Comment by elif | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elif | Hacker News Reader

What really happened is that "competitive online gameplay" now requires you to do outside research to determine the game meta, usually some kind of grind to achieve said meta, and only at that point can you begin to use your brain to optimize your individual performance. And you have to do all that fast enough to keep up with the current season before the meta changes.

This is different from the games we played growing up, where from the beginning you could use your brain to optimize, improve, and do the brain things that give satisfaction.

"Mundane chores" that gamers do are now mostly part of the "meta grind" but also niche mundane tasks like, say, trading a certain resource, doing a dungeon for the 200th time but faster, etc are in the few remaining places where you can derive this kind of satisfaction.

Developers have become so hyper focused on ensuring the "meta" play is balanced (and requires you to grind in their game), that they patch out these chores as "quality of life" improvements.

The overlap of people who engage in "competitive online gameplay" and those who play "PowerWash Simulator" is probably not that large. And it's even less likely that the latter is in any way replacing the former.

I'd surmise that the people engaging in mundane chore games are those that want mindless entertainment.

I disagree. I certainly play both types of game. Sure, you don't /need/ to have the most efficient pattern in power wash simulator. They hardly punish you even in use of your time, but when you hit that perfectly aligned parallel line with no streaks, it sure feels good. And that is the core of the gameplay satisfaction..

"Playerskill mattering" has become largely inaccessible in competitive studio games, so these indie games are able to scratch that itch by letting you jump in and immediately see the reward of improving your hand eye coordination, path planning, etc.

Yeah, I certainly enjoy my competitive RTS (though in small doses these days, nothing is quicker to cause wrist pain than a 3 hour starcraft session), or high end mmo raiding, but can also enjoy chilling in truck sim or similar

One of my best friends, a man from Iceland I met in Overwatch a few years ago plays both Overwatch when he feels like really digging into something, and he'll play simulator games (Truck sim, Cooking sim, etc.) when he wants to 'chill' or wants less of a challenge. It works well for him, since his disability means that gaming is pretty much his whole life now.

That seems orthogonal to the article itself. The draw of these games is in part, their familiarity and perhaps lack of competition with other people.

Games nowadays are less competitive than they used to be, see the simplification of controls in RTS and simplification of shooter mechanics (i.e. no quake) etcetc

> simplification of shooter mechanics (i.e. no quake)

Does it get any simpler than UT with instagib?

Have to seen professional csgo matches? Players spend thousands of hours mastering smoke and flash throws and recoil patterns and bhopping, and flick shots. The skill ceiling for competitive team csgo is absolutely insane. Dota and lol and eve and farming simulator are right up there too.

Now go watch Valorant.

> Players spend thousands of hours mastering smoke and flash throws and recoil patterns and bhopping, and flick shots. The skill ceiling for competitive team csgo is absolutely insane.

Just to point out, these two statements are unrelated. You can have a game with a low skill ceiling which nevertheless involves skills that take forever to learn. If those skills have a small impact on the outcome of the game, they won't raise the skill ceiling much.

The paradigmatic example of such a game is "chess dice", in which two players first play a game of chess, and then each roll a six-sided die. High roll wins; the winner of the chess game adds one to their die roll.

This game involves exactly as much skill as chess, while having a much lower skill ceiling than chess does.

You are correct to point out that games have gotten simpler in a certain sense, but I wouldn't conflate that with being less competitive.

Simple games can be very competitive because the best players can become much better at them. Chess and Go are good examples.

This doesn't track at all. FPS such as Overwatch have characters that move faster and mechanics that are more complicated than Quake, even if the time to kill is higher. Any given MOBA has dozens of complicated skill interactions that change every match.

I don't love Fortnite, but building structures while shooting requires pretty demanding execution. "Simple" isn't the term I'd use at all.

What does this have to do with chore simulator games?

Did you read the article?

pov: you play hearts of iron 4

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