AAA studio casual is where the money is and it's the philosophy driving their game design even though from their perspective they'd probably call "easier to get into" or more "intuitive" or "streamlined".
Look at the difference between Starcraft Broodwar and Starcraft 2, Diablo 2 and Diablo 3, Dota and every clone like LoL and Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone, Overwatch. All of the sequels and successors are more shallow and casual than what came before. And the novelties these games introduce are better characterized as gimmicks to hook casual players. Why make a game that caters to a hardcore audience? That's just limiting your playerbase and limiting your potential profit.
I've been playing XCom2 a lot recently, and it occurred to me that I was caring waaay too much about my soldiers. Then it occurred to me that actually the part of the game I was enjoying most was looking after my soldiers.
I have a sniper that never hits anything, ever, and I've started having little pep talk with her before each mission, trying to get her to buck her game up and be a useful member of the team.
Shooting aliens in the head isn't the fun bit. Caring for my little gang of incompetents and nursing them through each mission is the fun bit.
I spent a lot of time playing the original XCOM on both playstation and PC. This is what made the game amazing. I would name the soldiers after friends, family members, and famous people that I admired. When one would get injured or killed I really cared. It also made approach the tactical part of the game with much caution. I would get really nervous when taking on some of the more dangerous missions. However, once I would get one of my soldiers fully trained and ranked up it was totally worth it!
You might like Invisible Inc. It's a turn-based sneaking/spy game and one of the few recent games that I played straight through with no 'guilt' afterwards.
Rimworld is so good. At the same time, no game has made me ragequit more intensely in a very long time. Broken thoughts right when you need the colonists to buckle down...
The sandbox style of game is your ticket to bliss then. Wandering through London in Assassin's Creed Unity. Climbing mountains in Skyrim. Traversing the landscape with a grapple/parachute in Just Cause. Plundering the high seas in Assassin's Creed Black Flag. Exploring Mordor in Shadows of Mordor. Driving through the city and countryside in Need for Speed. Flying the endless black in Elite Dangerous.
There are frequently scripted introductory sequences to familiarize you with the mechanics and attempt to hook you with a story, but they will consume your time but once, and can provide you with hundreds of hours of entertainment and escape thereafter.
Of course, if driving is your thing, there are a ton of racing simulators out there, from F1 to rally cars.
This list is incomplete if you don't include Minecraft, the canonical sandbox game. Play in creative or in peaceful mode, and you don't have to do any fighting at all (though some resources are still best collected from mobs).
Other categories of nonviolent or non-FPS games would be puzzle games like Tetris or Candy Crush. Also, video games can reproduce or make single-player versions of the classic board, card, and dice games like chess or yahtzee.
Really? Skyrim, the game where if you place an apple in a bucket on a guy's counter and go do 200 hours of quests and come back... the apple is still there. That's not a persistent world? That's pretty much the only point of that engine.
Granted, player agency in Skyrim is pushed way down compared to earlier TES titles but you can still affect the game world by choosing quests, choosing sides, Hell, Morrowind allowed you to kill a main questline quest-giver, ruin the prophecy, keep playing, and still fulfill the main storyline.
The Elder Scrolls games through Oblivion (and I think Skyrim?) are not permanently persistent. The game does eventually do garbage collection, and only some places in the world are safe from it. This is why every major town/city has a house you can buy; your collection of every cheese wheel in the game may not persist forever if you leave it in some random chest in a shop.
The ability to create or change objects is not what defines the limits of player agency within a game. Is my ability to go on a relaxing drive through fictional terrain any less meaningful because I didn't first build the road and the car?
In the end, playing games labeled with either "theme park" or "sandbox" doesn't change the fact that you are still playing within the confines of someone else's world; I can't create a functional X-Wing in Minecraft and fly to Tattoine, no matter what blocks I put together.
The parent was enjoying driving a car around through a fictional (and populated) setting, so pointing them towards a "build your own adventure" game is probably not going to tickle their fancy nearly as much.
> I can't create a functional X-Wing in Minecraft and fly to Tattoine, no matter what blocks I put together.
This is where table-top role-playing games really shine. You can totally do that in, say, GURPS (among a great many other games, a tiny fraction of which I discuss below).
N.B. Forgive me if I'm preaching to the choir, or if you're simply not interested. It's currently NaGaDeMon (National Game Design Month), and I've been swimming in TTRPGs lately, spending nearly all of my free time researching, playing, philosophizing, and designing a TTRPG of my own for the past week... I've really got to hand it to my anti-depressants, as this time last year I couldn't find the passion nor the energy to do this :)
Perhaps GURPS is too focused on realism for your tastes. How about Robin Laws's HeroQuest? where the probability of success doesn't depend on an action's difficulty in the "real world", but rather on which results produce the most cinematic and exciting stories? Or Fate [Core]? which emphasizes characters being larger-than-life and doing larger-than-life things in larger-than-life situations? These sorts of "narrativist" games are pretty popular lately, and not without good reason.
And then there's Apocalypse World, which focuses more on characters: the interactions between characters, their histories together, co-operation as well as conflict. Experience points are awarded for developing your relationship(s) with the other characters, rather than for slaying foul demons or hoarding precious loot. It's a game where the players are expected to be involved as much as the the gamesmaster in creating the game world and driving the narrative. Its mechanics reflect that, making the game difficult for a gamesmaster to railroad. As an added bonus (imho), the book itself is written in a very casual, conversational, vernacular style, which I find refreshing compared to the too-often sterile, textbookish style of these rulebooks. There are quite a few other games that come from the same school of design as AW, as well has plenty of third-party "rules hacks" — adaptations of the core system to other settings and genres, sometimes with very different goals than AW's, other times with surprisingly similar ones.
That's not to deride demon-slaying or loot-hoarding, though! The "Old School Renaissance" is now! Tons of games, ranging from free to cheap to pricey, all attempting to emulate that old-school early-to-mid-80s (sometimes even up to the mid-90s, by some accounts) TTRPG feel. If that's your bag, [Revised] Mazes & Minotaurs is quite well-designed (and free!), whereas something like Labyrinth Lord or Lamentations of the Flame Princess prefers to mimic old-school Dungeons & Dragons, complete with its quirks, much more closely. Then there's Monsters & Magic, somewhat unique amongst the OSR games, in that it's very much a new-school game that nevertheless is readily compatible with all (yes, all) of those old fantasy splatbooks from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, with any necessary conversion happening on the fly. Oh! and Tunnels & Trolls recently had an 8th edition published through Kickstarter, if you want to play something actually old-school ;)
Or how about a game where the rules themselves are as customizable as the fictional universes they power? Something like Fudge (free), or even Basic Role-Playing? Games which are as much toolkits or frameworks for creating a game of your own as they are games in and of themselves? (Fate Core (also free) leans a bit in this direction, too, though it's noticeably less flexible than Fudge in many ways, despite being similarly modular).
Maybe something more middle-of-the-road is more your style, and games like True20 and its successor Dragon Age/Fantasy...
Might not be exactly what you're looking for, but try playing The Walking Dead.
Not very demanding on time, and it's not about killing zombies.
Very story oriented, and you get attached to the characters in the game.
I myself abandoned games over a decade ago - they just required too much from me. Only recently I decided to check some games out from the library. Not sure why I picked this one to play and was very pleasantly surprised.
You raise a good point. I would never purchase a GTA game because I find the whole concept morally offensive, but I am very intrigued by the exploration aspect you have described. I would love to see more focus on exploration in games. A lot of RPGs (like the Elder Scrolls series) have significant aspects of exploration to them, but tend to get bogged down in the fetch-it quests or lots of repetitive hack-and-slay.
I've got nothing against combat elements of games, but if it falls into endless repetition and involves lots of grinding, etc, to advance, then it just becomes work, not fun.
GTA5 is the kind of game that the adventures the player takes on says more about the player than the game itself. Sure, you can run around causing mass chaos and deaths; but you can also do none of those things. Once you reach a point in the game, I forget how far into it, you choose what to do.
Want to drive around town obeying the laws and enjoy the sites? Do that.
Want to partake in multiple instances of non-violent side missions such as racing, skydiving, and more? Do that.
Want to stand at the boardwalk on the beach and watch people walk by while enjoying the setting sun? Do that.
Want to take flying lessons? Do that.
How about some tennis or golf? Do that.
At one point in the game you can even do yoga for crap's sake. There are actually several examples of exploration-type tasks that you seem to be interested in as well. There's a great deal more to GTA5 than the violence you hear about from people, that only focus on that one topic, that have a narrative and rhetoric to push on people for their own agendas.
Still have negative opinions towards GTA5 because of moral reasons? That's cool too. But consider you may be missing out on tons of stuff you would actually enjoy because you might dismiss it immediately for reasons.
It's the extent of the different styles of game play, and the kinds of things you can get out of it, is a huge advantage to these kinds of games.
When I got bored with GTA5's regular mission based mechanics, had finished all the missions, I spent just as much time getting two characters in a car and driving back and forth as fast as possible between the furthest auto body repair shops on the map just to see how long I could last before the car blew up.
From "My 4-Year-Old son plays Grand Theft Auto":
At this point my son was familiar with the game’s mechanics and hopped into the ambulance. As he put the crime fighting behind him, he wondered out loud if it were possible to take people to the hospital. I instructed him to press R3, and he was off to save a few lives. He was having a blast racing from point to point, picking up people in need, and then speeding off to Las Venturas Hospital. During one of his life-saving adventures, he passed a fire house with a big, red, shiny fire truck parked out front. He didn’t want to let his passengers down, so he took them to the hospital and then asked if I could guide him back to the fire truck.
> Sure, you can run around causing mass chaos and deaths; but you can also do none of those things
No, you literally can't. You have to kill people en masse from the very start of the game. And, if you want to progress far enough to unlock the various features of the game, you have to do downright reprehensible things.
I've played, and enjoyed most of, GTA5 (though I think the developers, at this point, should fuck off with the faux-satire, they lost the plot a long time ago), but I understand why other people don't.
And I quote: "Once you reach a point in the game, I forget how far into it, you choose what to do."
Once you have reached that point, you can do pretty much anything you want. Yes, I understand you have to do bad things to get to that point. That's why I agreed with the comment about if you still have moral objections to the game, then that's cool. I personally would prefer they allow you those options from the start, but I can understand why they do not for gameplay purposes.
IIRC, the only required part of GTAV was a single introductory mission representing a flashback of two of the main characters pulling off what was seemingly their last heist. Took like 10 minutes to finish. After that, free reign of the city. There are also some non-violent missions you can accept, like filling in as driver for your friend's tow-truck service and repossessing cars. They're actually pretty fun.
>Take, for example, GTA 5. I've probably spent more hours riding cars and bikes in GTA5's beautiful countryside and outback than playing actual missions. Just hours and hours of riding during rain or sunshine, dawn or dusk, in the city or the most remote mountains. It's beautiful and serene and made me realize that I don't really need dozens of hours of frantic gameplay.
You sound like you'd love the mostly open-world, graphic-centric (MMO)RPG genre! Something like Black Desert Online or FF14 Online. Where you can optionally focus on the story here or there and are mostly free to explore the world (although areas that outlevel you may be a bit dangerous...)
This captures a lot of what I've been feeling lately. I can't stand most games, they just make me anxious and I will quit...I've probably spent more hours riding cars and bikes in GTA5's beautiful countryside and outback than playing actual missions.
Most of the time, games are structured by people whose viewpoint and incentives are radically different from the players. In the short term, the industry doesn't "care" if you play because you're bored and there's no real choice (for AAA levels of production effort) and because that's what your friends are doing, and there's a little variable schedule of reward that's gotten its hooks into you.
The most memorable times I had in Eve Online were entirely through emergent gameplay. I and my fellow alliance players in 0.0 security space couldn't give a rat's ass about anything the content team generated -- except as a source of resources in our own player-generated drama of building a player owned station. The emergent stuff is what really engages the mind. That's the real "play" that's going on in games -- not the publishing company's interest in keeping us paying a subscription. That stuff was 100X more engaging than anything some content team could dream up.
I find there's a whole subset of gamers today who remind me of the college students who would come up to you at the beginning of a course, and ask if you'd play their "college game" with them -- You tell them exactly what to spit back out during exams, they memorize that list, they get their grades, they satisfy their requirement, and no one has to actually care or be engaged or actually learn anything. Those students remind me of a lot of gamers. It's not about finding fun, genuinely engaging, unexpected gameplay. It's about getting expectations met, and getting the stuff they're entitled to.
I got fed up, and I've decided to do something about it. I'm self-funding and making my own MMO, and I'm going to do my best to have it be about emergent play. I'm very far from being able to tackle those issues, but I have a server cluster that can spawn any of the 2^87 star systems, and support 70 players in the same multiplayer battle. All but one of those 2^87 star systems are identical at this point, however. But that's the next thing on my list. No RPG progression yet, but we'll get there. I want to make an MMO that's specifically built for smart people, where no one gets nerfed, no one grinds, and devs never give any sympathy to forum whiners.
(I'm planning a game that you'd have to spend hours and hours on, overall, but I'm going to try and structure it so you can play in half-hour, hour, or two hour sessions.)
Couldn't agree more. I still even get nostalgic about the "places" in the original Doom. Something about just hanging out there being amazed that my computer could even do that.
I only have Vice City, nowhere near as visually spectacular, but I get myself a car and just drive around with the radio on. It's the same for Assassin's Creed through to IV, I often just go for a walk and look at the scenery, immerse myself in a time and place that's long gone. Often enough, the missions get in the way.
I occasionally load up Black Flag to sail a 16th century ship and listen to pirate songs. It makes it fascinating to think about what the Caribbean were like back then...
I do the same in GTA V. I think its feeling of freedom and escapism is why games like No Man's Sky were appealing.
I used to clock hundreds of hours on Flight Sim 98, not necessarily learning how to fly (though that was fun too) but going to various cities in Flight Sim, checking them out in Encarta and doubling back to Flight Sim again.
Now that I'm older and financially capable of visiting these places, its pretty surreal. I hope the new AR/VR movement brings about these kind of experiences.
Firewatch is a really big step in the right direction.
But try playing it as a child or a woman marginally interested in a gaming experience and you get unnecessary swearing and tropes from a man's perspective.
Oh well. I wish there was possibility for a mode. Not one you are forced to select, but one based on a profile, more akin to the predictive one advertisers already have on you.
A "possibility for a mode" dilutes the artistic message of a game. If you don't like what the authors did, I would suggest doing something that presents a different viewpoint that you find valuable. (And that's not a cop-out--there are loads of indie developers doing exactly that, and a lot of those games are awesome.)
I understand that, and this understanding has been pervasive for 30 years, which is why this exact article was written, and is still being circulated on HN.
Are you implying that women don't swear? and why does a child have to play this game? this game is obviously oriented to a mature audience. Not all the games have to be suitable for everybody. If not, the only games available would be pixar-like games.
I'm implying, and directly said, that the tropes aren't relatable or interesting despite trying so hard to be LIKE EVERY OTHER GAME AND THE ENTIRE POINT OF THE ARTICLE AND THREAD
You think your rebuttals are original but they are just rehashing the same arguments from the past 30 years and completely unproductive. Assume I already know the counterpoints, you went for the lowest hanging fruit of them all.
Firewatch is an interesting one to call out, much like Journey as the author imagined, because those games try to be more interesting. They were created by artists and gamers tired of AAA titles and tropes. But they continue to fail to interest this other broad audience that is repulsed by the idea of games, but as the author realized, are actually entertained by immersive experiences.
> I've probably spent more hours riding cars and bikes in GTA5's beautiful countryside and outback than playing actual missions.
Sounds like you would enjoy Euro Truck Simulator 2 or American Truck Simulator. Yes you still have a mission (taking a trailer from point A to point B) but you can choose from a long list of "jobs" that will take you to many different cities, and you even have the option to free roam.
Heh, spent hundreds of hours on Flight Simulator doing just this, reading up on Encarta about beautiful cities, and then paying a 'virtual' visit in Flight Sim.
Yes, simulators are strangely compelling despite being seemingly "boring" at first sight.
If you are interested in the genre, you can follow Squirrel on Youtube, I especially like his "trucking diaries" but there are flight sim videos as well: https://www.youtube.com/user/DaSquirrelsNuts
Have you tried No Man's Sky? Once you get the initial couple of hours of "game" out of the way, there is pretty much absolutely nothing to do except hop from star to star, land on planets, and wander around them looking at the prettiness. I sunk hours into it. I wish the PS4 version had a cheat I could enter to completely turn off the "survival" mechanism and the HUD so I could just put it up on my projector, find a nice view, and have a living painting on my wall.
I've been playing games since Commodore 64. I've played through Amiga, early PC, Playstation, etc games. The problem is that gaming became an industry and the companies behind AAA games want you to spend as much time playing their game as possible. The 100% fun of Chaos Engine which took 4 hours became 150 hours of boring side-questing (I look at you Skyrim). The somach-wrenching action of Freespace 2 became endless leveling up, unlocking, achievement gathering in Battlefield or World of Tanks. This problem you describe is quite refreshing though but familiar if I think about it. I can only name a few games from recent years which have deep narrative (SOMA, Talos Principle for example) but most of them have some gameplay problems which you have to get used to. For example SOMA is unnerving, Talos Principle is full of hard puzzles. If you are not already a gamer you won't see what gaming can give you. This is a Catch 22 which is really hard to bypass. What I would really love to see is something like Dwarf Fortress which is __very__ deep but combersome in a neat package which can entertain me for a few hours (or weeks if I want). I also really like the direction Quantic Dream took with their games which are interactive movies with optional exploration. What I __REALLY__ miss though is well-written story and characters with real personality with the protagonist (the player) marching through a monumental and engaging storyline like we saw in Mass Effect. I really wish I could erase my memories of playing Mass Effect, System Shock 2, Undying, Half-Life and others so I can replay them and enjoy them again for the first time.
Well, the minecraft I played had a chapter where a guy got overconfident and continued building during the night. He ended up having a creeper blow up and have a ton of skeletons invade his house. He had to escape, near death. It took him a week to take his house back. In the endhe mourned his dead pet pig, and erected a monument in his memory. :)
Just because it doesn't have a "set in stone" story, that doen's mean that there isn't one. I've seen stories unfold in The Sims that would put to shame most books and movies.
Dwarf Fortress doesn't have a "set in stone" story either but there is a ton of emergent behavior which makes stories so fun that there is a whole community of players who are not playing the game but just reading the stories (myself included).
Are you implying that gaming was not an industry in the times of Amiga? The whole point of insane difficulty of many 8bit coin-op games, which was mindlessly translated to home consoles, was precisely to get as many nickels out of the player as possible. Back then, pay to win was the main monetization scheme, and everybody's having nostalgia for those games now.
Gaming was an industry at the time, but the PC scene was much less industrialized, full of bedroom programmers and demoscene hackers who could compete with the big companies due to the limits of the platform.
> What I would really love to see is something like Dwarf Fortress which is __very__ deep but combersome in a neat package
Have you looked at Terraria? Also, you mentioned Freespace 2. I'm doing a self-funded project where I'm building an MMO space game aimed at deeply emergent gameplay.
Witcher and Bloodborne aren't boring. It's just that AAA gaming became something made inside Anglo Saxon corporations, and everyone is fed up with that lack of details and creativity. 20 years ago top-class games like Dungeon Keeper could've been made in a garage.
Yes! The emperor has no clothes. I think video games are laymen's attempt at capturing the magic of controlling a computer. Why waste your time with boring games when you can write computer programs? I'd rather program than play computer games. Programming is the ultimate game.
I think the author is saying that the mechanics of gaming are flawed though. They're almost all centered around stuff like health and ammo, completing objectives, taking damage and dying. That's what most games are. Sure you'll find exceptions, but they're nowhere near the mainstream, and even gamers will shun them for "not being games" like Dear Esther. Also, even the variety that is there might not be what these people are looking for as shown by her friends not liking Journey. The point of the article is that we need to step out of what we consider games and try to think of a different audience who wants a new kind of experience with attributes, such as depth or relatability.
"Sure you'll find exceptions, but they're nowhere near the mainstream,"
It's important to be clear whether one is describing gaming as a whole, or "mainstream" gaming. Many criticisms of mainstream gaming don't apply to "gaming" as a whole, which includes things like a visual novel community, hidden object games, and the "walking simulators" that have almost no presence in the mainstream but definitely exist. They have almost no discoverability, being buried under games with advertising budgets an order of magnitude larger than what those games will make in revenue (let alone profit), but they exist.
So when you say something like "we need to step out of what we consider games and try to think of a different audience who wants a new kind of experience with attributes, such as depth or relatability", it's easy for those who already have to perceive that as a bit of an insult. "We" may not be as encompassing as you or the original author think it is, and some people may resent being categorized into that "we".
almost all centered around stuff like health and ammo
I don't know about "almost all", but even if 90 percent of games indeed fit that description, the remaining 10 percent would take 100 lifetimes to consume. Really--if all you bought were the bi-weekly dollar bargains on humble bundle, you'd have all the gaming variety you could have time for. I suspect most of our complaining is for the sake of complaining.
I certainly agree that we should be trying new things. Only good things can come of that.
But I think it's very important to acknowledge that these "problems" with games are not born out of laziness, lack of creativity, or an inability to see outside the cultural in-group. Games boil everything down to easily countable abstractions, because games are, at their heart, nothing but systems of rules. Your health meter is an abstracted version of your physical well-being. Objectives are abstracted goal setting and cause-and-effect. Even if the game doesn't show you these numbers, it is still using them under the hood. What's the alternative? A deep, nuanced simulation? That'd be great, but it's well beyond the scope and means of the vast majority of developers.
Why do so many games include death? Because it's the only universally accepted fail state. It is simply impossible for 99% of games to provide anything more meaningful than that, because doing so involves exponentially more complexity, storytelling, and asset development. The best most can do is just cover the death up with new coat of paint (a la Braid).
Why have a fail state at all? Because the interactive nature of the medium loses a lot of its weight when your choices/actions don't seem to matter, and simulating anything other than simple failure is, once again, exponentially more difficult and expensive.
It is tragic that there is a certain vocal group that rejects alternative types of games like Dear Esther. I won't apologize for them. However, the games that are "mainstream"—and the games that are not—are not selected by some game industry cabal. The easily consumed, easily understood games sell so much more than the niche stuff precisely because more people are interested in that kind of thing.
Although the point of the article is that we need to think of different audiences (which is hard to disagree with), my main takeaway was that society is full of judgmental elitists who love to denigrate things they don't understand. In particular, the author's cousin seems like a very unpleasant person. Although the story of her encounter with Lydia is superficially touching, it's hardly a revelation, and we've all heard these stories before: friend/relative hates video games, finally plays one, is brought to emotional tears, yadda yadda. Finding a good game is roughly as difficult as finding a good book; the culture is not to blame for people's ignorance.
(As an aside, the true tragedy is that the cousin's experience had a lot more to do with her ignorance than with Skyrim its. Avoiding video games for your entire life practically guarantees that you'll be blown away the first time you find one you like, because the game is still "magic" to you. The magic wears off very quickly, however, and after that the meaningful experiences are much more rare. If you continue playing games, you find yourself wanting more than just some scripted dialogue, and that's why games so frequently feature the challenges and spectacles that the author says turn the non-gamers away.)
I agree with your disagreement. After playing games for roughly over thirty years, I can say without a doubt there are a greater variety of games available today than most of my years of my game playing combined.
What I don't understand is that the author IS a gamer. And a designer. She probably knows a lot about games. She can help her friends sift throught the sea of games and find some that appeal to them.
I'm inclined to agree. The OP should have talked more with their friends to find out what kinds of experiences they wanted, before just blindly recommending their own favorite games.
Of course, the piece also reads as an advertisement for their new gaming studio the OP is building, so I think that figured into the narrative as well.
Take this for what you will, but one of the reasons I feel like I've become bored with games is that I've become bored of killing things. Yes, there are games that buck this trend, but I found myself struggling to justify buying a new console (or gaming PC) when this was predominant gameplay mechanic in most triple A titles. I only occasionally play games now, mostly Flash games.
I agree that the author knows about those games, but there was some weird equivocation in the article.
The problem I saw as I read was that those games don't get publicized. Shooters and RPGs are a big public entry point, while great oddities like Papers Please are mostly advertised in-market. If you don't open Steam or read gaming sites or talk games with friends, you'll never hear about them. It's a real shame, because there are people who would love these games but can't get there through the traditional channels.
The other claim, which was stated in the article, is that there's a shortage of these games. That the industry is uncreative and demographically challenged, and so it doesn't make these things. I'd love to see more of them, certainly, but it's hard to see how that will bring in non-gamers who aren't learning about what already exists.
So I think it was not just implied but stated. It felt like an inconsistency at the heart of the piece, where we got two disjoint stories; one about making unusual games, and one about publicizing them.
I stopped playing video games like 10 years ago for the same reason stated in this article: I couldn't finish any new game I started.
But I recently started to play again after years of no touching one. I weirdly enough I love it again. I can play solo games, enjoy them and finish them. I can play online games and enjoy the competition.
I think a lot has to do with how people cannot focus anymore on anything more than 10 minutes. I used to be like that. Checking phone notification, look at reddit every 5 minutes, etc. I worked on it for a long time. Stop running after the quick gratifications and enjoy the long term. And now I am back to being a gamer :)
I actually played Chrono Trigger out of nostalgia. I was actually sure I would give up along the way as before... And I didn't. I was really into it and I had a lot of fun.
I then ordered a ps4 and I am catching up on everything I missed! ;)
It seems like relatively fewer kids today are getting immersed in the worlds of Zelda and long RPG games. I certainly agree that lack of attention span has something to do with it.
I think you're absolutely right. Lack of attention makes it impossible to immerse yourself into anything. Even something as fun and beautiful as video games.
Same here. There's a wealth of amazing games that I haven't played, considering that I stopped being an active gamer somewhere during the GameCube 'era'.
But in the same way that I seek out 'old movies' carefully, I'm very selective in my gaming choices. Currently I'm working my way through Red Dead Redemption and the Avernum series, but a large amount of games from the Xbox 360 area don't appeal to me at all anymore, for example.
You make a good point. I know I can't remember the last time I finished a recent big console game but my reason is that many of them take so damn long to finish. According to http://howlongtobeat.com/ many of these games take hundreds of hours to complete. For example in 2004 Half-Life 2 took 19 hours to complete while the recent Witcher 3 takes 165. Skyrim takes 215 hours. I don't think there is anything that can hold my attention for 215 hours.
You don't have to count the hours, that's not the point. If you enjoy a game you don't want to finish it fast, you want to take it slow and enjoy every moment of it. I played a game for over 300 hours in more than a couple of years because it was a pleasant activity, not to beat it: I finished the main story at about 100 hours, there was nothing left to beat (open sandbox), but it was fun.
I really miss gameplay driven games rather than presentation/story driven games. I think both are great, but I really enjoy the technical intricacies of street fighter or mega-man games.
They're still out there. Ori and the Blind Forest, BlazBlue, Dark/Demons Souls, Shadow Complex, Dust, and more indy games than I could shake a stick at. One of the tricks is to avoid the internet while trying to solve the games. It's amazing the difference a guide-free run makes.
I very much enjoy clean, simple platformers with interesting mechanics and a minimum of story.
I spent hours playing N v1.4 in grade school, and the update, v2.0 is free online [0]. There is also a more reworked version, N++, on Steam that I can't vouch for but is probably good. There is also Dustforce [1], which has some very unique mechanics and is on Steam. Super Meat Boy [2] was inspired in part by N and got a lot of press. It has the same fundamental gameplay that N does (everything kills you, run and wall jump with physics) but not written with Flash and with some bells and whistles (I still like N and its physics better).
Also in the bucket of skill-based, storyless games is Devil Daggers [3], though it is first person, not a platformer. Some people love it, some hate it. I found it very compelling.
Yes, and the self-loathing white male undercurrent runs throughout. The idea that gaming is a solely white male affair is itself a very parochial view. Calling it a male affair is probably reasonable based on the statistics, although that's still already a bit of an insult to some of the successful developers who sell female-dominated genres, but it's not white male; plenty of non-white males play games, and they're already playing different games than the author does. As a single for instance, the word "sports" doesn't seem to appear in that article at all. (Not that sport games are exclusive non-white male; from what I see, they're popular with almost everybody, except "gamers".) As another for instance, Japan has been making and playing video games for as long as the West, and as far as I know, they are not white; again, no trace of the immense and incredibly diverse Japanese industry appears in the article.
You have to throw out a lot of evidence to come to the conclusion that video gaming is even remotely the exclusive domain of "white males".
I'd submit that rather than building games based on your political conception of what other people might want, you'd be far better off bringing in the non-gamers into the design process directly. Or even just letting other groups of people build the types of games they like instead of taking it upon yourself to build the games that somebody else might like, which is already sort of, shall I say, culturally imperialistic? They're doing it already, after all. I know; I've played some of them, and enjoyed them, and they didn't need permission, help, or angst from the "white males" to do it.
The problem may not be "the industry", so much as a game player who doesn't realize that even within the context of gaming as a whole, they are less widely-experienced than they think. If I were to try to entice my wife back into gaming, who plays Mario Kart with the family and a mean Dr. Mario, "Skyrim" would not even make my top 50 suggestions.
The author doesn't want more games for black males, or white women, or even minority women. Though the author may not realize it, that kind of demographics are a red herring.
What she really is looking for is games for what she feels is an under-served demographic: The kind of person who lives in "a state of constant shock, of constant stimulation" like her friends do. Her friends just happen to not be white males, so she latched on to that.
I don't feel over-stimulated, so I can only guess that such people would indeed prefer games like Farmville and Neko Atsume.
But the author's friend, in addition to being overwhelmed with constant shock and stimulation, is also a bit of a snob, so she won't play those low-brow games. I don't know what high-brow relaxing games are like. Maybe Papers, Please and Dear Esther?
> She didn't like that there is a snake that can kill you. It's not that it is too hard, it's that she is deeply uninterested in being attacked in a game.
I think this hints at a big part of the problem. When we frame something as a game, we tend to evoke the concepts of winning and losing. The most brutal and obvious (lazy?) way of implementing that is to turn it into "kill or be killed". And that brutal, obvious, violent metaphor underpins the vast majority of the mainstream game industry. That's why something like Undertale is seen as fresh and subversive. That's probably even a big part of why Tetris sold so many Game Boys. But too many of us can't or won't see it. The author is probably right: those of us who have been immersed in this culture for 20+ years are like fish who too easily forget that not everyone likes to get wet.
OTOH, until NLP is a thing, social mechanics will always feel lacking. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try: there are plenty of interesting mechanics left unexplored.
Besides, sometimes you just want to shoot sombody with an absurd weapon.
No, it really doesn't. Games sell like gangbusters as they are now. That doesn't mean there isn't room for non-violent games, and if you can come up with one that that's really fun to play you'll make a mint. Until then, don't decry an entire industry because you don't see the appeal.
Part of the problem is that it's easier to implement a competition/kill/survive mechanism than to add realistic interpersonal social dynamics. If you want to avoid competition or at least killing things, you'll have to be a lot more creative.
It's (relatively) much easier to find an audience for a film or book that is focused on dialogue, social interactions, and whatnot, than it is to do so for a game. I applaud efforts in this area, but I can see how it's easier to go for kill/win/compete style games.
I only enjoy two types of games now. Sports games because they are mostly boxed time and I find them fun, and mindlessly blow stuff up type games. Diablo and GTA fall into this category.
I used to be into RPGs, but they just take too much time now. The things that give them depth for one player, makes them impossible for me to play in short 30 minute chunks.
By the way, I can't comment directly on the article's page, so if someone can please let the author know that her Harry Giles link duplicates the link before it. She likely meant to point it here: https://harrygiles.org/2016/04/24/shock-and-care/.
I mostly disagree with this article. There's very few nonviolent games I've played that I enjoy. I guess you could say I'm the average consumer, but there are certain trends in industries that are predominant, because that's what people want. I think all media generally has its worth defined by how it is a conduit of unrealistic experience.
For instance, the biggest blockbuster movies usually contain unrealistic scenarios of violence and heroism. The biggest romance movies are usually unrealistic. The most popular music is usually describing a hypothetical situation that people feel drawn to.
I think that's responsible for the trends we've seen in graphics, 3d, virtual reality. People willing to consume media are people that don't have or want the opportunity to be extraordinary in their lives. The more realistic graphics become, the more they feel that their experiences in media are real experiences.
So my point is basically that games exist not just for the novelty of playing a game, but also to let people live their fantasies, and some fantasies are less realistic than others, and therefore will be better represented in games. Anyone can have a relationship with another person. You don't need Lydia in Skyrim for that, and likely if you try it in real life, it'll be much more rewarding than in a video game. If you try gutting someone with a sword in real life, you'll go to jail.
This whole portrayal of video games (and other media) as "art" will never take off outside of technological hipster circles, for the same reason most people don't spend hours in art museums ever day. They're not interested in media for its own sake as artistic, they're interested in the proxy experiences that it offers, that people can't get elsewhere.
People have very different fantasy lives. Some people have fantasy lives that revolve around social relationships. Others have fantasy lives that revolve around power-tripping and murder-hoboing. But I suspect that the former are actually much more common than the latter.
It's a fantasy life because it is not actually reality! I always wondered why people play Guitar Hero when they could just practice the guitar instead. But playing the guitar is hard and takes a lot of work, a huge investment of time. Social relationships are hard, too, and if you screw them up it can wreck your life. Establishing a social identity takes a lot of care. Who wouldn't want a fantasy social life to experiment with different identities and kinds of relationships?
My point is that different people will enjoy different kinds of games, which is fine, and should be fun. This was an article about why the author's friends didn't enjoy many video games. And it's hard to use yourself as the yardstick of other people's preferences.
I can't imagine realistic social gaming given today's technology. Relationships are complicated - much more complicated than game graphics. A system that accurately modelled human relationships would probably need to be within throwing distance of passing the Turing test.
One reason the industry keeps churning through the same ideas is because they're relatively tractable. Graphics, physics, texturing etc, are all solvable bounded problems.
It's easy to make trite multipath social games, but it's incredibly hard to make a social game with genuine depth. And realistically, if you do that you're not competing with other games, but with dating apps, job interviews, and the real social world.
Second Life was an interesting experiment. It started off as the great new hope for social gaming, and turned into a sterile strip mall and giant pimp hotel. It turns out that even if you give people free rein with their fantasies, most fantasies aren't all that original or interesting.
Lots of CRPGs understand that gamers want to explore different identities, and thus have strong character customization. But conflict in the game is often framed around violence and murder. It shouldn't surprise anyone that lots of people find violence and gore simply disturbing and don't want to engage it. In fact, that's what happened with the author's cousin and Skyrim: she was playing it obsessively until her "friend' died. What turned her off was not the limits of technology, but the game's violence.
When I read that she didn't like "Journey" because the snake could kill her, I thought back to how much I hated some of the ridiculous cheap death at the beginning of one of the first games I played, the original "King's Quest III" here http://icdn8.digitaltrends.com/image/kings-quest-iii-screens... (which I presevered through, although it seems like she would not). And it's true that many of the women I know who occasionally play games like things like "The Secret of Monkey Island", which has puzzles and RPG elements but dying is impossible. "The Sims" is another game with a large female audience that focused on building and exploring social interactions and identities. And IRL you can't actually lock your kids in a closet, drown them, or set them on fire, like you can with digital dolls.
Thinking in terms of board games, social games like Liar's Dice and Werewolf don't require good AI. Pandemic is a huge hit as a game without any social conflict at all, where the players are collaborating to solve puzzles (the game).
This actually offended me the most about Dragon Age : Inquisition - the way that every interaction with the world seemed to be 'hit it with your sword'.
Early on you find a region which contains groups of Templars battling rogue sorcerers, so I thought that you'd get some interesting interactions where you have to pick a side, or play mediator, lending your strength to one of these opposed factions. Instead we got the worst kind of videogame logic - both sides were hostile to me, permanently, with no chance of talking to either of them. Approach within a certain distance and they'll attack you until they or you are dead - the sort of mindless hostility that can only be excused in zombie games. And to top it all off, both sides kept respawning after I killed them, so their silly, pointless tussles go on indefinitely.
Eve Online is the game that no one has mentioned but that keeps coming to mind while I read this thread. It's the closest I've seen to a realistic social video game. When I saw your comment, I finally had to post something about it in this thread.
Like real life, doing anything meaningful in Eve is going to take a lot of time and planning. In some games, you can grind to max level in a matter of days or weeks. In Eve, max level is more than 15 years (roughly speaking). If you choose to focus your training on one activity, you will be weak in another until you put in the time to train it as well. Because of this, you are always behind your elders on an individual basis. This means that cooperation with other players is invaluable - no, imperative, if you want to make your mark or become effective quickly. Because of this, real social skills are incredibly useful. (Just like how, in the real world, networking is almost everything.)
Trust is the biggest currency in the game - trust in your partner not to skim from your share of the profits, trust in your CEO to recruit quality people and not traitors, trust in your fleet commander to recognize good vs suicidal engagements, and trust in your alliance leader to keep diplomatic ties strong. However, because "it's a game" and creating alts is easy (and incentivised), it's incredibly easy to trick and be tricked, and reprisals against bad actors are often very difficult to enforce.
So, there is this constant tension between the inherent insecurity of trusting anyone and the huge power available to savvy individuals who are willing and able to persuade and inspire and cajole and threaten until they are at the head of an army 18,000 accounts strong. On top of this, the free market economy means that a player is not limited to pursuing combat power, but also economic power - opening up avenues of play to people who aren't particularly interested in blowing up spaceships but who very much like to think about micro and macro economics.
You mention Second Life; I have never played it, but I imagine that it suffered because of the lack of real conflict / meaningful objectives / the lack of mechanics and/or enforcement of limiting policies designed to keep players comfortable and happy. I.e., no trolling, griefing, market manipulation, etc.
Eve Online is famous for the near-purity of its sandbox nature. It's not perfect - there are still actions that can get you banned from Eve - but it is much more permissive than any other MMO I've played or heard of. When Eve players appear in other games in organized groups (Black Desert Online, Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen - at least on the forums), chaos, forum tears and often bannings ensue. The content in Eve is extracted from other players; the NPC quests coded by the developers are the stuff of jokes.
Actions in Eve have permanence. Ships that blow up are gone, along with their cargo. There are no safe spaces. Names cannot be changed. The years-long account training process discourages constant recycling of "main" characters, so names are remembered for what they have done. A famous reputation blown by an injudicious action or an momentary lapse in opsec is forever tainted.
There are some interesting results from this stew of influences.
One such result that I'm often reminded of is that democracy isn't effective at producing a stable Eve entity. People have tried it, and the bureaucracy/middle-management leads to slow decision making, which leads to playing catch-up and eventually to member bleed and implosion. One fairly effective model is anarchy - a group of experienced members that understand each other quite well, are are all very capable on their own, and all "find content" often and make the others aware of it without asking for permission or making excuse for misplays. A couple of groups with ties to 4chan operate very much like this, unsurprisingly - including one of the...
> People willing to consume media are people that don't have or want the opportunity to be extraordinary in their lives.
That’s an interesting thought that I can’t disagree with.
Myself and many people in my circle, including clients, have had played games in the past, probably to the point of unhealthy obsession when we were kids and getting an education.
But all of us became less enchanted by the medium as we became more successful (success in terms of increasing our financial wealth, control of time and ability to experience or get what we desire in life). We just couldn’t justify the time to play the games that were coming out, which we believed were not sparking the same fire in us that games we played years ago had (possibly due to rose-tinted glasses).
According to the article I guess I now seek games with more depth. Games that can impart some useful knowledge and help me reframe things in life, like a good book can. To use BioWare as an example, I believe their older RPGs like Jade Empire did this well, that struck a balance of philosophy, problem solving and interesting narrative. But this went away when they dove more into RPGs that dived deeper into the power fantasies that most consumers want.
I wonder how many of us went the opposite direction. Loved games when I was a teen. Then college took up so much time that games fell to the wayside. And then almost the entirety of my 20s and much of my 30s was spent either working on projects I was passionate about, or with my friends and band, or on various adventures. Games took a far back seat to all of that. Something to do on one of those rare nights when nothing was planned.
And now, with the demands of family and sick loved ones, and with the added money which can build the sort of system I could have only dreamed about in my poor teens and college years, I'm home much more and games are suddenly appealing again.
Games for gamers are a known quantity. The formula for mainstream games hasn't changed for decades.
What if there's a huge untapped market for games that don't focus on war, combat, crime, apocalypse, and gore?
Personally I'm more interested in exploring than in killing enemies. Put me in a shoot-em-up and I'll turn on god mode and play through to the end to experience the scenery and locations. The aliens/enemy forces/demons/monsters are mostly just a diverting distraction.
I don't particularly want to have relationships with characters. But I do want to have novel experiences I can't have anywhere else. Mainstream games don't do that for me.
>This whole portrayal of video games (and other media) as "art" will never take off outside of technological hipster circles
Nonsense. Games that try to do more than entertain, that actually try to use the medium to express a message, much in the way an art film might, are generally well recieved by the press and gamers alike for mixing up the formula and trying new things.
For examples, look at games like Spec Ops: The Line (A vicious deconstruction of the FPS genre: do you feel like a hero yet?), Undertale, Papers Please, The Stanley Parable, and Master Reboot.
Different people like different kinds of games and gameplay experiences. But most of the video games industry is oriented around violent, twitchy games and RPGs.
I can sink hundreds of hours into Civilization, X-COM, or Minecraft—games of strategy and games of world-building—but for me computer RPGs are almost entirely inferior to tabletop RPGs, especially in the "open world" aspect. Shooters especially bore me: fast reflexes on a control pad are not something I particularly want to spend spend dozens or hundreds of hours developing. Then you see the YouTube comments of the people who deride everyone else for not sharing their commitment for some specific styles of twitchy games. Some gamers have developed a weird and toxic little cult around their lifestyle games.
I think board games have grown so much because they have been able to attract people who are interested in different paradigms of play: cooperative games, for example, because it seems like so many people hate player conflict. Competition adds a whole layer of interest to most board games IMO, but the most important thing is just for people to have fun.
Board games have really exploded with how they experiment with different concepts and mechanics over the past fifteen years, and they've been rewarded with greater and greater success.
Board game publishers actually encourage innovation from game designers (...to a certain extent. They also like safer bets when available too), much more so than video game publishers, and Kickstarter exists to fund the ideas that game publishers don't go for.
Kickstarter exists for video games too, but board games are succeeding on Kickstarter at a much higher rate than video games lately, in no small part because video games are funding development, for a game that may take a lot longer to develop and be impossible to complete with those funds. Even the darling Shovel Knight burned through all of its Kickstarter money 5 months before release and they all went broke just to get the game out the door. But board games are usually funding production of a completed design that's already priced out so they know how much it's going to cost them.
There are over a thousand new board games that came out this year at Essen alone, only one of several major board game trade shows. That's tons of opportunities for new mechanics and experiences. They're even getting deeper in their storytelling capabilities, as evidenced by the games Pandemic Legacy, Time Stories, and Above and Below.
Board games are still defining new genres even (most recently the Legacy genre which is only 5 years old, and Deckbuilders which is only 8 years old), I can't think of any new genres in video games since Grand Theft Auto 3 came out and popularized sandbox games 15 years ago. That is, unless you count 'Free 2 Play, Pay 2 Win', which is a perversion of game design dictated by market forces, not a true genre.
So I think part of the problem this designer is having is she's been too myopically limiting herself to only video games as an interactive form to draw inspiration from. Games exist in many forms. Board games in particular have a huge wealth of mechanics and ideas that video games have mostly left unexplored, and role playing/social games of late are no slouch either latel (just saw one that focuses on language and how it is formed and dies in an isolated community on Kickstarter, called Dialect).
One of the game designers who did a workshop at The MADE videogame museum in Oakland advocated board game design as an exercise in "pure" game mechanics thinking.
I feel like she just needs to find better less judgmental friends; they certainly don't sound like people I would want to associate with. They belittle her work, refuse to try things she enjoys and overall come off fairly unpleasant. New friends, real friends, are in order.
Honestly, the games I find the most engaging are simple 2D platformers and beat-em-ups. Maybe fighting games too, though I'm only interested in the single-player mode.
Playing around with some old games over the weekend and last weekend, I forgot how addictive they were.
Yesterday, I told myself "I'll play a bit of Super Mario Bros. 3 and see how far I can get on one life"... and before I knew it, I was in World 2.
The weekend before that, I played some Golden Axe, and I got a huge chunk of the way through the game before I had to turn it off to go do other things.
It's my personal opinion that 1985-1995 was the single best era for gaming, as it was dominated by addictive fast-paced games that you could just pick up and play. One of the things that turns me off about modern games is that the "just pick up and play" mentality is gone... too many unskippable cutscenes, forced tutorial levels, etc.
> things that turns me off about modern games [...] too many unskippable cutscenes, forced tutorial levels, etc.
Perhaps in the AAA space but down in the more indie spaces, you don't get those. My current set of favourite games (Rocket League, Binding of Isaac, Risk Of Rain, Rogue Legacy, Delver) certainly don't have any of those.
This article is weird. It sort of addresses the solution to it's problem while it's problem is also almost non-existant.
1 - not every medium is for everybody. Getting my friends to play videogames (or getting my few gamer friends to play niche/weird game I recommend) is something I already gave up. I don't dislike cinema, but most of the movies the are made simply don't appeal to me. There's nothing wrong with cinema. I'm just not that attracted to the medium.
2 - the author's friends' attitude to videogames. This shows lack of knowledge, lack of humility and elitism. Just because they don't know any games that "change you as a person" or cater to their "cultural preferences and interests" that doesn't mean that there isn't. People should be humble when judging other things. I don't like hip-hop. But I don't assume it is all bad or that I will dislike it all. Sturgeon's law applies both ways, and to everything.
3 - about the author's suggestions. I like the suggestions. I thought Skyrim would be a bit too heavy to a new gamer (specially to one who was really on the fence) but it worked! It showed the power transposing ourselves to a new world and live within it. And that Lidya story.. It was the best outcome it could happen. Sure, Kristina later abandoned the game. But the theme wasn't of her liking. But it showed her a glimpse of what is possible.
4 - I dislike the demonization of the bulk of the medium. Sure, there are a lot os FPSs and violence and twitch-reflex action games. We have Call of Duty as we have Katy Perry and Transformers[0]. And these get a lot of imitators and visibility and money because... there are a lot of people who like these things ans are willing to play for them. And this is OK. Niche stuff, out of the mainstream is always harder to find.
Finally 5 - The author is there and clearly knows videogames. If a friend wants to try videogames you should, like the author said, ask what they like or expect to see and direct them to a game like that. Skyrim is a good choice. Papers please is also nice. Maybe a puzzle game. Or a walking simulator to someone who just wants to experience a story in his own pace. And maybe you could, I don't know, give them Call of Duty. They might enjoy it. And they might even dislike everything. Because, as I said, not every medium is for everybody. but The demonization os the mainstream simply shows a clear lack of understanding of the market and an extremely "hipseristic" attitude.
[0] - I'm using these as an example of something low-brow, made for the masses. This is only my opinion and you are free to enjoy them and regard them in whatever way you want.
I think the author wants some validation and acknowledgement that a high-brow exists. Some of her friends thought the entire videogame industry is low-brow and the author says, quoting Tim Gunn, "this is a design failure and not a customer issue".
Well, frankly, narratively video games rarely even rise to the level of genre fiction (and the best ones stop somewhere around there) and I have a hard time taking claims about highbrow art seriously from somebody who claims that novels and cinema are now irrelevant because our lives are unpredictable.
I don't play video games, but I also don't think they're boring. I was a big gamer during my younger years - teens through university. Unfortunately this means I know the kind of time they can demand and consume, as well as the cost. Now in my 30s, I have a family, a home, and many other hobbies. I make a conscious effort to stay away from video games because I just don't have that much time I want to spend. I have fond memories of many games but I really don't miss it all that much.
These days, my infrequent gaming time doubles as friend/family time with a board game played around a table.
some games have depth and a compelling enough story to keep you wanting for more. e.g. for me that is the Mass Effect series. The graphics you could say are not that great by 2016 standards but the amount of work that went into the story and universe building for that game kept me occupied. I spent hours probably reading the codex about different species and events in the Mass Effect universe, it was similar to reading a fantasy/scifi book like Dune. It wasn't the graphics, it wasn't the amazing gameplay, it was just a good entertaining story and great universe building that made the game.
This is partly a story about getting older & wiser, and partly a story about consuming entertainment vs creating it. Games do get less fun as you grow older, and it happens a little faster if you're in the industry and start to see the big picture clearly. And consuming things is always less fun and engaging that making things. It's the same difference between buying software and writing your own.
This article resonates with me because I have nearly the same story. I used to play a lot of games, and I worked in console game development for a decade on some reasonably big titles. The game design patterns are somewhat derivative, I witnessed the echo chamber myself. But FWIW, it's very hard to push the boundaries and end up with something people want to buy. The market likes familiar (derivative), with incremental changes.
These days, I have enough other things to do that games aren't a priority and I can't get involved in most games. It even stresses me out to think about trying to finish a game. Enough of my goals and the people in my life want my time that adding a game to the list takes away from something else I care more about.
No, I'm not sure I've ever heard of it, but I'll check it out. I played thousands upon thousands of hours of Quake 3 back in the day. Possibly my favorite game recently was FEZ. Journey, mentioned in the article, was beautiful. These days I'm as much a sucker for online Boggle or Sudoku as any console game.
FYI, Dwarf Fortress is an ASCII-only roguelike, and the learning curve is as steep as the graphics are primitive. But the emergent gameplay is amazing.
If the inconsistent UI or graphics give you pause, I'd suggest taking a look at Rimworld, currently in Early Access on Steam (or available directly from the developer's site). It has some of the deep qualities of DF but is a bit more forgiving.
Primitive graphics are no barrier at all. I am a graphics programmer and graphics lover through and through. But I can say with some confidence that graphics only matter sometimes, and even then are only a part of what makes any game good.
I saw a great talk at GDC many years ago that had a study of what makes good games good and "realistic", and graphics was 7th or 8th on the list. The number one item on the list was how well players understood their own identity in the game, whether they felt like they fit in and knew what to do. Such an interesting and important and IMO underrated piece of gaming psychology.
Rimworld has chewed up hundreds of hours of my time. I frequently play it for 10 hours at a stretch - when I finally got frustrated with that sadistic RNG, I threw in a mod ("The Martian"). So many productive hours lost because I can't stop managing the little sods...
DF isn't a rogulike. It has a roguelike in it, though.
DF is (primarily) a fortress management game, akin to something like SimCity. But with vastly more depth.
The first time you play DF, the game will generate a world. It will attempt realistic simulations of a variety of properties to try to create realistic landmasses, and randomly generate wars between random civilizations, create random historical figures, and generally wreak havoc on your CPU.
Then you embark with a party of Dwarfs (yes, dwarfs), and journey into the wilderness to start a new colony. Each of your dwarfs has specialties, a personality, opinions, and an incredibly complex body model, keeping track of everything from broken bones to strained tendons (I'm not exaggerating). But it goes further because everything else in the game is just as elaborately simulated, down to waterflow, the densities of various woods.
There is no win condition: Your fortress will collapse. The unofficial motto of the game is "losing is fun"
The game is still in alpha (0.42, meaning it's 42% feature complete), it's programmed by one guy, and the eventual goal is to simulate existance (or at least, the narratively interesting parts), and allow people to create their own stories. At least, better than it already is.
Well, it's Unicode actually — displayed by OpenGL! — and not really a roguelike (although IIRC there is a roguelike adventure mode). It's incredibly difficult not so much due to the graphics but rather to the fantastically complex world, and also the control interface, which is … baroque.
Imagine a game, where you could re-enact decisive moments of your live, and watch other people react and get through those moments.
Of course, you would need good human/AI-Actors for this..
Skyrim might be a poor choice for people of those interests, but what about games like the Sims? Is it true that the video game industry has not catered to audiences like the author's friends, or has it actually catered to them all along--but the the author didn't notice because she was too busy being involved in her own demographic (which, to be fair, has more than enough material to keep any person busy in such a way).
I really appreciated the tone and themes of growth she expressed in the article. But she seems to currently have a state of mind of "if I can't think of an example, it must not exist", and not one of "if I can't think of an example, I must not have encountered one yet". In terms of understanding and perspective, you can tell she came a long way; but she still has a ways to go, too.
Nice polemic piece. Only goes to show that people don't know what huge variety of game experiences there are out there.
And also, we need to move away from the idea that some games or genres are objectively better or more interesting than others. It's all relative to the audience - some people have a stronger reaction to some experiences than to others, and will seek out different things.
Nick Yee has been doing excellent, data driven research on the interaction between player preferences, game types, and personality types - there's some intro material from his gdc talk on their web site: http://quanticfoundry.com/gdc/
It's worth calling out - the author is at least partially using this piece to highlight the value of their own new game development studio. This colors a lot of the piece in a very different light.
> At my studio we are making games with people who don't like video games because we want to break out of established paradigms.
There are a lot of games out there, more than enough to fill any niche you could possibly want to fill. The trick is that they aren't all made by Bethesda, Activision, or EA. If you really want to get your friends interested in videogames, listen to their interests (something that the OP didn't seem to do, for all that they're starting their own studio) and point them at games that cater to their interests, not your own.
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I am a competitive person. I rather play against a human being and see how I can improve then get stuck into a math/algorithm battle vs programmers. Solitaire is fine for a bit but all single player games feel like solitaire due to my desire to compete against others and myself.
Just to add: I prefer single player games. Multiplayer is a commitment. And I've been there. I put thousands of hours into Everquest and I've also put over a thousand hours into Fallout: Las Vegas. I've completed Doom. I was Elite in Elite. Finished Gran Torismo, Burnout 1 & 2. The Getaway - all great single player experiences. More recently the F.E.A.R series back to back.
You can't lump single player games into a single experience.
Single player = figure out the math/winning algorithm
Multiplayer = Competition. Playing against humans with the same rules. I am to old for basketball now my competition juices get to flow in less then 3 minutes. I jump into a game play for 5 to 60 minutes and then I can just walk away.
This is failed design. I eventually gave up on Call of Duty because while the control and bite-sized (multiplayer) games were great, there were such fundamental flaws in skill matching and team-work that it was un-enjoyable once the novelty was gone.
I compare this to Overwatch and hope games will continue in this direction. Matchmaking is much more balanced and team-work is far more important. It still has a long way to go, especially in rooting out toxic players and making it easier to spontaneously group with players you like -- but its an improvement and hopefully a trend that will continue.
I think it breaks down into a few categories;
1. Excellent controls. Probably the tightest and least obtrusive controls I've used in a long time.
2. Great characters. While the story itself isn't that great (because it's unfinished), the characters really drive the plot.
3. Amazing ambiance. I really felt that I was in Afghanistan and there were Russians I was trying to avoid. I eavesdrop on their conversations, hearing them yelling orders to each other, and even see them adapting to my tactics between missions.
What makes this game a great single player campaign is ... Weight. Everything has consequences because you care about the characters. Most AAA games don't have characters anyone remembers or cares about.
Because of the objectives, it is possible to contribute even if you aren't getting tons of kills and the game as a whole felt much more balanced than CoD. Even if the other players are much better, you can still get a few kills in and help your team.
In short: Generic modern military shooter #123781 that completely misses the point of idiosyncrasies of the one thing that somewhat sets it apart from the rest of the bunch: The fact it is set in WW1. Look at Medal of Honor (well, it's WW2 and therefore somewhat of a Nazi popper, but what do you expect) for a decent WW shooter campaign; I actually don't recall any significant WW1 shooter at the moment...
And as someone who is decently competent in competitive shooters (~2000 hours of Counter-Strike Source): Yeah, competition can be fierce even on "normal servers", but if you can keep up you'll get rewarded for it with a mixture of familiarity and challenging gameplay. And playing in "rough environments" has battle-hardened me I suppose. Dieing 10 times to superior opponents in a row barely moves me at all anymore, so if you don't get discouraged too quickly you may well find your frustration will wane with time.
Battlerite = 5 minute games
Paladin = 12 minutes at most
The whole market is moving to shorter games for exactly the same reason.
She does make it clear that she dislikes the AAA fps blockbuster,but I personally love them.
I love games, and I was expecting another article bashing video games in their current state, and that isn't what was written here.
The entire POV for the article is from a traditional video gamer (you know, people who like games) trying to understand her friends who are not appealed to by what she considers traditional video games, and how understanding your audience is key to unlocking the market.
What if you could get everyone who isnt interested in traditional games to understand what they are all about, the entire Skyrim subplot in the article is a person who loves video games trying to share her love.
I really hate to say this, but you clearly did not read the article.
> We want games that aren't gritty, toxic pseudo-realistic pseudo-masculine nonsense nor frustrating time wasters that leave you feeling dead inside.
Right at the conclusion. And don't forget the necessary reference to games being made for white males by white males. I don't think she hates games like gp, otherwise she wouldn't have worked in the industry for so long, but clearly she isn't seeing the forest for the cheap, easy to market and produce rehash trees.
The context is clearly "Hey, I really like video games but people like me clearly dont, why is that?"
>I've devoted my life-no exaggeration-to video games for 14 years, working on titles such as Company of Heroes, a few Assassin's Creeds, and Child of Light.
Titles are not articles.
I am ready for video games with these beautiful moments - and please keep them short! I don't want to spend hours and hours on a game anymore, at least not traditional ones - but I have no idea where to find them.
I do remember staring at the in-game sunset as it cast shadows across the open prairie and thinking, "Wow."
Game progress of story-heavy offline games should be unlockable at will without importing save games. Or there should be some kind of an AI play mode, where you only take over that autopilot if you seem interested or just like to watch.
For most linear games with an actual story a youtube replay, including fast forwards, will be as good as the thing itself. This might as well explain a part of the let's play success.
Most games seem to stick to some simple linear variation of a difficulty model: Easy, Medium, Hard, ... Why aren't there more options? Why aren't there more custom options? For many games, why is "easy" have to be so "hard" as a baseline. If I want to play a game as a 100% power trip, why not let me?
Buy gamess from small studios, made by a few people or even one guy, usually a lot of them are in Steam Early Access (yes, it is risky, some of them get abandoned or just never improve much)
For me this is like a reneissance in gaming. Have a look at Factorio, Starbound, Rimworld, Banished, Pillars of Eternity, SotS:The Pit, ARK:Survival Evolved, 7 Days to Die, Hearthlands. Some of those have multiplayer and are something else completely to play with a few friends
A whole lot of people don't even know there is entire world besides CoD or 50th fucking Asassins Creed...
I also play Dota 2 on and off, since multiplayer interactions in it are so intense and so unpredictable
Yep, that's a good rule to live by. There are a lot of great games out there if you put in the effort to look into them (and know where to look)
I think movies have this same problem. Your weekly superhero blockbuster's are fun, they definitely aren't everyone's cup of tea. But if you weren't ever really into movies, and started jumping in, you'd think that's all there was.
It's a shame to see how AAA companies have butchered the Dota-like genre. There's Valve's Dota 2 which is the shining example of what the genre should be and then there's all these garbage rehashes out there that have just tried to dumb down the game or introduce some kind of gimmick or cliche.
AAA games are just a race to the bottom in terms of design. They just try to appeal to the lowest common denominator and games get more shallow and casual with each iteration.
Look at the difference between Starcraft Broodwar and Starcraft 2, Diablo 2 and Diablo 3, Dota and every clone like LoL and Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone, Overwatch. All of the sequels and successors are more shallow and casual than what came before. And the novelties these games introduce are better characterized as gimmicks to hook casual players. Why make a game that caters to a hardcore audience? That's just limiting your playerbase and limiting your potential profit.
I have a sniper that never hits anything, ever, and I've started having little pep talk with her before each mission, trying to get her to buck her game up and be a useful member of the team.
Shooting aliens in the head isn't the fun bit. Caring for my little gang of incompetents and nursing them through each mission is the fun bit.
Sony's user experience in the store just really is horrible. It has gotten better, but its been how many years now?
Most titles don't have any screenshots or trailers or previews of any kind.
Most payment methods simply don't work.
A paypal account where you want to choose a payment source? TOUGH LUCK
A mobile payment from your telephone? NOT ON YOUR PROVIDER
Okay, fine don't take my money. I got a credit card to work once though, I saved that one.
There are frequently scripted introductory sequences to familiarize you with the mechanics and attempt to hook you with a story, but they will consume your time but once, and can provide you with hundreds of hours of entertainment and escape thereafter.
Of course, if driving is your thing, there are a ton of racing simulators out there, from F1 to rally cars.
Other categories of nonviolent or non-FPS games would be puzzle games like Tetris or Candy Crush. Also, video games can reproduce or make single-player versions of the classic board, card, and dice games like chess or yahtzee.
is GTA, really.
Granted, player agency in Skyrim is pushed way down compared to earlier TES titles but you can still affect the game world by choosing quests, choosing sides, Hell, Morrowind allowed you to kill a main questline quest-giver, ruin the prophecy, keep playing, and still fulfill the main storyline.
In the end, playing games labeled with either "theme park" or "sandbox" doesn't change the fact that you are still playing within the confines of someone else's world; I can't create a functional X-Wing in Minecraft and fly to Tattoine, no matter what blocks I put together.
The parent was enjoying driving a car around through a fictional (and populated) setting, so pointing them towards a "build your own adventure" game is probably not going to tickle their fancy nearly as much.
This is where table-top role-playing games really shine. You can totally do that in, say, GURPS (among a great many other games, a tiny fraction of which I discuss below).
N.B. Forgive me if I'm preaching to the choir, or if you're simply not interested. It's currently NaGaDeMon (National Game Design Month), and I've been swimming in TTRPGs lately, spending nearly all of my free time researching, playing, philosophizing, and designing a TTRPG of my own for the past week... I've really got to hand it to my anti-depressants, as this time last year I couldn't find the passion nor the energy to do this :)
Perhaps GURPS is too focused on realism for your tastes. How about Robin Laws's HeroQuest? where the probability of success doesn't depend on an action's difficulty in the "real world", but rather on which results produce the most cinematic and exciting stories? Or Fate [Core]? which emphasizes characters being larger-than-life and doing larger-than-life things in larger-than-life situations? These sorts of "narrativist" games are pretty popular lately, and not without good reason.
And then there's Apocalypse World, which focuses more on characters: the interactions between characters, their histories together, co-operation as well as conflict. Experience points are awarded for developing your relationship(s) with the other characters, rather than for slaying foul demons or hoarding precious loot. It's a game where the players are expected to be involved as much as the the gamesmaster in creating the game world and driving the narrative. Its mechanics reflect that, making the game difficult for a gamesmaster to railroad. As an added bonus (imho), the book itself is written in a very casual, conversational, vernacular style, which I find refreshing compared to the too-often sterile, textbookish style of these rulebooks. There are quite a few other games that come from the same school of design as AW, as well has plenty of third-party "rules hacks" — adaptations of the core system to other settings and genres, sometimes with very different goals than AW's, other times with surprisingly similar ones.
That's not to deride demon-slaying or loot-hoarding, though! The "Old School Renaissance" is now! Tons of games, ranging from free to cheap to pricey, all attempting to emulate that old-school early-to-mid-80s (sometimes even up to the mid-90s, by some accounts) TTRPG feel. If that's your bag, [Revised] Mazes & Minotaurs is quite well-designed (and free!), whereas something like Labyrinth Lord or Lamentations of the Flame Princess prefers to mimic old-school Dungeons & Dragons, complete with its quirks, much more closely. Then there's Monsters & Magic, somewhat unique amongst the OSR games, in that it's very much a new-school game that nevertheless is readily compatible with all (yes, all) of those old fantasy splatbooks from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, with any necessary conversion happening on the fly. Oh! and Tunnels & Trolls recently had an 8th edition published through Kickstarter, if you want to play something actually old-school ;)
Or how about a game where the rules themselves are as customizable as the fictional universes they power? Something like Fudge (free), or even Basic Role-Playing? Games which are as much toolkits or frameworks for creating a game of your own as they are games in and of themselves? (Fate Core (also free) leans a bit in this direction, too, though it's noticeably less flexible than Fudge in many ways, despite being similarly modular).
Maybe something more middle-of-the-road is more your style, and games like True20 and its successor Dragon Age/Fantasy...
Not very demanding on time, and it's not about killing zombies.
Very story oriented, and you get attached to the characters in the game.
I myself abandoned games over a decade ago - they just required too much from me. Only recently I decided to check some games out from the library. Not sure why I picked this one to play and was very pleasantly surprised.
I've got nothing against combat elements of games, but if it falls into endless repetition and involves lots of grinding, etc, to advance, then it just becomes work, not fun.
Want to drive around town obeying the laws and enjoy the sites? Do that.
Want to partake in multiple instances of non-violent side missions such as racing, skydiving, and more? Do that.
Want to stand at the boardwalk on the beach and watch people walk by while enjoying the setting sun? Do that.
Want to take flying lessons? Do that.
How about some tennis or golf? Do that.
At one point in the game you can even do yoga for crap's sake. There are actually several examples of exploration-type tasks that you seem to be interested in as well. There's a great deal more to GTA5 than the violence you hear about from people, that only focus on that one topic, that have a narrative and rhetoric to push on people for their own agendas.
Still have negative opinions towards GTA5 because of moral reasons? That's cool too. But consider you may be missing out on tons of stuff you would actually enjoy because you might dismiss it immediately for reasons.
When I got bored with GTA5's regular mission based mechanics, had finished all the missions, I spent just as much time getting two characters in a car and driving back and forth as fast as possible between the furthest auto body repair shops on the map just to see how long I could last before the car blew up.
From "My 4-Year-Old son plays Grand Theft Auto":
At this point my son was familiar with the game’s mechanics and hopped into the ambulance. As he put the crime fighting behind him, he wondered out loud if it were possible to take people to the hospital. I instructed him to press R3, and he was off to save a few lives. He was having a blast racing from point to point, picking up people in need, and then speeding off to Las Venturas Hospital. During one of his life-saving adventures, he passed a fire house with a big, red, shiny fire truck parked out front. He didn’t want to let his passengers down, so he took them to the hospital and then asked if I could guide him back to the fire truck.
http://venturebeat.com/community/2010/06/05/my-four-year-old...
No, you literally can't. You have to kill people en masse from the very start of the game. And, if you want to progress far enough to unlock the various features of the game, you have to do downright reprehensible things.
I've played, and enjoyed most of, GTA5 (though I think the developers, at this point, should fuck off with the faux-satire, they lost the plot a long time ago), but I understand why other people don't.
Once you have reached that point, you can do pretty much anything you want. Yes, I understand you have to do bad things to get to that point. That's why I agreed with the comment about if you still have moral objections to the game, then that's cool. I personally would prefer they allow you those options from the start, but I can understand why they do not for gameplay purposes.
You sound like you'd love the mostly open-world, graphic-centric (MMO)RPG genre! Something like Black Desert Online or FF14 Online. Where you can optionally focus on the story here or there and are mostly free to explore the world (although areas that outlevel you may be a bit dangerous...)
Most of the time, games are structured by people whose viewpoint and incentives are radically different from the players. In the short term, the industry doesn't "care" if you play because you're bored and there's no real choice (for AAA levels of production effort) and because that's what your friends are doing, and there's a little variable schedule of reward that's gotten its hooks into you.
The most memorable times I had in Eve Online were entirely through emergent gameplay. I and my fellow alliance players in 0.0 security space couldn't give a rat's ass about anything the content team generated -- except as a source of resources in our own player-generated drama of building a player owned station. The emergent stuff is what really engages the mind. That's the real "play" that's going on in games -- not the publishing company's interest in keeping us paying a subscription. That stuff was 100X more engaging than anything some content team could dream up.
I find there's a whole subset of gamers today who remind me of the college students who would come up to you at the beginning of a course, and ask if you'd play their "college game" with them -- You tell them exactly what to spit back out during exams, they memorize that list, they get their grades, they satisfy their requirement, and no one has to actually care or be engaged or actually learn anything. Those students remind me of a lot of gamers. It's not about finding fun, genuinely engaging, unexpected gameplay. It's about getting expectations met, and getting the stuff they're entitled to.
I got fed up, and I've decided to do something about it. I'm self-funding and making my own MMO, and I'm going to do my best to have it be about emergent play. I'm very far from being able to tackle those issues, but I have a server cluster that can spawn any of the 2^87 star systems, and support 70 players in the same multiplayer battle. All but one of those 2^87 star systems are identical at this point, however. But that's the next thing on my list. No RPG progression yet, but we'll get there. I want to make an MMO that's specifically built for smart people, where no one gets nerfed, no one grinds, and devs never give any sympathy to forum whiners.
http://www.emergencevector.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3DPalL7p5w&list=PLnAL8xf0QQ...
(I'm planning a game that you'd have to spend hours and hours on, overall, but I'm going to try and structure it so you can play in half-hour, hour, or two hour sessions.)
Damn I want my holo-deck. What's taking so long?
I only have Vice City, nowhere near as visually spectacular, but I get myself a car and just drive around with the radio on. It's the same for Assassin's Creed through to IV, I often just go for a walk and look at the scenery, immerse myself in a time and place that's long gone. Often enough, the missions get in the way.
I used to clock hundreds of hours on Flight Sim 98, not necessarily learning how to fly (though that was fun too) but going to various cities in Flight Sim, checking them out in Encarta and doubling back to Flight Sim again.
Now that I'm older and financially capable of visiting these places, its pretty surreal. I hope the new AR/VR movement brings about these kind of experiences.
But try playing it as a child or a woman marginally interested in a gaming experience and you get unnecessary swearing and tropes from a man's perspective.
Oh well. I wish there was possibility for a mode. Not one you are forced to select, but one based on a profile, more akin to the predictive one advertisers already have on you.
Dare.
You think your rebuttals are original but they are just rehashing the same arguments from the past 30 years and completely unproductive. Assume I already know the counterpoints, you went for the lowest hanging fruit of them all.
Firewatch is an interesting one to call out, much like Journey as the author imagined, because those games try to be more interesting. They were created by artists and gamers tired of AAA titles and tropes. But they continue to fail to interest this other broad audience that is repulsed by the idea of games, but as the author realized, are actually entertained by immersive experiences.
Sounds like you would enjoy Euro Truck Simulator 2 or American Truck Simulator. Yes you still have a mission (taking a trailer from point A to point B) but you can choose from a long list of "jobs" that will take you to many different cities, and you even have the option to free roam.
If you are interested in the genre, you can follow Squirrel on Youtube, I especially like his "trucking diaries" but there are flight sim videos as well: https://www.youtube.com/user/DaSquirrelsNuts
Some Swede actually did this, and made a couple Billion.
Just because it doesn't have a "set in stone" story, that doen's mean that there isn't one. I've seen stories unfold in The Sims that would put to shame most books and movies.
There's a lot of lifestyle gamers who get angry if games are 'too short'.
Have you looked at Terraria? Also, you mentioned Freespace 2. I'm doing a self-funded project where I'm building an MMO space game aimed at deeply emergent gameplay.
http://www.emergencevector.com
Entry to market for garage devs with a quality title is far easier today than 20 years ago.
It's important to be clear whether one is describing gaming as a whole, or "mainstream" gaming. Many criticisms of mainstream gaming don't apply to "gaming" as a whole, which includes things like a visual novel community, hidden object games, and the "walking simulators" that have almost no presence in the mainstream but definitely exist. They have almost no discoverability, being buried under games with advertising budgets an order of magnitude larger than what those games will make in revenue (let alone profit), but they exist.
So when you say something like "we need to step out of what we consider games and try to think of a different audience who wants a new kind of experience with attributes, such as depth or relatability", it's easy for those who already have to perceive that as a bit of an insult. "We" may not be as encompassing as you or the original author think it is, and some people may resent being categorized into that "we".
I don't know about "almost all", but even if 90 percent of games indeed fit that description, the remaining 10 percent would take 100 lifetimes to consume. Really--if all you bought were the bi-weekly dollar bargains on humble bundle, you'd have all the gaming variety you could have time for. I suspect most of our complaining is for the sake of complaining.
But I think it's very important to acknowledge that these "problems" with games are not born out of laziness, lack of creativity, or an inability to see outside the cultural in-group. Games boil everything down to easily countable abstractions, because games are, at their heart, nothing but systems of rules. Your health meter is an abstracted version of your physical well-being. Objectives are abstracted goal setting and cause-and-effect. Even if the game doesn't show you these numbers, it is still using them under the hood. What's the alternative? A deep, nuanced simulation? That'd be great, but it's well beyond the scope and means of the vast majority of developers.
Why do so many games include death? Because it's the only universally accepted fail state. It is simply impossible for 99% of games to provide anything more meaningful than that, because doing so involves exponentially more complexity, storytelling, and asset development. The best most can do is just cover the death up with new coat of paint (a la Braid).
Why have a fail state at all? Because the interactive nature of the medium loses a lot of its weight when your choices/actions don't seem to matter, and simulating anything other than simple failure is, once again, exponentially more difficult and expensive.
It is tragic that there is a certain vocal group that rejects alternative types of games like Dear Esther. I won't apologize for them. However, the games that are "mainstream"—and the games that are not—are not selected by some game industry cabal. The easily consumed, easily understood games sell so much more than the niche stuff precisely because more people are interested in that kind of thing.
Although the point of the article is that we need to think of different audiences (which is hard to disagree with), my main takeaway was that society is full of judgmental elitists who love to denigrate things they don't understand. In particular, the author's cousin seems like a very unpleasant person. Although the story of her encounter with Lydia is superficially touching, it's hardly a revelation, and we've all heard these stories before: friend/relative hates video games, finally plays one, is brought to emotional tears, yadda yadda. Finding a good game is roughly as difficult as finding a good book; the culture is not to blame for people's ignorance.
(As an aside, the true tragedy is that the cousin's experience had a lot more to do with her ignorance than with Skyrim its. Avoiding video games for your entire life practically guarantees that you'll be blown away the first time you find one you like, because the game is still "magic" to you. The magic wears off very quickly, however, and after that the meaningful experiences are much more rare. If you continue playing games, you find yourself wanting more than just some scripted dialogue, and that's why games so frequently feature the challenges and spectacles that the author says turn the non-gamers away.)
I would say the more likely issue is discovery.
Of course, the piece also reads as an advertisement for their new gaming studio the OP is building, so I think that figured into the narrative as well.
The problem I saw as I read was that those games don't get publicized. Shooters and RPGs are a big public entry point, while great oddities like Papers Please are mostly advertised in-market. If you don't open Steam or read gaming sites or talk games with friends, you'll never hear about them. It's a real shame, because there are people who would love these games but can't get there through the traditional channels.
The other claim, which was stated in the article, is that there's a shortage of these games. That the industry is uncreative and demographically challenged, and so it doesn't make these things. I'd love to see more of them, certainly, but it's hard to see how that will bring in non-gamers who aren't learning about what already exists.
So I think it was not just implied but stated. It felt like an inconsistency at the heart of the piece, where we got two disjoint stories; one about making unusual games, and one about publicizing them.
But I recently started to play again after years of no touching one. I weirdly enough I love it again. I can play solo games, enjoy them and finish them. I can play online games and enjoy the competition.
I think a lot has to do with how people cannot focus anymore on anything more than 10 minutes. I used to be like that. Checking phone notification, look at reddit every 5 minutes, etc. I worked on it for a long time. Stop running after the quick gratifications and enjoy the long term. And now I am back to being a gamer :)
I then ordered a ps4 and I am catching up on everything I missed! ;)
But in the same way that I seek out 'old movies' carefully, I'm very selective in my gaming choices. Currently I'm working my way through Red Dead Redemption and the Avernum series, but a large amount of games from the Xbox 360 area don't appeal to me at all anymore, for example.
I spent hours playing N v1.4 in grade school, and the update, v2.0 is free online [0]. There is also a more reworked version, N++, on Steam that I can't vouch for but is probably good. There is also Dustforce [1], which has some very unique mechanics and is on Steam. Super Meat Boy [2] was inspired in part by N and got a lot of press. It has the same fundamental gameplay that N does (everything kills you, run and wall jump with physics) but not written with Flash and with some bells and whistles (I still like N and its physics better).
Also in the bucket of skill-based, storyless games is Devil Daggers [3], though it is first person, not a platformer. Some people love it, some hate it. I found it very compelling.
[0] http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/
[1] http://dustforce.com/videos
[2] http://supermeatboy.com/
[3] http://devildaggers.com/about
You have to throw out a lot of evidence to come to the conclusion that video gaming is even remotely the exclusive domain of "white males".
I'd submit that rather than building games based on your political conception of what other people might want, you'd be far better off bringing in the non-gamers into the design process directly. Or even just letting other groups of people build the types of games they like instead of taking it upon yourself to build the games that somebody else might like, which is already sort of, shall I say, culturally imperialistic? They're doing it already, after all. I know; I've played some of them, and enjoyed them, and they didn't need permission, help, or angst from the "white males" to do it.
The problem may not be "the industry", so much as a game player who doesn't realize that even within the context of gaming as a whole, they are less widely-experienced than they think. If I were to try to entice my wife back into gaming, who plays Mario Kart with the family and a mean Dr. Mario, "Skyrim" would not even make my top 50 suggestions.
What she really is looking for is games for what she feels is an under-served demographic: The kind of person who lives in "a state of constant shock, of constant stimulation" like her friends do. Her friends just happen to not be white males, so she latched on to that.
Out of interest, what would such a game look like, to compete with such a state? Farmville? Candy Crush?
But the author's friend, in addition to being overwhelmed with constant shock and stimulation, is also a bit of a snob, so she won't play those low-brow games. I don't know what high-brow relaxing games are like. Maybe Papers, Please and Dear Esther?
I think this hints at a big part of the problem. When we frame something as a game, we tend to evoke the concepts of winning and losing. The most brutal and obvious (lazy?) way of implementing that is to turn it into "kill or be killed". And that brutal, obvious, violent metaphor underpins the vast majority of the mainstream game industry. That's why something like Undertale is seen as fresh and subversive. That's probably even a big part of why Tetris sold so many Game Boys. But too many of us can't or won't see it. The author is probably right: those of us who have been immersed in this culture for 20+ years are like fish who too easily forget that not everyone likes to get wet.
Games can be so much more than mainstream gaming has allowed them to become.
Besides, sometimes you just want to shoot sombody with an absurd weapon.
It's (relatively) much easier to find an audience for a film or book that is focused on dialogue, social interactions, and whatnot, than it is to do so for a game. I applaud efforts in this area, but I can see how it's easier to go for kill/win/compete style games.
I used to be into RPGs, but they just take too much time now. The things that give them depth for one player, makes them impossible for me to play in short 30 minute chunks.
For instance, the biggest blockbuster movies usually contain unrealistic scenarios of violence and heroism. The biggest romance movies are usually unrealistic. The most popular music is usually describing a hypothetical situation that people feel drawn to.
I think that's responsible for the trends we've seen in graphics, 3d, virtual reality. People willing to consume media are people that don't have or want the opportunity to be extraordinary in their lives. The more realistic graphics become, the more they feel that their experiences in media are real experiences.
So my point is basically that games exist not just for the novelty of playing a game, but also to let people live their fantasies, and some fantasies are less realistic than others, and therefore will be better represented in games. Anyone can have a relationship with another person. You don't need Lydia in Skyrim for that, and likely if you try it in real life, it'll be much more rewarding than in a video game. If you try gutting someone with a sword in real life, you'll go to jail.
This whole portrayal of video games (and other media) as "art" will never take off outside of technological hipster circles, for the same reason most people don't spend hours in art museums ever day. They're not interested in media for its own sake as artistic, they're interested in the proxy experiences that it offers, that people can't get elsewhere.
It's a fantasy life because it is not actually reality! I always wondered why people play Guitar Hero when they could just practice the guitar instead. But playing the guitar is hard and takes a lot of work, a huge investment of time. Social relationships are hard, too, and if you screw them up it can wreck your life. Establishing a social identity takes a lot of care. Who wouldn't want a fantasy social life to experiment with different identities and kinds of relationships?
My point is that different people will enjoy different kinds of games, which is fine, and should be fun. This was an article about why the author's friends didn't enjoy many video games. And it's hard to use yourself as the yardstick of other people's preferences.
One reason the industry keeps churning through the same ideas is because they're relatively tractable. Graphics, physics, texturing etc, are all solvable bounded problems.
It's easy to make trite multipath social games, but it's incredibly hard to make a social game with genuine depth. And realistically, if you do that you're not competing with other games, but with dating apps, job interviews, and the real social world.
Second Life was an interesting experiment. It started off as the great new hope for social gaming, and turned into a sterile strip mall and giant pimp hotel. It turns out that even if you give people free rein with their fantasies, most fantasies aren't all that original or interesting.
When I read that she didn't like "Journey" because the snake could kill her, I thought back to how much I hated some of the ridiculous cheap death at the beginning of one of the first games I played, the original "King's Quest III" here http://icdn8.digitaltrends.com/image/kings-quest-iii-screens... (which I presevered through, although it seems like she would not). And it's true that many of the women I know who occasionally play games like things like "The Secret of Monkey Island", which has puzzles and RPG elements but dying is impossible. "The Sims" is another game with a large female audience that focused on building and exploring social interactions and identities. And IRL you can't actually lock your kids in a closet, drown them, or set them on fire, like you can with digital dolls.
Thinking in terms of board games, social games like Liar's Dice and Werewolf don't require good AI. Pandemic is a huge hit as a game without any social conflict at all, where the players are collaborating to solve puzzles (the game).
Early on you find a region which contains groups of Templars battling rogue sorcerers, so I thought that you'd get some interesting interactions where you have to pick a side, or play mediator, lending your strength to one of these opposed factions. Instead we got the worst kind of videogame logic - both sides were hostile to me, permanently, with no chance of talking to either of them. Approach within a certain distance and they'll attack you until they or you are dead - the sort of mindless hostility that can only be excused in zombie games. And to top it all off, both sides kept respawning after I killed them, so their silly, pointless tussles go on indefinitely.
Like real life, doing anything meaningful in Eve is going to take a lot of time and planning. In some games, you can grind to max level in a matter of days or weeks. In Eve, max level is more than 15 years (roughly speaking). If you choose to focus your training on one activity, you will be weak in another until you put in the time to train it as well. Because of this, you are always behind your elders on an individual basis. This means that cooperation with other players is invaluable - no, imperative, if you want to make your mark or become effective quickly. Because of this, real social skills are incredibly useful. (Just like how, in the real world, networking is almost everything.)
Trust is the biggest currency in the game - trust in your partner not to skim from your share of the profits, trust in your CEO to recruit quality people and not traitors, trust in your fleet commander to recognize good vs suicidal engagements, and trust in your alliance leader to keep diplomatic ties strong. However, because "it's a game" and creating alts is easy (and incentivised), it's incredibly easy to trick and be tricked, and reprisals against bad actors are often very difficult to enforce.
So, there is this constant tension between the inherent insecurity of trusting anyone and the huge power available to savvy individuals who are willing and able to persuade and inspire and cajole and threaten until they are at the head of an army 18,000 accounts strong. On top of this, the free market economy means that a player is not limited to pursuing combat power, but also economic power - opening up avenues of play to people who aren't particularly interested in blowing up spaceships but who very much like to think about micro and macro economics.
You mention Second Life; I have never played it, but I imagine that it suffered because of the lack of real conflict / meaningful objectives / the lack of mechanics and/or enforcement of limiting policies designed to keep players comfortable and happy. I.e., no trolling, griefing, market manipulation, etc.
Eve Online is famous for the near-purity of its sandbox nature. It's not perfect - there are still actions that can get you banned from Eve - but it is much more permissive than any other MMO I've played or heard of. When Eve players appear in other games in organized groups (Black Desert Online, Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen - at least on the forums), chaos, forum tears and often bannings ensue. The content in Eve is extracted from other players; the NPC quests coded by the developers are the stuff of jokes.
Actions in Eve have permanence. Ships that blow up are gone, along with their cargo. There are no safe spaces. Names cannot be changed. The years-long account training process discourages constant recycling of "main" characters, so names are remembered for what they have done. A famous reputation blown by an injudicious action or an momentary lapse in opsec is forever tainted.
There are some interesting results from this stew of influences.
One such result that I'm often reminded of is that democracy isn't effective at producing a stable Eve entity. People have tried it, and the bureaucracy/middle-management leads to slow decision making, which leads to playing catch-up and eventually to member bleed and implosion. One fairly effective model is anarchy - a group of experienced members that understand each other quite well, are are all very capable on their own, and all "find content" often and make the others aware of it without asking for permission or making excuse for misplays. A couple of groups with ties to 4chan operate very much like this, unsurprisingly - including one of the...
That’s an interesting thought that I can’t disagree with.
Myself and many people in my circle, including clients, have had played games in the past, probably to the point of unhealthy obsession when we were kids and getting an education.
But all of us became less enchanted by the medium as we became more successful (success in terms of increasing our financial wealth, control of time and ability to experience or get what we desire in life). We just couldn’t justify the time to play the games that were coming out, which we believed were not sparking the same fire in us that games we played years ago had (possibly due to rose-tinted glasses).
According to the article I guess I now seek games with more depth. Games that can impart some useful knowledge and help me reframe things in life, like a good book can. To use BioWare as an example, I believe their older RPGs like Jade Empire did this well, that struck a balance of philosophy, problem solving and interesting narrative. But this went away when they dove more into RPGs that dived deeper into the power fantasies that most consumers want.
And now, with the demands of family and sick loved ones, and with the added money which can build the sort of system I could have only dreamed about in my poor teens and college years, I'm home much more and games are suddenly appealing again.
What if there's a huge untapped market for games that don't focus on war, combat, crime, apocalypse, and gore?
Personally I'm more interested in exploring than in killing enemies. Put me in a shoot-em-up and I'll turn on god mode and play through to the end to experience the scenery and locations. The aliens/enemy forces/demons/monsters are mostly just a diverting distraction.
I don't particularly want to have relationships with characters. But I do want to have novel experiences I can't have anywhere else. Mainstream games don't do that for me.
Nonsense. Games that try to do more than entertain, that actually try to use the medium to express a message, much in the way an art film might, are generally well recieved by the press and gamers alike for mixing up the formula and trying new things.
For examples, look at games like Spec Ops: The Line (A vicious deconstruction of the FPS genre: do you feel like a hero yet?), Undertale, Papers Please, The Stanley Parable, and Master Reboot.
Do you feel like a hero yet?
I can sink hundreds of hours into Civilization, X-COM, or Minecraft—games of strategy and games of world-building—but for me computer RPGs are almost entirely inferior to tabletop RPGs, especially in the "open world" aspect. Shooters especially bore me: fast reflexes on a control pad are not something I particularly want to spend spend dozens or hundreds of hours developing. Then you see the YouTube comments of the people who deride everyone else for not sharing their commitment for some specific styles of twitchy games. Some gamers have developed a weird and toxic little cult around their lifestyle games.
I think board games have grown so much because they have been able to attract people who are interested in different paradigms of play: cooperative games, for example, because it seems like so many people hate player conflict. Competition adds a whole layer of interest to most board games IMO, but the most important thing is just for people to have fun.
Board game publishers actually encourage innovation from game designers (...to a certain extent. They also like safer bets when available too), much more so than video game publishers, and Kickstarter exists to fund the ideas that game publishers don't go for.
Kickstarter exists for video games too, but board games are succeeding on Kickstarter at a much higher rate than video games lately, in no small part because video games are funding development, for a game that may take a lot longer to develop and be impossible to complete with those funds. Even the darling Shovel Knight burned through all of its Kickstarter money 5 months before release and they all went broke just to get the game out the door. But board games are usually funding production of a completed design that's already priced out so they know how much it's going to cost them.
There are over a thousand new board games that came out this year at Essen alone, only one of several major board game trade shows. That's tons of opportunities for new mechanics and experiences. They're even getting deeper in their storytelling capabilities, as evidenced by the games Pandemic Legacy, Time Stories, and Above and Below.
Board games are still defining new genres even (most recently the Legacy genre which is only 5 years old, and Deckbuilders which is only 8 years old), I can't think of any new genres in video games since Grand Theft Auto 3 came out and popularized sandbox games 15 years ago. That is, unless you count 'Free 2 Play, Pay 2 Win', which is a perversion of game design dictated by market forces, not a true genre.
So I think part of the problem this designer is having is she's been too myopically limiting herself to only video games as an interactive form to draw inspiration from. Games exist in many forms. Board games in particular have a huge wealth of mechanics and ideas that video games have mostly left unexplored, and role playing/social games of late are no slouch either latel (just saw one that focuses on language and how it is formed and dies in an isolated community on Kickstarter, called Dialect).
Shovel Knight source: http://www.polygon.com/2014/8/6/5974557/shovel-knight-sales-...
Playing around with some old games over the weekend and last weekend, I forgot how addictive they were.
Yesterday, I told myself "I'll play a bit of Super Mario Bros. 3 and see how far I can get on one life"... and before I knew it, I was in World 2.
The weekend before that, I played some Golden Axe, and I got a huge chunk of the way through the game before I had to turn it off to go do other things.
It's my personal opinion that 1985-1995 was the single best era for gaming, as it was dominated by addictive fast-paced games that you could just pick up and play. One of the things that turns me off about modern games is that the "just pick up and play" mentality is gone... too many unskippable cutscenes, forced tutorial levels, etc.
Perhaps in the AAA space but down in the more indie spaces, you don't get those. My current set of favourite games (Rocket League, Binding of Isaac, Risk Of Rain, Rogue Legacy, Delver) certainly don't have any of those.
Thanks!
1 - not every medium is for everybody. Getting my friends to play videogames (or getting my few gamer friends to play niche/weird game I recommend) is something I already gave up. I don't dislike cinema, but most of the movies the are made simply don't appeal to me. There's nothing wrong with cinema. I'm just not that attracted to the medium.
2 - the author's friends' attitude to videogames. This shows lack of knowledge, lack of humility and elitism. Just because they don't know any games that "change you as a person" or cater to their "cultural preferences and interests" that doesn't mean that there isn't. People should be humble when judging other things. I don't like hip-hop. But I don't assume it is all bad or that I will dislike it all. Sturgeon's law applies both ways, and to everything.
3 - about the author's suggestions. I like the suggestions. I thought Skyrim would be a bit too heavy to a new gamer (specially to one who was really on the fence) but it worked! It showed the power transposing ourselves to a new world and live within it. And that Lidya story.. It was the best outcome it could happen. Sure, Kristina later abandoned the game. But the theme wasn't of her liking. But it showed her a glimpse of what is possible.
4 - I dislike the demonization of the bulk of the medium. Sure, there are a lot os FPSs and violence and twitch-reflex action games. We have Call of Duty as we have Katy Perry and Transformers[0]. And these get a lot of imitators and visibility and money because... there are a lot of people who like these things ans are willing to play for them. And this is OK. Niche stuff, out of the mainstream is always harder to find.
Finally 5 - The author is there and clearly knows videogames. If a friend wants to try videogames you should, like the author said, ask what they like or expect to see and direct them to a game like that. Skyrim is a good choice. Papers please is also nice. Maybe a puzzle game. Or a walking simulator to someone who just wants to experience a story in his own pace. And maybe you could, I don't know, give them Call of Duty. They might enjoy it. And they might even dislike everything. Because, as I said, not every medium is for everybody. but The demonization os the mainstream simply shows a clear lack of understanding of the market and an extremely "hipseristic" attitude.
[0] - I'm using these as an example of something low-brow, made for the masses. This is only my opinion and you are free to enjoy them and regard them in whatever way you want.
These days, my infrequent gaming time doubles as friend/family time with a board game played around a table.
This article resonates with me because I have nearly the same story. I used to play a lot of games, and I worked in console game development for a decade on some reasonably big titles. The game design patterns are somewhat derivative, I witnessed the echo chamber myself. But FWIW, it's very hard to push the boundaries and end up with something people want to buy. The market likes familiar (derivative), with incremental changes.
These days, I have enough other things to do that games aren't a priority and I can't get involved in most games. It even stresses me out to think about trying to finish a game. Enough of my goals and the people in my life want my time that adding a game to the list takes away from something else I care more about.
If the inconsistent UI or graphics give you pause, I'd suggest taking a look at Rimworld, currently in Early Access on Steam (or available directly from the developer's site). It has some of the deep qualities of DF but is a bit more forgiving.
Primitive graphics are no barrier at all. I am a graphics programmer and graphics lover through and through. But I can say with some confidence that graphics only matter sometimes, and even then are only a part of what makes any game good.
I saw a great talk at GDC many years ago that had a study of what makes good games good and "realistic", and graphics was 7th or 8th on the list. The number one item on the list was how well players understood their own identity in the game, whether they felt like they fit in and knew what to do. Such an interesting and important and IMO underrated piece of gaming psychology.
DF is (primarily) a fortress management game, akin to something like SimCity. But with vastly more depth.
The first time you play DF, the game will generate a world. It will attempt realistic simulations of a variety of properties to try to create realistic landmasses, and randomly generate wars between random civilizations, create random historical figures, and generally wreak havoc on your CPU.
Then you embark with a party of Dwarfs (yes, dwarfs), and journey into the wilderness to start a new colony. Each of your dwarfs has specialties, a personality, opinions, and an incredibly complex body model, keeping track of everything from broken bones to strained tendons (I'm not exaggerating). But it goes further because everything else in the game is just as elaborately simulated, down to waterflow, the densities of various woods.
There is no win condition: Your fortress will collapse. The unofficial motto of the game is "losing is fun"
The game is still in alpha (0.42, meaning it's 42% feature complete), it's programmed by one guy, and the eventual goal is to simulate existance (or at least, the narratively interesting parts), and allow people to create their own stories. At least, better than it already is.
Well, it's Unicode actually — displayed by OpenGL! — and not really a roguelike (although IIRC there is a roguelike adventure mode). It's incredibly difficult not so much due to the graphics but rather to the fantastically complex world, and also the control interface, which is … baroque.
Subjective.
I really appreciated the tone and themes of growth she expressed in the article. But she seems to currently have a state of mind of "if I can't think of an example, it must not exist", and not one of "if I can't think of an example, I must not have encountered one yet". In terms of understanding and perspective, you can tell she came a long way; but she still has a ways to go, too.
And also, we need to move away from the idea that some games or genres are objectively better or more interesting than others. It's all relative to the audience - some people have a stronger reaction to some experiences than to others, and will seek out different things.
Nick Yee has been doing excellent, data driven research on the interaction between player preferences, game types, and personality types - there's some intro material from his gdc talk on their web site: http://quanticfoundry.com/gdc/
> At my studio we are making games with people who don't like video games because we want to break out of established paradigms.
There are a lot of games out there, more than enough to fill any niche you could possibly want to fill. The trick is that they aren't all made by Bethesda, Activision, or EA. If you really want to get your friends interested in videogames, listen to their interests (something that the OP didn't seem to do, for all that they're starting their own studio) and point them at games that cater to their interests, not your own.