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I think there's a lot going on here. Some of it is just general maturity and experience. Things that were novel when you were a child wear off when you're older. Those achievements that you aimed for as a child (having 'perfect' gameplay) may seem less meaningful when you're an adult, especially in the context of other real world achievements.

The loss of "novelty", to me, one of the most challenging things about aging. You can't feel the excitement of certain things again as you did when you did them for the first time. I think this is why it's important to try new hobbies.

Seconding this. I think the game that most set my world alight as a kid was Star Control II. It was a wonderfully realised world of spaceships, alien races, battles and a sprawling story line. It blew my mind. But if I was presented with a game of similar magnitude today I'd have a pretty muted reaction. (I also probably wouldn't have time to play it!).

I feel the same way about many things, like (to keep on the space theme) all the recent iterations of Star Wars and Star Trek. People love to complain that the new SW trilogy (or the prequel trilogy) or Star Trek Discovery is a load of rubbish but the reality is that we're just older. Things aren't going to spark in the way they did when we first watched. And that's fine.

> But if I was presented with a game of similar magnitude today I'd have a pretty muted reaction

Or maybe not. I'm yet to see any modern game that would even remotely approach the magnitude of SC2. So far, the closest competitor was the original Mass Effect game, itself clearly influenced by Star Control games, but even it failed to surpass it.

The problem here is that it is basically impossible for a modern game to achieve the magnitude of those old CRPGs if you just mean that in the sense of how big the universe is and how much story it contains, but with modern AAA standards. The man-hours required to create all that content would be ridiculous.

That being said, if you count the totality of the Mass Effect trilogy, including all its DLC, I think you do get the magnitude of one Star Control 2, and it's generally fantastic.

You don't need to create everything with modern AAA standards. Games like FTL show that you can achieve a lot with much less effort. You just need to be bolder. And i think being bolder is the hard part: games these days are more timid in their aprroach to than they were in early 90s, like always trying to stick to a working formula. Mashups of different genres like SC2 are somehow nonexistent.

If you think that, you're not looking hard enough. There are countless incredible (and bold) indie games doing really interesting and unusual things.

Off the top of my head:

- Outer Wilds (an entire solar system is a puzzle stuck in a time loop)

- Hades (a roguelike where dying progresses the story)

- Slay the Spire (a hybrid deckbuilder/roguelike where different runs can produce drastically different gameplay and builds)

- Dead Cells (a hybrid Metroidvania/Roguelike with Diablo-style random weapon/item spawns that force the player to use different strategies with every playthrough)

- Into the Breach (from the guys who made FTL)

- Undertale (a fourth-wall-breaking RPG in which you can talk your way out of any battle, with multiple endings)

- Signs of the Sojourner (a narrative deckbuilding game where your cards represent different types of conversation)

- Her Story (a game all about watching pieces of footage from a deposition about a death... or is it a murder?... and trying to figure out what happened)

- Baba Is You (a puzzle game in which the rules are also objects in the game that can be moved and changed)

- Hypnospace Outlaw (a simulation of an alternate-reality 90's internet)

- The Stanley Parable (a game about following directions, or not following them and irritating the narrator)

- The Beginner's Guide (a narrated tour through the games of another developer, possibly without their approval)

StarSector - ~Star Control

RimWorld - "sims"

AFAIK RimWorld is more like Dwarf Fortress

Of this list, I've seen ads of most on Steam and checked the reviews. That's not what I'm talking about. Most of your list is still one genre, maybe with some new mechanics (not so new in Hades, for example, I've seen shades of this in 1992's Ragnarok).

What I was talking about are games like Star Control 2 and Dune 1, where they boldly mixed completely different genres and, in SC2 case, added a very deep lore and managed to feed it to you at the right pace, not overwhelming you with information, and giving it in entertaining way.

For example, I would love some nice space RPG with FTL-like space combat. But they just don't mix genres that way these days.

Star Control 2 shipped with a text file containing a story where Fred Ford and Paul Reiche disappeared for 9 months to hole up in a cabin in Alaska building out the game (including planet surface exploration and hundreds of pages of alien dialogue), in isolation from their publisher, who had to hire a private investigator to find them.

I have no idea if there's any truth to it, but it sounded like my idea of heaven for a long time. When I learned that they were still working together (Toys for Bob) many years later, I harbored a fantasy about going to work for them.

By pure coincidence, after playing Star Control 2 when I was about 8, my family moved to Novato, CA - home to Toys for Bob - when I was a bit older. I ended up getting a temp contract job there on the Madagascar game when I was 19. Paul and Fred were great to work with and as far as I know TfB is still a great place to work.

I doubt that Paul and Fred would have actually disappeared to write the game, but the story is 100% Paul's sense of humor.

It makes me happy to hear that, thank you for your reply.

Last I checked I had spent around 700hrs in skyrim...

I dunno... The Mandalorian has achieved everything that the prequels and episodes 7-9 were unable to; it did exactly the things folks said were impossible.

While I've been a fan of Discovery for the most part, and it occasionally shows glimpses of promise, it's largely not "Star Trek." The story telling is simply just not rooted same soul that Trek has been built upon. I'm okay with change, but not so much with creating flashy spectacles at the expense of meaningful story telling.

I know it's been discussed to death, but just wanted to say I was late to the Mandalorian and I completely agree with you— it felt very true to the Star Wars universe, while at the same time expanding it considerably and not relying on cheap recycling of past characters and plot arcs.

And all of this on the kind of technology platform which could easily have enabled the absolute worst of the Lucas instincts to thrive as far as overcomplicated plots and gee-whiz special effects. Somehow it managed to take us to a dozen different planets and yet stay firmly rooted in a story about parenthood— and that, between a faceless warrior and a voiceless puppet. Wild!

> I dunno... The Mandalorian has achieved everything that the prequels and episodes 7-9 were unable to; it did exactly the things folks said were impossible.

That's a good way to put it. Entirely agree.

Seeing characters from the original be the bad-ass your younger self imagined they were but couldn't be is what The Mandalorian achieved. They crafted a story that allowed that to happen.

check out The Orville, it is more of a classic star trek than the new official star treks

The story/campaign for SCII was great, but it also came with a local multiplayer arcade mode! It was an awesome time.

Star Control II was THE defining game of my childhood. After completing the quest - with difficulty, since my command of English then was not what it is now - my brother and I spent countless hours in Melee mode.

I remember being really bored with choosing the ships by hand and so reverse engineered the Ship Team format and wrote one of my first "for myself" programs in Turbo Pascal to generate random ship combinations.

Few years ago I replaced SCII story mode and found it to be a total delight, especially now that I recognize the fine humor in English.

And now I have two sons about the same age that I was, and they got hooked on Melee as well and would play each other and myself, bringing warm happiness to my heart. One of them drew some ships for me on paper and they're on my corkboard in here, making me smile every time I look to the left.

I wish there was a SC3!

> I wish there was a SC3!

:)

I, too, wrote a program that would assemble random teams of ships so you could have ladder style type combat amongst friends!

The driving factor is that some ships were virtually impossible to defeat in a skilled player's hand so we had to resort to random selection to be even remotely fair to everyone.

Freaking Utwig, man. I never had a really good answer to an Utwig with a skilled pilot. I would just throw ships at it in melee and expend way more than the "points" the Utwig ship is worth.

We used to play highest ranking vs lowest ranking ships a fair bit. If the Arilou didn't teleport into the planet more often than not, it would've been a lot more dangerous.

> The loss of "novelty", to me, one of the most challenging things about aging.

To me, this is where the “start a new company doing something good and interesting” kicks in, it seems. The best part of ageing seem to me that they grey hairs that I acquired during the last startup make it easier to the next one.

I feel the same way.

I'm really fascinated by speedrunners who can beat my favorite classic games less than an hour, sometimes in minutes. Some of that is cutting weird corners but often it's pure excellent execution.

I often wonder about doing that myself, playing hundreds of hours of a single game to master it. Putting all of my focus on a single game like I used to as a kid, but I don't find anything keeps my attention that way now.

I think partially it's what you said, more money than time and I naturally gravitate towards spending my time on novelty instead of mastery. That's just how my brain works.

The other piece is when I look back, I don't think I spend nearly as much time replaying the same things in the past as I feel like I did. I think those memories of playing and replaying games are somewhat distorted by my memories.

I also spent a great deal of time watching those games being played by friends and their siblings and so forth, during sleepovers and after school.

"I'm really fascinated by speedrunners who can beat my favorite classic games less than an hour, sometimes in minutes. Some of that is cutting weird corners but often it's pure excellent execution."

Ocarina of Time speedrunning has gotten to a really weird place now, where they basically set the character's name to a string of bytes which are executable code, and then de-reference a pointer to it and warp directly to the end credits, all within a few minutes of gaining control of Link. But, the community has a whole bunch of categories for different types of runs, from ones that are basically the Any% category before SRM (stale reference manipulation), to semi-legitimately beating all the dungeons (though with lots of sequence-breaking), to fully glitchless. It's a lot of fun watching some of those other-category runs for a taste of "normal" gameplay done at a very high level.

Another thing that's fun to watch runs of is randomizers (chest contents, quest rewards, sometimes even doors), since then you're not just seeing high level play, you're also seeing someone doing the live work of reasoning about their route through familiar-but-scrambled territory:

https://ootrandomizer.com/

I'm aware of all of this, but I'm really glad you posted it in case some others read it and it catches their interest.

OoT speedrunning is very unique, and since it was a game I played a lot as a kid I'm always excited to watch the ways it's beaten.

I do admit I prefer the categories that emphasize more gameplay though, even if the glitches are incredible.

I think it's just the novelty of things. And the free time aspect.

I remember playing Dragon Warrior on NES late into the night with friends. Grinding away to get that next item and leveling up to fight bigger monsters. It was really fun, really exciting.

A few years ago I got an emulator and fired it up. Played about 5 minutes before I couldn't continue. Just didn't have the desire to grind away. And the emulator had a fastfoward button, which I found. So I just kept zipping around and running into monsters, not even wanting to spend the time to fight them. Spoiled because I didn't have to die, I could just reset to a save point.

I dunno. Maybe that just happens when you get old. Maybe it's just that there's so much instant gratification. I remember playing zelda and meticulously making maps on graph paper etc. Today you can just look it up on the internet in a minute and print a glorious, in color complete map.

It's just not the same anymore.

This week I reconnected to the MUD I used to play 20 years ago. I'm amazed it's still running. I've forgotten nearly everything.

I've been having a blast these past few days exploring the vast world.

There's nothing that Google can tell me about it. There's still people playing (and building) it, so I can ask for help - my old clan is still going even - but there's no instant fix on everything.

I don't know how long it'll last, and the time it will take is too much to fully immerse, but I've already started making some maps and trying to tackle some quests.

Please share. Perhaps if a few more join it can last longer.

The MUD I think will be fine, it's my interest in playing it that I'm not so sure about :-)

As I said in the other reply on this thread, it's RavenMUD, ravenmud.com 6060.

Out of curiosity, which MUD?

I used to play EliteMUD a ton decades ago. We used to get up at 6am to grab some computer terminals at the city's computer center and play all day.

I could've played from home but the phone bill would've been crippling.

RavenMUD. It's now running on ravenmud.com port 6060.

Mmm, achievements don't really seem as special anymore for a variety of reasons. Everything is so regimented in games now. You get an achievement for completing the tutorial mission. You get an achievement for finding the thing you can't progress in the game without it in your possession. You get an achievement for collecting 1000 blivets from radio towers. It's all uninteresting, uninspired busywork or crap put into the game because it's expected.

There's also accumulated gaming experience. I've been gaming for more than 4 decades, there ain't nothing new under the sun.

Also, real life cheevos are harder, and some would say more important, to attain.

I'd say for me, the magic of a lot of things wore off a long time ago. YMMV. GL HF

As adults we've found higher payoff/cost activities and generally, at least for me, other people are more interesting than games. I never saw that coming.

EDIT: not to say that I don't still enjoy games, but games have to either be really fascinating (factorio, surviving mars, city skylines) on a technical level, be social (multiplayer minecraft with my kids), or emotionally engaging (some RPGs, but usually only one playthrough)

I think that's really on point for me. I try to recreate the magic I used to feel playing Ultima, Wing Commander, Gunship, Commanche, Falcon 3, etc. with modern games and find I just don't... care. In terms of personal activities, I could be building something cool in the garage, or out on a real-life adventure, or playing with some electronics experiment, or doing research on a topic of special interest to me. Games feel very boring and unproductive to me even though I periodically attempt to check myself on this.

Augmented Reality could bridge the gap. Take a look at Pokemon Go or Geocaching as examples.

Pokemon Go was the last game I really played and it was so incredibly fresh and had an experience I will never experience again.. crowds of people outside doing the same thing with servers crashing.

How rare is that?

I stopped playing it years ago when they changed the gym system from a stacked tower to some system where your guys would lose health automatically just by being in the gym. Took the challenge out of it.. I was a completely solo player and enjoyed the challenge of taking on a fully stacked gym tower by myself.

Just as well. It did a number on my phone's battery with their poor coding (e.g. loading graphical assets over and over through an uncached encryption routine or something).

I'd hazard a guess your WC goals would've been seeing how many variations of the storyline there were. If memory serves there were 4, you doing great, OK, not so great or terrible and the war story would depend on how you do. Suppose you could include 5 in being blown up.

There were a range of medals you could get, too. Think I had to complete it several times over before I was sure how many there were!

I played 100s of games on the Amstrad CPC and Amiga in late 80s/early 90s. Think for me the magnus opus of gaming was the possibility of being able to play people online. The level of competition is high and it almost feels like work, so I stick to turn based games like Civ - but still fond of all the nostalgic game titles.

I was thinking along similar lines the other day. One of the things I realised was that imagination played a much bigger part in my enjoyment of games than it does now (as it did with playing with toy cars, lego etc. back at that age).

I vividly remember playing one of the Shinobi games on the Sega Master system, and spent a huge amount of time wandering back and forth in the levels thinking about the townsfolk who occupied various buildings and their work days.

There was also a mountain range in one of the backgrounds on one level, and I recall spending time planning to explore it later, even pausing the game to draw a map of an imagined village there.

Of course now the vocabulary of games (and my understanding of them) has changed a lot, and it's far more obvious what the limits of a game and its interactive areas are - to me they're now throwaway pieces of entertainment, no longer worlds to inhabit and explore.

> I vividly remember playing one of the Shinobi games on the Sega Master system, and spent a huge amount of time wandering back and forth in the levels thinking about the townsfolk who occupied various buildings and their work days.

I remember Choplifter for the Sega Master System. Half the fun was the story in my head regarding the hostages, the behind the scenes operation of rescue attempt, etc. And the tragedy of it all going wrong when you'd crash with people on board...

I still prefer to play a few games many many times instead of a lot of games a little. I've replayed the Dark Souls games so many times I have to backup my save file because I reached the save slot limit. Each time I replay I tend to have a theme or challenge. I also play factory style games for hundreds of hours. (Was up to 4am playing Factorio)

If I've lost anything as an adult it's that I'm less tolerant of games that don't capture my interest. As a kid I replayed certain games because I simply had fewer games to play. Now there are so many free or cheap games available but I find I quit new games quickly unless they capture my interest.

I'm in the same boat. Part of it is the medium has so much choice now, and the other part is that we're adults with both more money and less time to spend on things.

I remember playing a handful of NES games countless times, and being able to beat several of them in a single sitting.

I think some people manage to hold onto that (see speedrunners and/or world-class players of this or that game), but you'd have to be very intentional about it.

There was a time when I loved playing JRPGs, which can become a mindless grind if you're trying to maximize a character for fun.

I still like them, but on an emulator, with cheats for easy experience or money. I enjoy the story without the grind, and although I lost the perseverance and endurance I had then, I don't think I'll ever have the time (or the patience) to play them properly again.

You lost something to gain something else.

They have lost some of the magic I think. I remember as a child doing something similar with games. Back then I wasn't as skilled with games, and as a kid in the 90s it wasn't common to ask your mom or dad to "beat this level for you" because they were often worse than you.

So I'd just play the same levels over and over again. It would take me years to eventually beat Wing Commander 2 and 3. But it wasn't repetitive because I didn't feel any pressure to actually beat the game. I think I was actually more invested in exploring the logic of the game and creating imaginative storylines instead of actually getting invested in the game.

This one alternate mode of play contrasts to my kids where they seem to have two modes of play. One where they do the same thing and just explore game mechanics while dying over and over, and another where they actually want to make forward progress and often reach out for help. Luckily my generation is more acclimated to this type of interaction so we help out where in the past we would just struggle along or get sidetracked.

The lack of save systems on most console games back then led to the same result. I spent hours exploring the early levels of Sonic and Sonic 3D, because I was only so good and could only get so far in one play session.

This somehow led me and my friends to discover a very unintended way to reach the level select in Sonic 3D: place the cartridge in as loose as you can, and then shove it down fully on the Traveler's Tale logo. Crashes 9 times out of 10, but always worked eventually.

For me, this magic was in playing the shit out of demo games that came with my PC Games magazine subscription. I fondly remember playing Diablo I and War Wind (a WarCraft 2 clone) demos over and over again.

Speedrunners can spend hours working on small incremental improvements to their runs on a very deep level, with some of that time wading through code and disassembly; they sometimes end up understanding a game's programming better than the original designers haha

It seems like a grind from the outside but with the right game and the right community... there is always a faster time to achieve :) https://www.speedrun.com/

Its like eating a few table spoons of maple syrup, then biting into a fresh orange. your tastebuds will have become less receptive to the sweetness of the orange. Pretty much the overload of media/games today for the youth, hard to appreciate and enjoy the 'taste' of a sweet game, when theres 382472398407 games easily accessible on steam to play, or free for that matter e.g. LoL, engineered to blast open (crit chance 0.95x) your dopamine circuits.

> readily available game reviews tell me basically exactly what to expect.

this is why I actively avoid reviews for any media I might be interested in watching. I don't want any influence on my experience at all. I don't even let my friends tell me why they like a movie: if they recommend it, that's the most I want to know. It's awesome! I can pick something up like Nier or the first Avengers movie, and it's a completely immersive experience. I don't think it's difficult; it's not like reviews are some core part of life that can't be lived without. And I can't speak for you, but for me, not having reviews is part of the magic of gaming that I experienced as a kid: blindly choosing games to try based on cover art, the name, the studio, the console, etc. Building up my own idea of what the game will be like, making sense of the game as I experience it with no expectations, and finally forming my own opinion of it makes gaming feel like it did when I was a kid.

The exception is for games that I just never would have heard of. There are literally thousands of games out there, and if it's not modern, it's probably not going to be talked about. So I'll watch stuff like Ross's Game Dungeon or Civvie 11 to get a taste of older things that would be harder for me to stumble upon, and just keep a distant finger on the pulse of what's hot today, like Among Us or Fall Guys.

There's also minor stuff that I think people underestimate. When I play games, I don't have a second monitor with discord/netflix/youtube, I don't constantly text people. I just play and if I get bored, I take that as a sign that I need to work harder to figure the game out or just play a different game, like kids do. If you get stuck, try to find a PDF of the strategy guide instead of looking up youtube walkthroughs.

In my experience, gaming has always, continuously changed. There's some magic that older games have that new ones just don't, but there's also magic to newer games that older ones just don't. And there's also the player's ability to immerse themselves into the games. I try to be mindful and actively fine-tune the way I game and it's had great results for me whether I'm playing my childhood classics, experiencing old games for the first time, or jumping on the bandwagon of what's shiny and new.

There are communities devoted to deep understanding of games. These tend to be in the Speedrun or Tool-Assisted-Speedrun communities. Both tend to be high time investments, but can reveal deep understandings of a game, including how to exploit coding flaws.

Of course, gaming is not the only hobby that a person can gain satisfaction from, and you can similarly get that sense of growth from other goal or skill based hobbies. Painting, music, or even just learning a foreign language. The payoff may be much greater than mastering a game, as society at large tends to value these "worldly" skills more than gaming skill.

I feel the same. I used to be able to get uncountable hours of gameplay out of simple demo's of games because I didn't have the money for full games. The examples that come to mind are Cavewars and Fallen Haven. Both strategy games with a time limit. My brother and I would play the demo level over and over again and try to progress further and further within the set time limit. In a way it was like speedrunning but the other way around.

Z

Funny you should mention the mental model of challenges because I do the same thing. I've started role-playing in games that neither require nor request any real role-play. For example, I find it much easier to suspend my disbelief in a shooter game if my character doesn't have to survive 10s of bullets without even a wince. As a result, I play and replay shooter levels until I can beat the game without taking a single bullet.

You are not alone. This was my experience precisely as well.

You should give Hades a try. It's built from the ground up to be replayed - in fact that's woven into the story in a very compelling way.

I've only recently had the financial capacity to purchase games. However, I find that I've lost my appetite in playing them. I wonder with so many games at my fingertips I'm unable to find the motivation to play them like I used to. I'm baffled that I'd rather read about bash scripting.

Thanks for mentioning Hades, based on the steam reviews and gameplay trailer, it looks promising.

Not sure if it's your style of game, but Red Dead Redemption can be a great use of idle time, just roaming around at golden hour admiring the natural environment. It's a separate idea to knocking off achievements or rushing on to the next game. More like sitting on the porch with a drink, for people without a porch or much of a view.

Games lasted longer twenty years ago. It was easier to immerse in the game for this reason. Nowadays, blockbuster action games give you twenty hours of gameplay give or take. Even RPG games are shorter these days. Baldur's Gate took me weeks to finish. I can't remember the last time I played a contemporary game that lasted that long.

They are still there : Rimworld, Space Engineers... Factorio is a fan favorite on HN. You can also count Minecraft and Skyrim as long enduring successes.

>> Baldur's Gate took me weeks to finish.

The great games have no "finish". Where is the finish line in SimCity? Factorio never really stops, just getting bigger each time you play. I don't like SeaOfThieves but I appreciate that it is about playing rather than winning. And I cannot be the only one who has never bothered to kill the ender dragon.

> The great games have no "finish".

Hah well this is obviously highly subjective.

Games lasted longer twenty years ago. It was easier to immerse in the game for this reason

I think part of this was because games used to be about the gameplay, and not about the special effects.

A few weeks ago I got an old Pong cart in the mail. By the time I looked up from playing it, I'd lost half a day.

No special effects. Minimal sound. Irritating controllers. But almost entirely about the gameplay, and not about the game.

However, some old games' gameplay, unlike Pong's, was awful. Sometimes, terrible gameplay was actually a legit "strategy" by the devs to artificially make a game last longer, so people wouldn't feel ripped off. Good gameplay was appreciated, sure, but bad gameplay was often swept under the "challenging/hard-to-beat" rug.

I challenge this. Most games were really short. They were just very quick to kick you back to the title screen. :)

There are many games that will give you much longer than 20 hours. It's actually a complaint by some about modern open world games and how they're geared towards 40+ hours for even a basic completion. Longer if the player wants to finish some of the side quests. And then that's not counting mods and how those extend game time even further. And also not counting all those open-ended games which last as long as you're interested.

Gaming is in very good shape right now. I think most of the lack of immersion comes down to age. And also comes down to having many more diversions when you have an afternoon to yourself with time to play.

Speak for yourself. I get hundreds of hours out of great games like Rimworld, FTL, They are Billions and Hades.

There are just as many great games, they're just not the ones advertised to you.

Speak for yourself

I always speak for myself dude. Like everyone else in here.

they're just not the ones advertised to you

I'm not learning about new games from ads. I don't view ads at all online.