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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

Would love to hear someone narrow down the era "when games were fun".

It wasn't the 1970s and 1980s. Arcade games were designed to extract quarters from consumers. They were brutal. They heavily influenced game design for home systems, for years, so you'd expect games for the Nintendo Entertainment System to act like they're trying to extract quarters from you.

In the 1990s this should have been gone, but there are games like The Lion King (1994, SNES / Genesis) which...

> Disney actually told the developers to make the game so difficult that people wouldn't be able to beat it during a rental period.

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I think the analogy isn't quite the same.

Imagine if instead of a quarter granting you an extra life, it gave you a power-up that let you clear the first 10 levels in 2x the speed. That is the design we have reached.

More quarters never made an arcade game easier or different, it just got you more time to play the game. The game design principle of arcade games was to make progression difficult but still possible by playing MORE. Pacman has some RNG, but the rules are there and aren't circumvented at the whim of the developer when a player starts to excel.

New games seem to have espoused the principle of pay more to play LESS which is almost an opposite goal and in the parent comment I think "fun" refers to playing the game, which they might feel is warped when people pay to avoid the playing aspect.

A little off-topic, but I liked the "fighting game" model that rewards skill, for example, the Mortal Kombat series on arcade. Only the new human challenger would have to pay the quarter, and if you beat him, you continue to play the next person and the next person without having to pay again. I recall in the '90s playing MK3 literally all night (hours of play) on a single quarter, with a line of people paying $0.25 over and over to lose to me in 15 seconds. Ahh, the good ol days of gaming.

IMO affordable consoles (SNES / Mario / early 90s) and App Stores (Farmville / mid-2000s) mark the beginning and end.

Console exclusives drive console adoption, which incentivizes better games.

App Stores undermine the console market, and simplify micro-transactions.

Those examples are "pay money to spend more time with the game" but OPs example is "pay money to spend less time playing the game". Both extract money from you, but in different ways.

> Arcade games were designed to extract quarters from consumers

I think the point of the article is about making games less fun and more grinding, preying on gambling addiction, the gatherer-hunter instinct (gotta catch'em all), and the sunken costs fallacy (if I stop playing I lose all my efforts).

Take Pokémon Go, which is free to play, and the transactions are optional and not completely pay-to-win. The main game mechanic is mind-numbing repetition, the same actions done tens of thousands of times for meager rewards, and the occasional good reward, chasing the moving goal post. That game is not fun by any stretch of the word, it's a grind designed to keep players trapped for years.

Paying quarters for having fun for 15 minutes was better than not paying for mindlessly grinding. Games are supposed to be fun, not exploitative.

Not really hard to nail this period down. 1992-2009 (the release of Call of Duty Modern Warfare ushered in the age of progression and weapon unlocks in multiplayer games).

Agreed. Watch a documentary on game dev during the period. It was very often just a bunch of gamers creating the game they wanted to play.

What makes this a bit hard to pin down is that around 2009 was also the (re)start of indie gaming. Xbox Summer of Arcade started in 2008, Humble Bundle and Steam Greenlight followed in the next few years and ever since we had an enormous mass of high quality indie games available.

So even with AAA gaming starting to go downhill around 2009, gaming as a whole did actually quite well.

I might even push it to 2006 and TES Oblivion. With both cosmetic and technically power DLC. Horse armour was pretty bad, but then some addons(not Shivering Isle) clearly were little content, but making game easier by giving free stuff...

Rental period? I owned that game as a kid and NEVER beat the second level.

Die Siedler. (The Settlers).

1998-2010

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