Video Games Are Boring | Hacker News Reader

Video Games Are Boring

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249 pointsmxfh334 comments

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.

This is exactly how I felt about Red Dead Redemption. Years after beating the game, I couldn't tell you much about any individual mission.

I do remember staring at the in-game sunset as it cast shadows across the open prairie and thinking, "Wow."

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.

...until you finally collect that last blue flower, and get eaten by a mountain lion :D

On a similar note, Zork I had a textual description of a sunset (being a text adventure) that, for whatever reason, I found massively peaceful.

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.

Rockstar makes great sandboxes, and I mostly play them that way as well. I do the missions very grudgingly, and mostly just to see the cut scenes.

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

> don't buy AAA (apart from very few select titles)

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)

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.

Games aren't getting more shallow and casual. More likely you're just getting older and developing a preference for nostalgia over novelty.

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.

If caring for your incompetents is fun, then dwarf fortress or the genre of DF-lite will be for you.

love DF :)

I try to do this on PS4. Many indie titles are released on all platforms fairly simultaneously these days.

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.

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...

AAA = ?

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.

> the canonical sandbox game

is GTA, really.

I would have said Elite, which predates GTA by, what? A decade? And pretty much created the concept of a sandbox game

It's funny that every single game you mentioned is a "theme park" open world game, and exactly zero of them are "sandbox" open world games.

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.

In real life, your cheese collection may not persist either 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 AGE can give you a nice balance. They manage to be traditional but with some modern mechanics carefully blended in: a little more gritty than the likes of Fate or Apocalypse World but not so much as GURPS or the typical OSR game, and they balance cinematics with simulation pretty elegantly. Traditional yet casual, these games feel mellow and relaxing to me somehow, with less demand to constantly be table-consulting and jurisprudently brilliant than more classic-style games, and less demand to constantly be super-creative and imaginatively brilliant than many of the more modern-style games. (I tend to recommend this type of game for players about to embark on their first long-term campaign — usually after they've had a few one-shots with a nanogame (see below) or two under their belts, though that's hardly necessary).

Or maybe you just want to grab a few beers and shoot the shit with your friends. Nothing drives out boredom like a good one- or two-page "nanogame" RPG, such as Everyone Is John, Police Cops 2, or Lasers & Feelings (free, free, and free).

I introduced a few friends to TTRPGs at my bachelor party a few years ago, in which we grabbed a cozy table at a cigar & whiskey bar, busted out a d6, and played a few hours' worth of Everyone Is John. They all said that they had a blast playing it (as did I), and a couple of them have since picked up "the hobby" themselves. The "rules" and the "setting" are just tools to help you maintain direction, to occasionally introduce complications that make the fiction more engaging, and to enable the group to engage in a shared imaginative experience. And those rules and settings are not sacrosanct — tweak them to your heart's desire, or do away with them and substitute your own. Do whatever you think is fun, or awesome, or epic, or interesting, or amusing, or cool, or funny, or... really, just anything you want. Let loose t̶h̶e̶ ̶k̶r̶a̶k̶e̶n̶ your imagination, and set your creativity free!

Compare that to a video game, where you can do literally anything the developers decided you could do (and had enough time to implement before the deadline...). Not to hate on video games (gods know I enjoy a good video game myself), but TTRPGs are a totally different experience. —"Wow, did you hear that Dragon Age Inquisition has over 100 hours of gameplay? And it's still only $60!" —"Cool. I dropped $40 on the Dragon Age TTRPG, which has literally ɪɴꜰɪɴɪᴛʏ hours of gameplay. INFINITY. (Plus it looks pretty damn cool on my shelf, to boot... quite possibly the prettiest book I own, and I own lots of books...)." Of course, video games have the advantage of single-player mode(s) — despite Tunnels & Trolls featuring many popular "solitaire" modules, the experience is so different that it feels like a totally different game, even if all the rules and mechanics are the same. Whereas video games can actually be (and often are) fun to play solo, I don't think I've ever had much fun playing a TTRPG solo (though, full disclosure, I've only ever played two solo adventures before I lost interest). So grab some friends and some dice!

There's even a decent amount of "open-source" TTRPGs, if you care about licensing terms & conditions :)

---

P.S. If you're really hung-up on Star Wars, there have been some half-dozen officially-licensed Star Wars TTRPGs (West End Games's original back in the 80s being rightly considered a classic, and Wizards of the Coast's early 00s version providing the mechanics for Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic, while Fantasy Flight's current trilogy has been generally well-received despite requiring strange, custom dice (grr...)). As you can probably imagine, there have also been tons of fan-made, unlicensed Star Wars TTRPGs as well, usually provided as splatbooks for existing sci-fi/space-opera games or generic/universal systems, not to mention plenty of "Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off" games/splats, such as West End Games's D6 Space (now free), which they produced after they lost the IP license. Both types of game/splat are easy to find on the Internet. Of course, if you and your party are comfortable enough with the Star Wars setting, you can just grab an appropriate game/system and just wing it (Traveller being the classic sci-fi game, while just about any game mentioned above would work (most of the OSR games, nanogames, and Apocalypse World would be considerably more work to adapt than the others, although Uncharted Worlds is a space-opera game using a slightly modified AW system (PbtA—"Powered by the Apocalypse"), so at least that work has been done for you already), as would a great deal of others).

If you insist on that "sandbox" definition, Creation Kit awaits ;p

So do Virtual Worlds.

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.

I really liked The Walking Dead even though I'm not a huge fan of QTEs.

Interestingly enough, this is one of the reasons I still play World of Warcraft: I used to be pretty hardcore (never Realm Firsts or anything, but hard mode raiding during BC/WotLK), and thus invested into my main characters... but recently I much more enjoy leveling, questing, pet battles, and all these little things. I basically play it like a single player game and enjoy the scenery. I just can't bring myself to enjoy other new games like I used to, I have a huge library of unplayed or minimally played Steam games, because I will just play WoW anyway...

My wife and I have been playing Guild Wars 2 in roughly the same way. I used to raid in vanilla WoW, she ran an Everquest raid guild. These days we just mess around in GW2 doing dailies or personal storylines. It's ultra casual, usually pretty easy, but it's fun to drop into for an hour or two.

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.

http://venturebeat.com/community/2010/06/05/my-four-year-old...

> 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.

Without doing a good chunk of missions, the game's set of activities doesn't open up.

>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...)

    [0] http://i.imgur.com/oV4smNW.png
    [1] http://i.imgur.com/XqGjx5e.jpg
    [2] http://i.imgur.com/lpJ272N.jpg
    [3] http://i.imgur.com/1w9yCy2.jpg
    [4] http://i.imgur.com/QCRQLIP.jpg

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.

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.)

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.

Damn I want my holo-deck. What's taking so long?

This is what I came here to say.

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.

Try "The Witness".

Or Firewatch.

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.

Dare.

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.

Seems to me you will love Euro Truck Simulator 2.

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 most feared (but not even close to largest) alliances in the game. Another, more common model is the dictatorship - a personality cult, where one member makes the calls and steers the group according to his will. He might have an inner circle that he delegates duties to or receives counsel from, but there is no question who is in charge, internally or externally. This group is nimble, able to react quickly and operate in a united fashion, but the responsibility often burns out the leader. With the leader not logging in and no organic transition to an equally respected replacement, the magic is lost and the group dissolves.

Another result is the remarkable approach of an Eve player's duties to "real life" duties. In Eve, one interviews people, one researches people's work histories, one hires people and one fires people. In Eve, one reviews weekly, monthly and quarterly economic reports, collect and pay taxes, and audits franchise managers. In Eve, one configures up forums and websites and chat servers and SSO authentication systems and automated alarm systems. In Eve, one inserts watermarks and cross-references IP logs and administers barium meal tests and more, as means to maintain infosec. Some people say they would never play Eve, because it isn't really a game, it's a job. Some people play Eve precisely because they thrive on real challenge. Some people do just fine playing Eve to blow up ships and never do a single one of the things above.

Another result is the overall tendency towards stagnation and lack of meaningful conflict. I'm not sure yet if this is simply because of the current game mechanics or because of a larger, systemic flaw that video games cannot inherently overcome (or because of human nature). Most of the game map is "nullsec", space open for the taking to any alliance of any size that wants to plant a flag there. At first, this was motivation enough. Later, people needed a reason to take and hold space, which usually meant "it needs to be profitable to hold space." When the devs made holding space very profitable, nullsec alliances started to make non-invasion pacts with their neighbors. They'd fight as fleets of ships, but not attack holdings. It made sense financially; people were making enough money with the space they had; no need to evict the neighbor. Trying to do so would start a war, and that would be more painful than making fat stacks at home. Eventually one coalition of alliances held half the map and another coalition held the other, and only play fights were happening. The devs made a number of mechanics changes in an attempt to encourage balkanization, and that, combined with an unprecedented announcement by an fabulously wealthy player (he made his money from a player-owned and developed in-game casino, btw) to make essentially limitless funds available to anyone who attacked the leading alliance of one of those super-coalitions lead to a large breakup in the nullsec geopolitical landscape. Unfortunately, now it appears that many feel it is no longer worth holding space under the new mechanics (attacking is easy, defending is hard, burnout is real). So if it is too hard, no one plays, and if it is too easy, everyone works out deals and it becomes boring.

So, it turns out that in the game with some of the most freeing mechanics and policies, people still get bored. The practical strategy (from a game design p.o.v.) is to tweak the game back and forth looking for the sweet spot where it is fun, but not too hard. From a theoretical standpoint, it's hard to know whether or not video games are fundamentally and inevitably boring, or whether a perfect game has simply not yet been created.

>realistically, if you do that you're not competing with other games, but with dating apps, job interviews, and the real social world.

Nail on the head.

Wow, nice description! Could you recommend me some videos to show some of this to a person who hasn't played since the 90s?

> 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 love Jade Empire, I always wish they continued that series. Even a modern remake with an updated combat system would be welcome...

+1 for Jade Empire

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.

I think you're giving far too much intellectual credit to what is basically just a feminist rant dressed up as concern trolling for the industry.

A wild Privileged White Male IT Worker has appeared!

>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.

Highly recommend Spec Ops: The Line, its usually on Steam for cheap and works on Linux!

Ah, you've played it!

Do you feel like a hero yet?

One of the main problems with single-player video games is that a lot of people work alone and don't want to spend their free time doing something that feels kind of like work, but doesn't seem to offer much in return. They'd rather spend their time socializing or doing something that will improve them in an obvious way.

A personal anecdote - I loved single-player video games until I was 18, but I stopped cold at that age. 5 years later, I tried to get back into it. I played some games that I used to like. I don't feel the things I used to feel while playing. Leveling up in Diablo just feels like accomplishing a chore - it feels meaningless.

This author seems to think that video games, in general, are definitely for everyone. I don't agree. Just like there are people who don't like reading or listening to music who manage to live whole, well-rounded lives, there are people who don't like playing video games.

Maybe it's the games you play, not the single player mode. I play both and I have no preference for the type, but for specific games.

I think this is a good point. I've felt that way about single player games for a while. When I recently played Firewatch, which has a story with some complex emotional layers, I realized that I now need more than "mechanics" for a single player game to appeal. Now, I try to find games with more emotional depth. There aren't many out there. We all change in different ways and I suspect you can find single player games that will appeal more to you now than ones similar to those you used to play.

Sounds like "This War of Mine" might appeal to you. Check it out if you haven't yet.

This is exactly how it is for me too. When I was younger I would feel so connected to the game world, and the wonders of exploring the game world were real wonders to me. Discovering some new village in Ultima 6 made me feel like a great adventurer. A finder of something. If it was important in the game world then it was important.

These days it falls out just like you wrote: if I try to play a game, I mess around for a bit and then think: I could spend this time doing something creative. Making something, learning something. If I found some modern equivalent of a hidden city in a game, I'd think: so what? Who fucking cares? What does that get me?

I still can't figure out if this means there's something really wrong with me, that I can't even enjoy meaningless pursuits; or maybe that my sense of 'meaning' is so restricted; or if it's the opposite, and my reticence to do those things is a sign that I'm spending time the right way, or at least, that I have the right objective function in how I evaluate my time?

Of course, I'm a miserable bastard. That's probably an important data point. But I'm not sure how I could change even if I was sure that I should.

> Discovering some new village in Ultima 6 made me feel like a great adventurer.

I find that joy of discovery varies wildly game to game. I could never get into Bethesda RPGs, new or old. There is lots to discover in an Elder Scrolls game, but none of it feels like it has much weight or import. When the Ultima games really hit their stride (V through VII p2), discoveries had weight and import. The Witcher games feel similar, to me, I spent way to much time exploring every damn polygon in the world. I can't really pinpoint why these games feel so different, but hey, I still find new games to trigger that same sense of wonder.

It's about depth. The world of Witcher 3 might as well be an actual world, with its utterly insane level of detail and scale. It has deep lore, history, politics, drama, intrigue, friendship, love, loss, humor. Everything is believable. No other game I've played over the past 15 years is like it. Skyrim came kinda close but that was after a ton of modding and fixing.

I'm the same way, although my thinking is more along the lines of "man, instead of playing this game I should go meet girls so that I don't die single." :P

Videogames (and most art and literature) are at there best when they can expose you things you couldn't imagine without them. When you are a ~teenage, old enough to understand things, but still inexperienced enough to not understand so much, they are a font of mental stimulation.

Videogames taught me (some) history, geology, geography, chemistry, phsyics, math, psychology, anthropology, etc, etc.

But as I got older (and as Internet got better), there were more and more real things to learn about, and life skills to work at (earning real money, doing real exercise, meeting real people), and a lot of videogame tropes stopped being novel. So they hold less appeal.

> I still can't figure out if this means there's something really wrong with me, that I can't even enjoy meaningless pursuits; or maybe that my sense of 'meaning' is so restricted; or if it's the opposite, and my reticence to do those things is a sign that I'm spending time the right way, or at least, that I have the right objective function in how I evaluate my time?

Neither. Your interests have just changed as time has passed.

Now, I'm in the same boat as you and GP, nowadays not really enjoying the same types of games that I used to. However, there are some things I still enjoy, and there are new things I've discovered that I enjoy. Any psychologist will tell you that your waning interest in something is only a problem if your interest is waning in general, and that as long as you still have something you're still interested in, not a problem. Otherwise, it may or may not be a sign of depression, burnout, or other malady, in which case I'd urge you to see a counselor or therapist, perhaps even a psychiatrist.

That said, it's important not to think of media consumption as "wasting time", per se. There's a point where it can become a problem, but for most people playing games or watching TV is a vital source of stress relief. I myself have fallen into (and am still in...) the trap of feeling like if I'm not constantly doing something productive, I'm wasting my time. It's important to slow down once in a while and give yourself a break when you need one, and to take care of yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, etc.

>A personal anecdote - I loved single-player video games until I was 18, but I stopped cold at that age. 5 years later, I tried to get back into it. I played some games that I used to like. I don't feel the things I used to feel while playing. Leveling up in Diablo just feels like accomplishing a chore - it feels meaningless.

"Growing up", that's what you are describing; I purchased Fallout 4 the day it came out, and after few minutes of playing and all I could see was bad hit-boxes and every NPC feels like a sound-recorder with a few different pre-recorded phrases. That game got pretty good reviews so its probably not about the game, its my perception of it. Old hobbies feeling meaningless happens to almost everyone, some people spent their youth reading but at their forties they barely read the news.

>This author seems to think that video games, in general, are definitely for everyone. I don't agree. Just like there are people who don't like reading or listening to music who manage to live whole, well-rounded lives, there are people who don't like playing video games.

Couldn't agree more; some people like extreme sports, some people don't, doesn't mean there is something wrong with every extreme sports, its just that we are different from each other, that's all.

> Growing up

You might want to edit that to "people change", since that's what it sounds you meant, instead of a phrase that evokes "becoming more mature/adult".

Nope. Its "growing up", most people who did skateboarding at their teens don't do it after growing up; saying "people change" is too vague, if you say "growing up" you are clearly pointing out that it was something they did as youngsters but not any more; and language exists for the sake of clarity and communications, so "growing up" is a good choice here.

I think to say that people stop doing things like skateboarding or video games because they are "growing up" condescends to these activities. I understand that people move on, but to "grow up" may imply that these activities are childish. I disagree with this sentiment; people get older and priorities change to family, work, physical health, etc.

Alright. In that case you are simply wrong. I know plenty of mature people with great families and careers who appreciate games like Fallout 4 and many others. Nothing to do with youth.

>>I know plenty of mature people with great families and careers who appreciate games like Fallout 4 and many others.

Yeah, but compared to younger people who appreciate video games, they are few and far between.

You're reading too much into what the poster is trying to say, and attaching some kind of baggage to the phrase.

The point isn't that only youngsters can enjoy video games, nor that video games are inherently immature, nor that the act of growing up necessitates that someone lose interest in gaming, nor that adults can't enjoy games.

The point is that video games are something the poster enjoyed as a youngster but no longer enjoys as an adult. That's all "growing up" means. You could s/video games/*/g, and it would still just be part of "growing up".

I picked up skateboarding again in my twenties after not skateboarding since middle school. Places where people discuss skateboarding online are filled with these kinds of people. Meanwhile I've lost interest in video games at the moment, but I still believe I will pick them up again at some point. I tend to switch hobbies, trying to find what I like. My interest in particular things can fade in and out. That's why I think "growing tired", "losing interest" or "moving on to other things" are better descriptors than "growing up".

And here I am, acting in reverse. I loved multiplayer games much more than single player when I was in my teens, but since graduating college a couple years ago I've only been drawn toward single player experiences.

I don't care about beating other players or grinding out at some arbitrary mechanic that's going to get patched in two months just to be "better" than my friends. I'd rather sit back and enjoy a well made game for 40-100 hours and talk about my experiences playing it later.

The arbitrary mechanics of chess and poker (to name just two) haven't changed in over two months.

You hit the nail on the head for me too, exact same thing happened to me at age 18. I used to be such a gamer as a kid, and now I can hardly stand to even pick them up. I've continued to some play multiplayer games (mostly shooters and FIFA), but even that has trailed off and my Xbox One is mainly used for netflix. Unless there is an aspect of socialization to it I just don't find it a rewarding use of time. Even something like this, browsing HN and writing a comment, is more interesting to me at this point.

I think your close to an important point.

A lot of video games are designed to satisfy our desire to be accomplishing things. I think if you already have things in your life you are working towards then these kinds of video games don't have much of an appeal.

I used to spend a lot of time playing video games, and one of the things that allowed me to break away from it was realizing I was using video games as a proxy for accomplishment in real life.

I think this one of the reasons games like diablo are more appealing when we are younger some of as kids/teens don't have things we prefer to do with the time.

As a counter-point, there are so many genres of VG that at this point there really is a game for everyone. Sure, we all grow up and our tastes change, like in music and movies - you just rent this one movie you enjoyed so much when you were 18, and now it's just a cringefest. Doesn't mean, tho, that you dislike movies or that movies are not for everyone.

I can and do relate with the sentiment that Diablo is an endless grind - but that's because it always was. Just like duke nukem always was a parody of action heroes and doom never really had a story; our younger selves simply chose to ignore that for some reason. Now we're a bit older and really spoiled - we want triple A graphics together with a solid story that, if it were a movie, would get an oscar, minimal grind and repetitiveness (looking at you, borderlands, you're just teeedious). And you know what, there are games that provide. The "walking sims" for your storyline needs, say, Firewatch; Frictional studios games to make you miserable; Stanley Parable and The Beginners' guide for your mindfuck needs; Sunless Sea if you don't mind an occasional grind and presentation from 1999 - but you're rewarded with lush writing that alone makes the game worth playing... Hell, even if the good writing's not your cup of tea, you still can enjoy such beauties as Braid, or great weirdnesses such as Antichamber.

We have this whole area polished to a place we don't even have to play - there are countless "let's play" videos, forum threads and i bet there even is a "let's play" podcast somewhere out there.

I feel the point of the article is that people who enjoy this art (notice the lack of quotes) are looked down by the people who "don't like video games" and think that candy crush or call of duty are the pinnacle of modern gaming. There's no way they'd leave that zone of comfort and give a good game a shot instead of insisting people do "something that is obviously more meaningful". The author claims that the "industry" produces "boring games", and she is partially right - games that are interesting for working adults that do not want to spend time in trivial pursuits do not get enough exposure. Should they? Probably not. Should the notion that games are a waste of time, a grind, a simulacrum of work and totally useless, change? Probably yes.

>One of the main problems with single-player video games is that a lot of people work alone and don't want to spend their free time doing something that feels kind of like work, but doesn't seem to offer much in return.

What are you basing this on?

I play some multiplayer stuff but I'm like 90% a single player gamer.

I find other people (like public servers in Battlefield or the screaming/hacking teenagers in GTA Online) ruin games more often than make them better.

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.

Have you played Dwarf Fortress at all? I'd be interested to know your thoughts on that.

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.

Thanks for the tip, I'll check out Rimworld too!

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.

> FYI, Dwarf Fortress is an ASCII-only roguelike

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..

> Games do get less fun as you grow older

Subjective.

> 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.

20 years of gaming here and honestly, the industry needs to get over its fetishization of violence and it's reliance on it as a crutch.

Games can be so much more than mainstream gaming has allowed them to become.

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.

Tetris was a blockbuster hit without realistic interpersonal dynamics.

Yes. Yes it was.

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.

Indeed: I wonder how many of those friends would have loved to play Fallen London, or Papers Please.

> The most important thing is that they think video games lack depth. They say things like, "Unlike books/films/podcasts, with video games I don't learn anything or change as a person".

Which is somewhat surprising, since as with any art form, there are games which are masterpieces, and there is mass market junk. Why would people specifically not like games "because they lack depth", but have no problem reading books or watching films, while the vast majority of them are drowning in the sea of mediocrity as well?

I suppose it comes from the general lack of perception about games as an art form. While established art exists for many years, computer games are relatively young art, and I suppose you can compare it to the negative view on cinema by some in its early days.

> Skyrim has the depth, but not the taste.

I wouldn't agree here. While Skyrim draws many with its exploration element, I'd say it lacks depth if you compare it to really good RPGs. It's not on par with Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment, Knights of the Old Republic, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines or the Witcher series. The story in later Bethesda games is pretty generic and outright boring. I'd say the last good game in the series was Morrowind.

Going back to the art point above, it's the result of mass market appeal. Publishers don't want risky things which can become masterpieces. "Safe bet" of mass market mediocrity is more comfortable for them. Luckily, crowdfunding today helps with that to some degree.

> I'd say the last good game in the series was Morrowind.

Which why people still play it, and there was even work in bringing Morrowing to the Skyrim engine[0].

[0] https://tesrenewal.com/skywind-faq

I'm more interested in OpenMW personally: https://openmw.org

It also has an open-source re-implementation of the engine in the works which is currently playable, and a graphical enhancement program which adds distant land to the game along with some nice optional shader effects like sunrays, depth of field, better water, etc. Also, there's a mod similar to Skywind for the Oblivion version of the engine.

Plus there are some enormous mods such as Tamriel Rebuilt, which aims to add the entire province of Vvardenfell, and Skyrim: Home of the Nords, which aims to depict Skyrim during the game's time period.

The amount of content that has been made for that game, even beyond normal mods, is kind of staggering.

Those "white men" (I guess Asian gaming isn't a thing?) are apparently doing a pretty good job appealing to women as some studies have suggested they're roughly half of the game playing demographic: http://www.dailydot.com/parsec/adult-women-largest-gaming-de...

It may be correct that women want something different than men, but I don't think its true in the way they imagine. A lot of women seem to have enjoyed "The Sims", but many of them appear to have spent their time in-game torturing their hapless sims.

Maybe I'm cynical, but I tend to be skeptical of art that's more about a cause rather than about the art itself. I'll give an example: christian rock. I have no problem with christianity, or with rock, or with rock that is about christian themes or ideas. But I think we all know there's also a subgenre called "christian rock", which is generally a tacky, pretentious and overbearing imitation of the above things in the interest of furthering an agenda or crassly pandering. The problem with "christian rock" is it tends to be more about being "christian" than about being good rock music. You can have good rock music that is christian, but "christian rock" is almost always tacky.

You see something similar recently with "art games" that are trying so hard to be "art" that they're pretentious and overbearing. The only good "art" games are the ones that ended up being interesting works of art by exploring an idea, not because they set out to be art games.

I hate to say this, but I kind of worry this could just be the same thing, but instead it'll be "serious adult" games or "feminist games" or pick whatever social movement you want here. But it won't really be about the game, it'll be about the movements values.

Couldn't agree more. Minecraft comes to mind. I haven't personally played it a lot, but obviously there is some magic in that game that kids can't get enough of. And although it was certainly experimental in nature, it wasn't "artsy"

Your entire first paragraph reads just as well without the word "Christian". One-word proof: Nickelback.

I'm not even Christian, and I found myself enjoying an evangelical Christian rock CD as just good music, until I listened close enough to realize that I didn't agree with many of the lyrics.

Your second paragraph is simply the No True Scotsman fallacy, or the "all gay men are flamboyant" observational-bias fallacy. You are just saying that you don't like things you don't like, and you don't notice the intention behind things you like.

> Your entire first paragraph reads just as well without the word "Christian". One-word proof: Nickelback.

Well no, my point is that when a work is primarily created to service an ulterior agenda (in my example, theology, but it could be any agenda), rather than for its own sake, the result is generally kitsch. I don't even mean that in a pejorative way, most entertainment is kitsch, and it's fine, people are entertained. Many (not all) "art" games tend to end up being kitschy because they're designed to signal and appeal to an elite in-group's values rather than being a true expression of ideas of their own. I think a piece has more artistic merit if it reflects ideas and truths the artist discovered for themselves, drawing on influences, instead of ideas that are designed to appeal to a certain set of people while signaling adherence to group values.

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).

Shovel Knight source: http://www.polygon.com/2014/8/6/5974557/shovel-knight-sales-...

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.

>We want games that aren't gritty, toxic pseudo-realistic pseudo-masculine nonsense nor frustrating time wasters that leave you feeling dead inside. We want games about how each of us could be in the future, how the world could be in the future. We want games built on compassion and respect and fearlessness. This is so much more interesting.

Great. That's fantastic. We always need more games, and more types of games. Just about anything can be made into a game (for evidence, just look at Phoenix Wright. Being a lawyer was never so much fun). And frankly, I'd love to see different games from more perspectives.

But.

Sometimes I want what this article dubs, "gritty, toxic pseudo-realistic pseudo-masculine nonsense," or "frustrating time wasters that leave you feeling dead inside." I get home at night, and maybe it's just me, but I want to raid dungeons and slay dragons. I want to storm the tower and save the princess. I want to kill sentient mushrooms by jumping on their head. I want to battle a handful of strangers, armed with a Rocket Launcher, improbably large collection of other weapons, and my own wits and reflexes.

And sometimes, I want to fit together blocks falling from the sky in a demented abstract russian nightmare.

In short, I want your experimental art games, but I also want the kinds of games that we already have. And we already have a lot of good ones, so stop insulting them, please.

...Anyways, if any of you are interested in game design, and also in the idea of games as art, and that games can be more than just entertainment, can appeal to more than just gamers, I would reccomend checking out Extra Credits (they're on YouTube now). Plus, their channel also does a pretty cool history show.

Hey no one dies in Super Mario Bros. The mushrooms get swished and bopped off-screen.

Yeah, and you never die in SMB. Your hands just go up, and your character bounces off screen.

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 :)

What game(s) brought you back?

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 think we need to distinguish between video games as "multimedia entertainment experiences" and video games as play.

Minecraft is essentially computerised Lego. There are few higher accolades I could pay to any game, because Lego is a phenomenally deep plaything. The more semantic meaning that the designer of a Lego set provides, the worse the play experience becomes. A bag of plain bricks can become anything, but a dragon molded as a single piece can only ever be a dragon. Likewise with Minecraft - Story Mode is a brief, dreary and hollow experience compared to Survival or Creative.

Each football match or chess game tells a unique story. The players create a spontaneous drama using the particular interplay of their skills and ideas. Infinite variety emerges from a leather ball and two sets of goalposts. A box of crayons and a piece of paper are in themselves meaningless, but create boundless meaning in the hands of an imaginative person.

My gripe with most modern games is that they try too hard to tell a story. Designers in the AAA and indie space are often preoccupied with emulating the attributes of other media, rather than exploring the unique possibilities of video games. Any modern gamer is familiar with the "movie with quick-time events" trope, games that shoehorn meaningless interaction into linear storytelling. A game can (and perhaps should) be a blank canvas rather than a work of art.

If you can't find meaning in a boxing match, if you can't grow and learn through playing Catan, if you take no joy from a lump of modelling clay, then the problem lies with you. We have many media that are infinitely better suited to depicting relatable characters and portraying the real world. The unique strength of games is play; games are at their best when they emphasise this core strength.

> My gripe with most modern games is that they try too hard to tell a story. Designers in the AAA and indie space are often preoccupied with emulating the attributes of other media, rather than exploring the unique possibilities of video games. Any modern gamer is familiar with the "movie with quick-time events" trope, games that shoehorn meaningless interaction into linear storytelling.

The common problem is not with "trying to tell the story", the problem is usually as you said with its linearity. Making a reactive story with meaningful consequences to choices is hard and time consuming.

> A game can (and perhaps should) be a blank canvas rather than a work of art.

It should be a work of art which allows player to participate in a meaningful way. Compare it to a form of art where actor plays a role, but the play isn't set in stone, and you are that actor.

Roleplaying however is just one type of gaming activity. There can be other types of games, more focused on exploration for instance, puzzle solving or simulation and etc. While quite different categories, they all can be enjoyable computer games. Some tend to be more sport, than art.

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/

I disagree strongly with the implication that there isn't already tremendous variety in games.

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.

I would say the more likely issue is discovery.

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 don't think that was implied. The author named games like Papers please, This War is Mine and Neko Atsume, so she knows about the variety.

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.

My wife loves portal and portal 2 because you get to explore and not get shot at without walking into it with early warning. For 90% of the game, you can just drop the controller, come back the next day, and everything will be just how you left it. No pressure.

Coincidentally that's the kind of games I usually dislike, life is dull by itself; I need rush and adrenaline because that's the kind of thing my real life is missing.

But I liked portal 2, I actually finished it all in one single session, but it was because the story is thrilling, every puzzle different enough from the previous and makes me think, not because I could drop the controller and forget about it.

TLDR: The author has a cousin who doesn't like video game violence and white males ruin everything.

That's a grossly unfair mischaracterisation of the piece, did you actually read it?

No it's not and yes I did, unfortunately.

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.

> under-served demographic: The kind of person who lives in "a state of constant shock, of constant stimulation" like her friends do

Out of interest, what would such a game look like, to compete with such a state? Farmville? Candy Crush?

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?

Indeed, it's an example of the kind of blinkered identity politics that is infecting so many minds, industries and institutions.

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.

Well, now I have some names to Google...

Thanks!

Addiction.

My main gripe with video games is that they're addictive. Boring or not, they push you to play another 5, 10, 60 minutes... before you know it, you ruined your evening, and wasted your time and the next day at work...

Kudos to the artists, developers, psychologists who can build that. And probably I am weak.

At the end of the day, they are very successful in making me addicted, that's why i am staying away, that's why I am not a gamer.

I don't think you're weak at all. They do build the games to be super stimulating and addicting. They build reward models into the games that help you form the habit of playing every day for a small reward. Then eventually you're logging in every day to play for something you don't care at all about.

Once you realize that, you're free.

A simple idea is to remove their incentive to make it addictive:

Never buy anything that has in-app-purchases where for $ money you get something and for $$ money you get more something.

If you see a screen that has $1.99 for 5 gold/gems/points/cards and $4.99 for 20 gold/gems/points/card then RUN!

A good book has exactly the same effect; the primary difference is that all books are finite. As a child, I would read books under the bedcovers by torchlight. I'd stay up all night playing chess against my little Saitek. Is Fallout 4 or Hearthstone an objectively worse use of time?

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.

Different people like different stuff. It sounds like her friend would be a lot happier playing The Sims.

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.

> What I would really love to see is something like Dwarf Fortress which is __very__ deep but combersome in a neat package

Some Swede actually did this, and made a couple Billion.

Yep Minecraft was a good one but it lacks narrative. I do play Minecraft anyway but I would like to put more emphasis on the simulation.

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).

To be fair, that's not a story so much as an event.

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.

> ... took 4 hours became 150 hours of boring side-questing ...

There's a lot of lifestyle gamers who get angry if games are 'too short'.

Short is better than "noisy" for me. If i have to grind 80% of the time to play 20% of the time (I look at you EVE) it is just a waste of time.

> 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.

http://www.emergencevector.com

Yes I actually bought it but it didn't cut it for me. :(

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.

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.

>> 20 years ago top-class games like Dungeon Keeper could've been made in a garage.

Entry to market for garage devs with a quality title is far easier today than 20 years ago.

I agree with the general thesis of the article, but I don't buy the cop out that things are the way they are because the creatives in the industry are white men. That wouldn't be an acceptable thing to say about (insert any other gender/race combination here) so I don't think it's an acceptable excuse or reason here either. It's clear that the industry sorely needs some new thinking and new creative ideas, but I believe those new ideas can come from anyone, regardless of gender or race.

The fact that the video game industry is dominated by white men is a bad thing. But you're saying that pointing that out is bad, and that seems completely backwards to me. If you don't acknowledge the current reality, things will never get better.

The culture of video games, particular the working environment, is largely influenced by the people who created the industry: white and Asian men. This isn't a problem because there is no discrimination against ideas coming from other demographics.

Anyone who likes video games and wants to make it their career is free to do so, but shouldn't expect to be able to strong-arm others into their way of thinking.

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.

This does seem to be a real problem in the games industry, but I think there are plenty of bright spots that speak to more than just adolescent boys.

I think the best example of all time is The Sims. I saw that game draw in non-gamers like nothing I've ever seen before or since, and draw them in with a passion and obsession only matched by hardcore gamers. That's all the evidence you need to prove that there's big money in something that doesn't have a "kill" button or a win state.

Another bright spot: the entire Wii platform. I agree that the problem is probably due to a lack of diverse perspectives. The games industry disparages these experiences as "casual." Ouch.

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.

The most engrossing game I've played is The Last of Us on the PlayStation. Wow, it was literally the only time in my life that I stayed up into the early hours to get as far I could. So much depth and nuance in every chapter to build out a universe that definitely showed it took Naughty Dog years to develop.

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 was waiting for somebody to mention Dark Souls! It has by far and away one of the best combat systems I've ever played. Amazing game.

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.

[0] http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/

[1] http://dustforce.com/videos

[2] http://supermeatboy.com/

[3] http://devildaggers.com/about

From the Tao of Programming:

A master programmer passed a novice programmer one day. The master noted the novice's preoccupation with a hand-held computer game. "Excuse me," he said, "may I examine it?"

The novice bolted to attention and handed the device to the master. "I see that the device claims to have three levels of play: Easy, Medium, and Hard," said the master. "Yet every such device has another level of play, where the device seeks not to conquer the human, nor to be conquered by the human."

"Pray, great master," implored the novice, "how does one find this mysterious setting?"

The master dropped the device to the ground and crushed it underfoot. And suddenly the novice was enlightened.

I've played video games since before I could walk. Some games I connect with and can't stop playing - Undertale and Papers Please come to mind. Most don't anymore, not even an old favorite like Doom.

I feel like there's something to this article, but I think it's larger than "I don't like Game of Thrones". There is room for games that really dig into humanity, rather than being meaningless mechanics.

I mean, I like sports. But I like books, too.

I didn't play Undertale yet, but soundtrack there sounds pretty good: https://tobyfox.bandcamp.com/track/bonetrousle

It is indeed good! (I actually have the soundtrack on my phone.) But I suggest playing the game and letting the soundtrack surprise you. It really is worth a play.

Yeah, I usually avoid listening to the soundtrack before playing some game, but I've heard Bonetrousle somewhere, and couldn't resist buying the whole OST on Bandcamp :)

The game sounds somewhat controversial with some liking it a lot, while others quite disliking it. I might give it a try at one point.

I really liked it! Then again, I played the games it was (obviously) inspired by, and I liked those games too. I understand if people don't like it - it's pretty personal, in the way that it's targeted directly towards the niche the creators love. Those things tend to be rather splitting, so it's unsurprising, in retrospect.

It's kind of like bad shark movies - there is a group of people who love them, and everyone else is fine not being in that group. It's not that either group is better or worse, it's just a niche.

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/.

As someone who has been a consultant for a software development environment, I've been inside a lot of companies, and I've been struck by how often they all seem to make the same mistakes. My former company had acquired 2 different implementations of the same language, and it was eerie how both former companies made the same mistakes -- down to even making the same corresponding in the same corresponding subsystems. I've also been observing video games since Pong was new, as well as other forms of media, such as music, books, and video/film. All forms of media seem to be following somewhat parallel paths. All media industry publishing seems to tend to make the same mistakes generally, and to tend to make the same mistakes in response to technological changes in distribution, like those brought about by internet downloads, streaming, and social media. (There are people who are thinking ahead and using forethought to navigate these changes as well.)

There also seem to be parallel missteps in the invention of new forms of media. It took generations for the industry to get a handle on all of new tools, techniques, and vocabulary of cinema. It took generational change for the field to give up old forms adapted from the theater. One generation's daring and pioneering work would also become the next generation's stultifying, overused tropes.

I find that many of the pretensions of art in games are well meaning but misapplied things learned in film school. Higher budgets seem to result in more production with less interactivity and less intelligence credited to the players. There are leanings away from intellectually engaging interactivity and towards sensation and addiction through variable schedule of reward. There are also some of the same unjustified pretensions to "art" or intellectualism, as well as a few justified ones.

As always, the way forward is partly through the self honesty and self awareness required of art.

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.

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 article hijacks the history so that in one browser I have to double click the back button to get back to hacker news and in another browser I end up at facebook. It's very irritating.

Interesting article, but games for me since the 90s ended have been huge letdowns. I started gaming in '86 on a Commodore and a bit before with an Atari 2600. The 90s were the peak of creativity. The 80s a bit limited technologically, though the arcades at their peak were a sight to behold. In the last 16 years, I only found a handful of games that really got me interested. Left 4 Dead and League of Legends (I did have TFT and tried DOTA but didn't play long enough to get hooked).

But it seemed in the 90s, both PCs and consoles were putting out their best stuff. I still look at the old Sega Genesis games and early 90s PC titles as some of the best the industry ever put out.

As a result, I just bought a new PC and decided to not even bother with a high end gaming machine. I'm using a Skull Canyon NUC, first time in 30 years I wasn't concerned with meeting current specs in the latest AAA games. We're going on two decades of rehashing 90s ideas and I'm done.

I will be buying a Nintendo Switch though. The social gaming aspect of Mario Kart is still magic for me but there is no other entity out there with Nintendo's polish, charm or fun. I think it's an open secret that 3rd party publishers often run from Nintendo systems not due to API lock-in but because they simply cannot compete with Nintendo 1st party titles.

Oh, and my username is actually a homage to the Buck Rogers Gold Box titles from the early 90s. I never got into the D&D stuff but played the heck out of the two Buck Rogers releases.

This may not be a hugely valuable contribution to the discussion, nevertheless ...

A. Game value is in the eye of the beholder.

B. What takes my eye changes over long and short terms (as a function of spare time available, economic circumstance, hardware at hand, effort/reward ratio, but mostly the ever-intangible "what takes my fancy at this point in time" - a reflection of my personal psychology that also changes over time).

C. At best you can please some of the people some of the time.

I'll admit that I'm of an age where I lost the capacity to devote bunch-of-hours-per-day to gaming just as MUDs were becoming really popular. I think as a result I never really got into massively multi-player gaming. I've played Diablo III - but single player.

My favourite games of all time include (in no particular order):

- Moon Cresta (table-top)

- The Hobbit (C64, cassette)

- Nethack (VAX VMS)

- Impossible Mission (C64)

- Balance of Power (C64)

- Bards Tale I (C64)

- Dune (Amiga)

- Elite (Amiga)

- Nethack (PC)

- Need for Speed: Most Wanted (original) (Mac, via Wine)

- Diablo III (Mac)

- Nethack (Mac)

- Backgammon (iOS - at least 10K games played on this sucker! I had to delete it!)

- Nethack (iOS)

Lately, I've been really getting into Really Bad Chess (iOS). Was never a chess player but it's is a clever wrinkle on this (for me) very boring (i.e. too hard) game.

At least it is clear who will be the final boss in whatever game he makes. The most evil, oppressive, disgusting, disgraceful, exploiting, aggressive thing there is...

Can you beat.. The White Western Male??

I am sick of all of this. There is gender parity in video gamers. There is huge amount of diversity in video game titles for whoever wants them. Think you have spotted a gap in the market? Great, make your billions, others will follow very, very quickly.

"For years I've been bored of trying to prove to my colleagues that women are human, that women aren't too unpredictable to study, that what women like is not less worthy nor boring nor wrong nor hard to understand. That it's garbage to say that women don't need deep, rich experiences."

The disdain for The White Male in this is ridiculous.

"For years I've been bored of trying to prove to my colleagues that women are human"

Does anyone reading this believe that his colleagues believe women are not human or worthy of respect?

This person is aiming straight for bullseye of a niche, vocal man hating demographic in order to make money.

So - can the games industry be saved, or does it need to get "disrupted"?

From the outside it definitely looks like it has the same problem as the movie industry, that is lots of money going into large conservative projects, where change is perceived as pure risk and little upside.

To be honest the article itself put me off first with the "white male" stuff, but I must admit that it sums up mostly what I feel about games today. While I really admire the graphics (Battlefield 1 for example), the kind of dead end gameplay makes me sad.

I'm wondering what the necessary environment would be to incubate change there. It's still not the size of the movie industry (on a company level at least), so there should be room for development.

On the other hand, from a technical perspective, with the tools we have today (Unity etc.) there is a very solid foundation for quality independent developments. So that's at least one positive outlook.

As you hinted, independent studios are already taking the ball and rolling with it. It doesn't need to be disrupted, although that would be welcome. There is already a thriving community of consumers (less numerous but more discretionary and willing to shell out money for quality) that actively seek the newest developments in the gaming scene.

Let me turn this on its head.

The industry is building games for what market research tells it is wanted by people who play their games. The claim is that part of the market is not being targeted, and this is a group of women who do not define themselves as gamers, nor are they interested in gaming.

It is quite possible that there is no unserved market.

I believe it is an artistic mistake to target an audience in the way the author is intending with her studio. She mentions, "women aren't too unpredictable to study" and "what women like", as though what she learned from the "white male" centric industry is how to pander to a market for profit.

I'm a male individual and whats said here really resonates with me. I have never been that interested with fighting/action games, Fallout has always been my most favourite game and its less the combat but really the open-world adventure that appeals.

For those who don't like typical games, you might enjoy theme park builders, city builders or simulators. They have gaming elements, but are mainly about designing and using your imagination and skill with the tools provided.

I'm currently enjoying Planet Coaster. If I had kids I would be granting them more "screen time" if they played these applications rather than shooters. For younger kids, titles such as Minecraft fall into this category too. Having something to show after countless hours of playing is always better than not having anything to show.

That said, who isn't guilty of sinking hundreds of hours into nothing more than thrills and rank in some action/sport game.

> Linear novels and films are less relevant now for reflecting our realities.

Citation needed.

No they are not. There is so much variety right now for so many audiences its unbelievable. I would even say its the golden age of videogames, even kings quest like games are making it big again.

I disagree with the notion that because life is hard video games should be easy. I think lots of people vent frustrations through video games, and get a sense of accomplishment when they do hard things. It's one hard thing in life you can get really good at. And it doesn't mean the game has to attack you. The game Fez comes to mind. Nothing in the game can harm you, but there are tough puzzles.

Unlike the usual at least this one ended with the author stating they were going to work on the problem. These types of articles usually end by telling me why I am wrong and what I should be doing.

Did anybody else find the font distracting? The little connecting thing between "st" is too ostentatious, particularly when the site does not respect other typographical conventions, like the difference between n- and m- dashes. (See, for example, the parenthetical statement in the second sentence. It should use the m- rather than the n- dash usually reserved for hyphenated words.)

Edit: On second viewing, the issue with strange "st" font artifacts was fixed when I enabled java-script.

I was going to reply, you don't seem to be seeing the font that's on the page. The font they're using is a renamed copy of Baskerville eText, and it doesn't have an 'st' ligature. It does have 'ff' and 'fi', you can see a sample here: http://myfonts.us/td-JZwQMI

The css for the page enables ligatures however, and falls back to the browser's own serif; so you were probably seeing the ligatures from your own default font. I'm guessing Adobe Caslon Pro, because it's widely available and has a very distinct loop ligature for 'st'. http://myfonts.us/td-C4VrUX

Good luck. You'll create another game that the next blogger will ignore when they write about video games being boring.

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.

That's not what the article says at all.

Someone doesn't know about Killer Queen yet ;)

There is nothing to support the author's typical feminist schtick of using diversity as a shorthand for blaming white men for the problems observed. Video games already have a diverse, demographically blind audience, that's why they're cheap mass entertainment. They're class and race-blind, and women do play them.

Games can offer a free space to explore, play and excel, away from the judgement of real life, often with a completely arbitrary character. For the entire bottom half of society, that's very appealing, and it's not "pseudo-masculine nonsense". Relationship mechanics are popular with men too, with Mass Effect's crew of cameraderie and romance being a hugely popular AAA example. So popular, the lack of a respectful ending pissed off its fanbase, whose desire for meaning and depth then got spun into an accusation of entitlement and obsession.

What we've seen the last 10 years is games have become more shallow, favoring gambling systems and skinner boxes over mechanics and systems. Ironically, it's mostly women playing these social and mobile games. In fact, it is hilarious that she talks of "rich, deep experiences" but then holds up "Kim Kardashian: Hollywood" as an example in the very next sentence, which is literally a cash-grab celebrity reskin of an existing game.

She complains that "we've stopped listening to each other", that the conversation is "evolving slowly" and that people don't think "women are human", but she pulls the same dehumanizing routine by painting the entire existing industry and its customers with the same tired old brush. Perhaps she should consider "that what [men] like is not less worthy nor boring nor wrong nor hard to understand". And if she wants "compassion and respect and fearlessness", she could start by practicing what she preaches.

Does this article scare you? You sound very defensive. I'm sorry to inform you that we do have a culture problem that is well documented, and you have identified yourself as part of the problem.

> Video games already have a diverse, demographically blind audience

Do you have some data to support your assertion there? That would mean that the same number of men and women play games. Because I've worked in games, and the publishers acknowledge that games are biased toward young white men. The publishers have been trying to create games for girls, and the girls frequently won't buy or play them because, according to their research, boys won't play games oriented toward girls at all, and the feeling that girl oriented games are less cool actually gets adopted by the girls. Meanwhile games specifically and intentionally oriented toward boys outsell other types and continue to be produced.

I've never seen a survey anywhere that showed equal or greater numbers of women playing games, and most surveys are trying to boost the number of women by including games that most young men don't play. This is simply not "demographically blind".

http://www.polygon.com/2016/4/29/11539102/gaming-stats-2016-...

"60 percent of those who buy games most often are men, while the remaining 40 percent are women."

http://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/ESA-Essenti...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_culture#Demographic...

"according to a 2011 study showing that 58% of gamers are male and 42% female."

http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/12/15/who-plays-video-games-...

"Young men in particular play games and identify as “gamers.” Fully 77% of men ages 18 to 29 play video games (more than any other demographic group), compared with 57% of young women – a 20-point difference."

I notice your statistics are about things like "buys games more often" and "plays games and identifies as gamers (conjunction fallacy?).

Those are things that videogame publishers care about a lot, I suppose, because they have to do with sales and branding.

But they have nothing to do with the parent comment's assertion about the demography of videogamers as a whole. Poor minorities may just be playing less profitable games.

The definition of the demographics of games is the people who play games. What are you even talking about?

I know that is what you intended to talk about, but I'm pointing out that it's not what your sources are talking about. They are about who buys games, about who identifies as gamer (i.e. is more susceptible to marketing)

Only one of those four quotes said something about buying games, but you used plural language twice now. You drew a false pattern where none exists.

The fact that the stats I provided shows the same gender bias no matter how you slice it - whether it's playing, or purchasing, or identifying as a gamer, means that the bias is robust. It is more evidence of the bias, not less.

But, if you think the 4 links I posted are all wrong, feel free to actually refute it with some data instead of faulty logic.

All gamers are susceptible to marketing, whether they buy games or play free ones, that is part of the problem. Our marketing system is oriented toward boys, it is reinforcing the cultural problem we have, you can't escape marketing or divorce the problem from marketing, because marketing is half the issue.

Ok, so the first source is the one that says "buy" instead of "play".

The second and third are alright, and also the least outrageous ones. The 2nd says the male/female ratio is 56% to 44% and the 3rd says 58% to 42%, which are not that bad.

The fourth one is about "identifying as gamers".

I agree there is a marketing problem from our point of view, but from the point of view of the marketers it makes sense to market to boys because they buy more (per source 1) and they are more loyal customers (per source 4). Women (and for that matter, poor people) still play a lot of games, just not the profitable ones (from the publisher's point of view).

You know, you make some good points, but unfortunately, you're so unbelievably condescending that I can't make it through an entire comment.

You're only making my point further by assuming "diversity" must imply a 50/50 gender distribution in the players.

Diversity implies differences in class, age, origin, occupation, and so on, and this is definitely the case in the consumer demographics. The fact that some games appeal more to men and others more to women is unsurprising, and irrelevant.

In fact, that you're seeing numbers such as 60/40 despite the game makers themselves being far more male-dominated suggests those men are doing a pretty decent job in appealing to people not like them.

> You're only making my point further by assuming "diversity" must imply a 50/50 gender distribution in the players. Diversity implies differences in class, age, origin, occupation, and so on

Sorry, but that's wrong. This is a common statistics mistake, let me try to help you.

You're conflating diversity of selection with diversity of demographics. There is one, and only one, way to demonstrate that something is "demographically blind".

The definition of "demographically blind" is when the number of people in each category playing games occurs in the same ratio as the number of people in that category in the general population. For example, for games to be demographically blind, there would need to be 3 men for every 2 women in the general population. The fact that men and women occur close to 50/50 in the population, and that men and women play games in a 3:2 ratio literally proves that games are not demographically blind.

Again I ask for some data. Have you worked in games? I have. Have you talked to publishers about cultural sexism? I have. Do you have any evidence for your claim that games are demographically blind? I provided some. Logic doesn't work, but feel free to prove me wrong with some data.

If you took a less condescending tone your argument might be more persuasive with a wider audience.

Sorry about that, I sometimes do get condescending when I feel strongly and am pretty certain that I'm right. It is a problem, and I do want to learn how to make a strong point and not be condescending.

Do you feel like my language was more condescending than the comment I replied to? I reacted to what I felt was more or less outright sexist language.

"There is nothing to support the author's typical feminist schtick of using diversity as a shorthand for blaming white men for the problems observed."

I realize I may be wrong, but I have to admit that I felt like my language, while a little more personal, was more measured and less condescending than that.

"Does that comment scare you? You sound very defensive. I'm sorry to inform you that we do have a discourse problem that is well documented, and you have identified yourself as part of the problem."

That was your comment. I changed a couple of words so it would look like it was directed at you.

Calling people defensive is very condescending and shitty, because it leaves people in a position where they have to choose between responding (and "proving you right", since they are now more "defensive") or leaving the conversation (and letting you "win" the argument by default).

Yes, agreed, I was condescending, and I will do better next time. To be honest, I've learned a lot about how to post civilly over the years on HN, and I still make mistakes. My post above is not an example of my best work. ;)

But - answer me honestly - do you think what I said is less accurate or more condescending than what @tnones said about Brie? Do you think my comment was out of proportion or very different in tone to what he said? He dismissed Brie's words as "typical feminist schtick" when she was relating her own feelings and talking about video games, and when she clearly has mountains more experience in the industry than @tnones. Do you think that was fair and not shitty, what @tnones said?

For my part, I'd agree with you. But I also have to admit that my tolerance for 'typical feminist schtick' is much lower than my tolerance for those who question it.

I'm fully aware that this is not fair, and I'm trying to compensate, but that's how it is for me right now. It's much harder to challenge something than to (somewhat callously) reject it, and that sucks.

I think your comment was a little more condescending because the other comment invited a response (just from a non-feminist perspective) while your argument pre-emptively dismissed every possible response.

I also think it was less accurate because I believe the feminism angle is a red herring.

Like, suppose I complained that videogames are rarely marketed to poor people like me who can't afford modern hardware (when was ever "terrible graphics" and "runs on old consoles" a selling point for a mainstream game?) and then postulated some discrimination by elites against poor people, or maybe that they live in a bubble and are out of touch with the tastes of the poorer masses.

One could reasonably answer that I'm missing the point, the industry is perfectly aware of my situation and just doesn't care because I am not profitable to them. Also maybe I should support small indie game studios instead of complaining that AAA games are not being made with me in mind.

Just replace poor with women and we have a similar situation. Notice how the actions of the author (working as a game designer) actually do serve to improve the situation and it's only her discourse that is, in my opinion, holding us back as gamers. So that's why some people don't have a lot of patience for the "typical feminist schtick" (though I think this feminist is sincere and not a schtick)

> I also think it was less accurate because I believe the feminism angle is a red herring.

How does that reflect on me? I didn't bring up feminism, @tnones did.

> Like, suppose I complained that videogames are rarely marketed to poor people ... maybe I should support small indie game studios instead of complaining

I don't understand where you're going with this. There is a class bias in the video games market, as with more or less our entire economy. That is probably much better documented than the sexism bias. But games cost money to make and money to buy, and they're a luxury entertainment product, so I'm not sure what there is to do about it, not do I see how that changes anything regarding cultural sexism.

> it's only her discourse that is, in my opinion, holding us back as gamers.

What did she say that is holding you back? How is it holding you back or working against gamers? Did we read the same article? She's trying to appeal to more gamers, not fewer, she's trying to help people who don't current like games start to like them and see games the way gamers see games... I'm confused.

I know that part didn't reflect on you. You asked about my opinion on the accuracy, and the thing we were trying to be accurate about was OP's article, right?

You know how men make more money than women? And how white people make more money than black people? We should expect then that more white men will buy luxury goods like videogames, right? No additional sexism needs to be postulated, is what I'm saying. You are double-counting the evidence.

> She's trying to appeal to more gamers, not fewer, she's trying to help people who don't current like games start to like them and see games the way gamers see games.

We all are. We are on the same side, some people just think the author is doing it wrong. I myself think the author is doing most things right (she is an actual game designer working on fixing the problem she complains about), but her complaints sound misguided and superfluous. They don't match with some people's experiences of trying to persuade their friends to play games, which means she was generalizing from a small sample and her theory might be wrong. (not the practice, though, since she is an actual game designer)

> the thing we were trying to be accurate about was OP's article, right?

No, you said my comment was less accurate, because feminism, not that the article was less accurate. Except I didn't bring up feminism. Nor did Brie. @tnones did, his comments were inaccurate.

> You are double-counting the evidence.

How so? I was disagreeing with @tnones, who said there's "nothing" to support Brie's point of view. "Video games already have a diverse, demographically blind audience". "They're class and race-blind..."

Those statements are factually incorrect, and my comment was simply addressing that. I provided evidence to someone who just denied that there are any biases in games at all.

You have just acknowledged race, class, and sex biases, and it sounds like you also disagree with @tnones and agree with me.

> We are on the same side, some people just think the author is doing it wrong... her complaints sound misguided and superfluous... she was generalizing from a small sample and her theory might be wrong. (not the practice, though, since she is an actual game designer)

This sounds so presumptuous to me. Brie was a lead programmer (not designer) on Child of Light & Assassin's creed. She has more than a decade of experience leading teams making the very games you're defending, and your conclude her remarks are superfluous based on some internet commentary??

There is data that supports what she's saying, it's easy to find with almost no effort, if you look. Publishers agree with what she's saying, I know because I've talked to some. Like Brie, they're also trying to find healthier markets that attract a broader base and appeal to women as well as minorities, old people, poor people, etc.

You said her remarks are holding gamers back. What did you mean? How are you being held back? Why don't you share your experiences that shed some light on your point of view, or point us to some data that backs up your position that the industry is going the right direction and that Brie's is misguided?

Brie did bring up feminism. Or rather, she uncritically brought up the white male gamer stereotype, which is worse. That is the "feminist shtick" that tnones was complaining about.

I acknowledge bias in who pays for videogames, not who plays them. My friends and I play lots of videogames but we don't show up in any publisher's radar because we are poor and play mostly old games, used games and pirated games. We are fine with that and do not write blog posts complaining that the gaming industry discriminates against poor people.

We still play more than many rich people, we just play different things.

Brie is a very good designer but (by her own story) bad at giving gaming recommendations to her friends. Those are separate skills that do not transfer well. She learned the wrong lesson from her experience when she blamed the sexist culture instead of her own inability to understand her friend's tastes. To her credit she also learned a correct lesson: "It wasn't about answering them; it was about asking them".

As for my own experiences, I think they would bore you. Where I come from we have our own petty dramas like this game journalist for a local paper who means well but is so cringey that it ends up reinforcing the basement-dweller stereotypes. This worries us because where I come from games aren't seen as a high-status upper-middle-class luxury, but rather as a low-status diversion and escape from reality (kind of like opiate for the masses). It feels like an entirely different situation that someone like Brie, who complains unironically about a "a state of constant shock, of constant stimulation", would not understand.

> Or rather, she uncritically brought up the white male gamer stereotype, which is worse.

Would you mind quoting what you're talking about? And would you mind explaining how something she said that is true, and has data to back it up, and that you've already acknowledged, is "worse" than what @tnones said, which has no basis in fact? Is this more a problem of style than of content, like with my comments? You complained about my condescension, and yet agreed with my facts and disagreed with @tnones.

You realize that complaining about feminist schtick is a sexist male chauvanist thing to do, right? @tnones is being a hypocrite, doing the very thing he's complaining about.

> I acknowledge bias in who pays for videogames, not who plays them.

Still, despite the evidence I provided? All four of the links showed biases in players separate from purchasing. Even though you didn't like the quote about who buys games, the first link still had separate demographics data about who playes games. If you follow the link, you will find separate sections on "demographics" and "buying habits".

The data does show a clear bias in who plays games, not just who buys them. Why would there be huge a gender difference in purchasing patterns, and not in playing patterns? That doesn't make sense, but I'd love to see some supporting data. There's plenty more data on game demographics, btw, I Google searched for all of 5 seconds just to have some links to back up what I already knew from 15 years working in games and films, that cultural sexism exists in games. Nobody who's actually working in the games industry is disputing the existence of cultural sexism in games. It's not one group or one thing, it's all of us, the makers, the marketers, the players, the buyers, the publishers. The good news is problem is being slowly solved, it is becoming less of a problem over time, thanks to the people that are acknowledging the situation and helping to fix it. Not helpful at all is denying that it exists like @tnones.

Your own sources say that playing games is fairly equal. Two of them say it's fifty-something to forty-something. The bias is too small, and the difference in wealth between privileged-straight-white-males and the rest of us is enough to explain it. Notice also that according to source two, women who play videogames are in average older than men who play videogames, suggesting another wealth correlation.

> I Google searched for all of 5 seconds just to have some links to back up what I already knew from 15 years working in games and films

That is precisely the problem. You already knew what you wanted to find, so even though we are looking at the same data, we are interpreting it differently based on our different experiences.

>You realize that complaining about feminist schtick is a sexist male chauvanist thing to do, right?

By saying things like that you reinforce @tnones point. I disagree with him but your dismissive attitude is not proving him wrong.

> Why would there be huge a gender difference in purchasing patterns, and not in playing patterns

That's what the data you found says, so don't dismiss it just because you can't easily explain it. The explanation I can come up with is that games are expensive and wealthy people buy more of them. Straight-white-male-privilege correlates to wealth.

EDIT: I think your mistake could be that you believe people who can't afford games don't play them. As a person with 25 years of experience in being poor, I can assure you that is not the case.

> Not helpful at all is denying that it exists like @tnones.

If @tnones is right then complaining about sexism is a waste of time and effort that detracts from the effort we should be applying to the "real issue", whatever it is. Like you say, the problem seems to be going away on its own (just like the gender wealth gap, further supporting my theory that we are looking at wealth correlates).

I don't think discussion about the "real cause" of the problem or even about whether the problem exists at all is unhelpful, as long as it is kept civil and does not detract from the real work of people like the author.

EDIT: Forgot you asked me about quotes! Just search for the words white and male in the article. Almost every time she mentions those it's to put forward a stereotype.

Do you think my comment was out of proportion or very different in tone to what he said?

I think there is a noticeable tone difference, assuming one is sensitive to these sorts of things.

He dismissed Brie's words as "typical feminist schtick"

While this is true, as a whole if you compare his first couple of sentences to yours, his remains much more closely related to the overall subject matter. He dismisses the author's words, but goes right into talking about video games.

On the other hand, your opening is too focused on tnones. The subject is always tnones and neglects the topic of video games. You can see this with the constant instances of "you" throughout the first line of the comment.

Now maybe this is because you're trying to establish the thesis that tnones is part of the problem as you state in your first line. However, I think approaching your rebuttal this way has led us to where we are now where you come off as condescending. Ultimately it distracts too much from the subject matter and distracts from the points you make later.

Simply leading off with "we do have a culture problem that is well documented" without anything else in the first line would have been a better way to start. The impact of a statement like "you have identified yourself as part of the problem" would have been better in your conclusion after all was said and done.

You're right, I hear you, and I appreciate the thoughtful analysis. I could have skipped the first line entirely and my comment would have been better for it. Notes for next time. I'm taking the punishment and leaving it there.

My mistake was letting @tnones' comment bother me and replying while irritated.

So let's get back to the subject matter. Is there a gender gap in games, and what should or should not be done about it? Is @tnones right that there's no evidence of a gap?

Why would you think that attacking tnones' comment is a reasonable defense of your comment?

I find the entire quoted line to be unnecessary. The initial question "Does this article scare you?" doesn't serve a purpose, it's just filler. I wouldn't expect the other person to really respond to such a question, nor do I think the conversation should be or is trying to be centered on the question and its possible answer. The post would have been better off not being framed by that question and instead just dive right into the actual arguments.

60-40 is actually not so bad; much closer a split than I would have expected.

The kind of "equality" you're arguing for is seriously overrated and often leads to more discrimination.

> it is hilarious that she talks of "rich, deep experiences" but then holds up "Kim Kardashian: Hollywood" as an example in the very next sentence, which is literally a cash-grab celebrity reskin of an existing game.

The sentence you refer to is calling attention to people sneering at that game. So you sneering at it is a bit weird. You're just supporting her point. I've heard it's a solid game, as you say it was mildly successful even before it had a big media franchise attached. Do you sneer at every TV show or movie tie-in? The Walking Dead by Telltale for example?

The Kim Kardashian game is a hollow pay-to-win slugfest full of time locks, that made millions just by slapping on a celebrity face. If we are supposed to dislike video games that are boring and don't color outside the lines, as the author suggests, then that would be a pretty good candidate.

The Walking Dead on the other hand is an expertly written, uniquely styled game, which is tied-in to its source IP pretty much in name only. It would've won awards without the branding just the same.

Do you see the difference?

I can see differences, but when you sneered at the Kardashian game, the reasons you gave applied just as much to a Telltale Walking Dead game, or a Lego Batman game.

So now you're clarifying that you're sneering at the Kardashian game because it's boring, and it made too much money from all the people who play it all the time.

Where are you getting this hate for IP tie-ins from? I was talking about game mechanics and _soulless_ cash grabs. The opposite of The Walking Dead and the Lego games.

First off, the KK:H financial success isn't laudable, it's simply predictable and how companies like Zynga got rich off pilfering the creative ideas of others. All free-to-play gambling games, and gambling in general, make their money from a tiny subset of their audience who are addicted and spend enormous amounts of money to keep playing in the face of artificial barriers. The games rely on word of mouth via free players to reach those juicy targets. The celebrity face was the difference between just another copy-cat and a viral success with tons of media coverage.

Second, to deride "pseudo-masculine bullshit" in search of rich meaning while considering Kardashian beyond reproach, that makes the author's already shaky premises particularly lacking in self-awareness. The game is the actual embodiment of vapid celebrity and appearance-obsessed femininity on top of being an archetype of soulless box ticking.

But see, there's nothing _wrong_ with making games that play to stereotypical female interests either, if done well. Compare for example to the Desperate Housewives game, which is a Sims spin-off aimed squarely at female players who want juicy drama and catty social dynamics. It involves real storytelling, while the gamified aspects are only there to support the player agency.

Those games already exist. The author instead preferred to spin a tale of female oppression at the hands of white men, while promoting her own unproven studio. Color me unsurprised.

Though I agree with what you say - I would say that the conventions of games are gender oriented.

They are made by guys, for guys, and girls can play along.

The 'mission orientation' - the 'guns/violence' - and 'sports' - while not exclusively a guy thing - they are definitely guy-leaning.

Let me say it differently: if you took a totally random sample of girls and gave them each $100M to go off and build the 'best game for them' - they might look really, really different.

I don't like the political aspect of 'isms' in games ... I really could care less. But I do think that there are pretty big differences between genders - on the whole.

To add: I'm not remotely making a political point, I'm not necessarily supporting the thesis of article, and I'm saying nothing about 'women in gaming' yada yada.

I'm just saying: I think that especially console game themes are generally a little gender-skewed.

Fully agreed. I did a stint @ EA a while back. At least amongst our team, our culture made state school party frats look like enlightened ones.

One of the many "games/pranks" other devs would play was called cubicle cropduster. As you walked through the cubicle jungle, one would cropdust a colleague's area by silently evacuating a generous amount of methane.

When you work people like beasts of burden, dont be surprised when the behavior becomes more, ahem, primal

Moat modern games are made to sell. If the buyers are looking for X then it makes sense that a business should provide them with X to turn the most profit.

If females, or anyone, wants separate gameplay mechanics then they need to reward that with cold cash to build an economy and incentivize creation. Else it's all just words and forcing a square block into a circle hole. Cash is the only way to lasting change (see the mobile space for example).

I get it, I fully agree.

That said: the industry is really built around conventions and culture. Guys making games for guys. Marketing to guys. The entire culture skews guys.

Of course they might have a hard time 'selling to girls'.

This might seem a bit 'sexist' or whatever to use a 'fashion' example, but just as a crude idea ... maybe a social game that made you a 'designer' - and you could design fashion/clothing ... you had to get a budget, design a 'runway show' ... and then get 'audience' (other players) to chime in and comment. You have to hustle and deal to sell the clothes or whatever. Hustle movie stars to schlep your stuff. Have real fashion designers and celebs chime in. Invent new textures, new fabrics.

Ok, ok, maybe a terrible idea in reality - but I'm just trying to illustrate a completely different scenario/culture/setting for which there exists no context in gaming as we understand it today.

Anyhow. I worked at an Fortune 50 and we were trying to market our 'mostly guy-ish' product to girls, and sitting around the table with 50-something rich fat men who all shopped at Wallmart, and their big idea was 'make it pink' - and that was it! :). Too funny.

>That said: the industry is really built around conventions and culture. Guys making games for guys. Marketing to guys. The entire culture skews guys.

Then there is roughly 50% of the population not being serviced. Hire some female talent, get some investments on your easy-to-market product, and make yourself rich via a successful business catering to the female demographic of gamers.

If one fails in such a large, uncatered to market, it is one of three things:

    1) Failed marketing
    2) Failed product
    3) Your assumptions were wrong

I always see talk about how things need to change - but nobody wants to put their money where their mouth is. If the problem really is a chicken/egg problem then hatch an egg.

The problem: There is no large female demographic of gamers for devs to market to. There is no large female demographic of gamers because there are no devs marketing/making games for them.

The problem as I see it is that nobody pays attention to games like Neopets or Candy Crush skewing female. Girls and woman are marketed to by entirely different genres of games. My money is on the fact they are more interested in the games they're buying and playing and that the industry has enough money and research to have a good idea of what they're doing.

Why is it that female devs would be required to make a game that women would like?

Because the argument is that men aren't capable of doing so [0]. I don't believe that is the case, but it is the argument being hinted at. It is also a very common argument.

I think the issue is culture, not 'female devs'.

Maybe not so much in games - but in almost every other field where devs work - they have a lot of influence over the product. So it's part of the issue.

Devs are usually the one's founding the company ...

But gaming, I guess not so much. So maybe less of a requirement.

But remember that most 'great things' come from inspiration all around. Game devs might 'love games' and put that 'extra umph' into it to make the game great. The little tweaking that's inspired.

My suspicion, without a background in marketing, is that marketing concepts towards males are more clearly identified in terms that easily apply to gaming. Men like sports: winning, fighting, competition, stealth, dominance. Some men don't like sports: politics, dominance, competition, exploring.

I recall from a psychology lecture in one of my courses, many years ago, that women tend to play games like the Sims as if they were dollhouses, building their dream lives. On the other hand, my ex- used to play it in a masculine fashion, torturing the Sims by shutting them in a room without a door or a toilet, sending them for a swim and removing the ladder, things like that.

Exactly what this means, I'm not sure, but I think it is a piece of the puzzle.

"Hire some female talent, get some investments on your easy-to-market product, and make yourself rich via a successful business catering to the female demographic of gamers."

It's not remotely that easy.

If it were, they would have done it long ago.

>It's not remotely that easy.

So why do you guys feel so entitled to have games especially marketed at the female demographic?

Nobody should go out of their way and create a game that is catering to the female demographic, just so some internet feminists can feel better about themselves and afterwards not even buy/play the game

I feel that the breakdown of gender norms is not necessary, and many people in our country are trying to do so right now in the name of "equality."

However, that's just my opinion. If other people disagree and see potential in the market, then let them design that game and prove me wrong.

Please try to be a bit less condescending on this site. We try to be more professional here.

The first decade of computer games, the all-time best-seller was King's Quest. It wasn't combat-related. It was problem-solving. It sold double what anything else had ever sold. Because girls liked it too. That was all it took to be #1 - double your demographic.

If memory serves me, the #1 selling game of all time is Tetris, and it's 50/50 guys girls.

Could be wrong.

The Sims did pretty well too, didn't it, and it was quite popular with the female demographic. I vaguely recall something similar for Myst and the genre it created (not to mention the traditional adventure games).

Chicken-egg problem. You can't figure out what different people would like if you keep churning out the same things that once attracted a particular audience over and over again, just bigger and with more pixels. Change is the only way to attract newer audiences (see the mobile space for example.)

It's only a "problem" for large game companies with unimaginative executives. For indie developers it's a blessing, and rightly so.

The idea that games are made for guys is in itself sexist, is it not? They're just games, and you're free to interpret them however you'd like.

I don't know if it's sexist. If it's a fact, it's just an observation. Facts should ideally not be sexist (although I understand the can of worms such a statement might open).

I'm inclined to believe that gaming in general is tilted towards the things that men like (whether culturally or biologically). And I'd welcome game producers/financiers/whatever to invest in games that offer things that traditionally non-gamers would be into, but I can also understand that those kinds of projects are riskier than going for an existing market.

I am of the opinion that men and women are biologically different, and this leads to psychological differences that create social and cultural differences between the genders. However, unlike many, I don't believe that the differences between the genders are evil, and I don't believe that we should be breaking down all of those differences in the name of equality.

With that said, if you see potential in the market, by all means make a video game targeted towards everyone & get rich. That is your right.

Not everybodys escapism fantasy Highpoint in live is scoring a diplomatic victory at a cocktail party, to restore some social equilibrium.

Only if the idea that tampons are made for women is sexist. It's just an absorbent object, and you're free to use it how you like.

These products weren't things that exploded from a volcano, or discovered in the center of an apple pulled from a tree. They were created by people to attract other people enough to surrender cash.

I wish this were a joke. A tampon is unambiguously designed for women. Video games are designed for those who enjoy them.

> Video games are designed for those who enjoy them.

This doesn't make any sense. How can something be designed for the people who enjoy the thing that hasn't been made yet?

Video games aren't made out of thin air. There is an art and a science to video game creation that involves novelty, difficulty, and mastery. That takes a lot of planning and designing. Obviously that means that video games need to be designed BEFORE they're created. ;)

Maybe it is? It's hard to say, because it depends on what kind of question you're asking.

Are you saying that the statement "games are made for guys" requires you to first believe that there are qualities of games that men inherently like more than women?

Or are you asking about an observational statement that games seem to be designed to target men as buyers by catering to traditionally male interests?

I think you could make a case that the implied belief in the first statement is itself sexist, but I don't think that's what the parent poster meant. We could probably have an interesting discussion on the subject, and I'd be curious if there is any rigorous research on the topic.

But I think the parent poster made the second observation, which can be true or false independent of any judgement of sexism.

Certain free-to-play MMORPG's with fantastically revealing female armors and very well endowed female characters are very clearly catering to a predominantly male audience. It doesn't take too much interpretation to call them sexist by the "I wouldn't want my daughter to grow up in a world that looked like that" standard. You can disagree with me on whether that actually constitutes "sexist," but I think we'd generally agree that those portrayals of women are problematic.

It's more subtle in most games, but I think there's still a point there about designing games for the existing hugely predominantly male gamer demographic.

Honestly, I agree with the statement that games cater towards men more, but I like playing devil's advocate. I personally believe that psychological differences between men and women make men enjoy video games more, and it's not something that we should attempt to break down because of equality. There are differences between genders in every culture of the world. Instead of trying to blur the line between the genders, I feel we should embrace and celebrate those differences.

> I think we'd generally agree that those portrayals of women are problematic.

Why is it problematic if a game does this? Is it because it makes the game player sexist? If so, then it has the same argument that people make against violent video games in that it makes people violent, even though the data doesn't back that up.

Generally I play somewhat niche strategy games (paradox generally) that are absolutely not mission oriented or particularly violent (most of the violence is abstract). Every time there is a community poll it turns out that only about 1% of the community are female, which is way below the average of the games you're talking about.

So I very much doubt it's the mission orientation, guns/violence or sports that are putting women off games.

In the last few years, since the Walking Dead series came out, my sister has gotten into videogames for the first time really in her life and we play together. This was not the case when we were kids. It is not the case for most videogames. But games like that, games that are simple and playable by players with virtually no controller skill, games with depth, story, and character appeal to some non-gamers like my sister in ways that no game before has. They appeal to me more than any other type of game and I've been gaming for decades.

The biggest factor, I'd say, is how frustrating a game is and how easy it is for someone who doesn't regularly play games to pick up. If a game requires a lot of hand-eye coordination, a lot of repetition, a lot of dying, it will not work. Period. I have no doubt you can do tons of studies to prove it. People like my sister are not interested in trying to find the skeleton key inside the blue ruby inside the giant book inside the treasure chest so that they can open some door to get a battery to operate an elevator so they can continue the game. The more nonsensical the gameplay, the less non gamers are interested in it. This pretty much eliminates 95-99% of videogames as frustrating garbage (and let's face it, for people without controller skills, they are nothing more than that).

It's amazing to me to see how many games fit into that remaining 1-5% of games and how fun they can be. I'm not interested in being frustrated anymore either, so other than sports games, those are mostly the only games I play or have played in the last few years. Some companies are realizing this and making great games for a variety of people. Others are making the same old garbage that even videogame veterans like me are frankly sick and tired of. Then they wonder why people hate their videogames. Like with most things, the answer is obvious.

I think that there X and Y chromosome games. With some subset of X liking Y and vice versa.

For me - the greatest game ever is Serious Sam - give me a chaingun, enemies and bullets and I am happy as a worm in an apple. Obviously Katrina would not find the game interesting. She also would probably not enjoy a Thaddeus raid. Or ripping spine fatality.

Testosterone loves adversarial, brutal, violent games. Estrogen - not so much.

One interesting correlation is that women that like real metal (not bon jovi) and beer tend also to like the video games that serve mostly the male audience.

So big part of the market is underserved. But I think that for that we must put inclusiveness on hold - nobody in the publishing industry expect sizable male audience for 50 shades, or sizable female for Brandon Sanderson.

You know, I might not think the same way that other white men do, so kindly take your sexist racism and shove it.

TLDR: Women author knows dont like actual gameplay part of games, they like narratives. She cant come up with narrative driven games therefore all 'Games Are Boring'.

What about Telltale? Life is Strange?

i don't game anymore because

1> games are very buggy 2> i need super computers to play them

There are no planescape torments anymore..

The game industry urgently needs to find out how to satisfy the taste of art historians who like feminist art. Maybe a first person shooter where you play a vagina that shoots with tampons?

That said, while I love game, only very few games are really fun to me these days. It seems only ever few year there is a game that captivates me. Discovery is another problem: maybe there are more good games, and I just don't hear about them.

People who hate games should really go find other stuff to write about. Their articles are boring.

In this article author clearly states that they loves video games.

that really doesnt mean much. Saying I love books or movies doesnt say much either, there are way too many types and genres.

She does make it clear that she dislikes the AAA fps blockbuster,but I personally love them.

Are you kidding?

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?

The author does sound like the type of person that would complain about braindead blockbusters in cinema and literature too.

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.

Titles are not articles.

For all I care it was written by someone who recommended Skyrim, a boring game filled with poor design decisions.

single player games are boring.

EDIT:

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.

BTW TotalBiscuit has absolutely slammed the Battlefield 1 (there's gotta be a prize for worst video game titles) campaign: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkDysHo83lw.

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.

> 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

Battlerite = 5 minute games

Paladin = 12 minutes at most

The whole market is moving to shorter games for exactly the same reason.

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