Games are becoming less games and more “interactive entertainment.” What exactly do I mean by that? Well it’s kind of like games play themselves, they don’t require much from you. On average, the biggest and most popular games don’t really force you to think or require nearly as much persistence than games used to. Trying and stuff is hard work.
Games have changed…
Prince of Persia, 2008
Well let’s take a look at Exhibit A: the new “re-invented” Prince of Persia. The game has garnered some attention because well, you can’t die. This Elika chick tags along with you and pulls you up every time you’re falling to your death or some guy is about to gg you. Well that’s if you let the guy gg you, if not you have like a 1 second window (that’s pretttty long) to press the random button on the screen (quick-timer event, which critics love to hate) to save yourself with absolutely no penalty. Pretty much she plops you back like somewhere in the ballpark of 5-30 seconds average. I have to say though for PoP, it works because the game is mostly about “enjoying” the flow of movement, no skill involved really (future review for Prince of Persia mebe). But this lack of death really exemplifies what has happened to the games: less skill required, more instant gratification.
Kids these days got it eeeease
Super Mario Bros. 3, 1990
Video games used to be about losing though. Boy games were tough, and I still played them. Why? Because there was a challenge and I wanted to get past it. Now kids play games why? Because check out dem sweet grafix and boom headshot, I’m doing crazy stuff I can’t do IRL. What’s on the outside counts with most people. Beauty may be skin deep but that don’t make the nerdy girls more popular than the supermodels (unless they’re nerdy and supermodels).
Perhaps the fact games are becoming easier is because it’s ingrained in our psyche from an early age: we don’t like to lose. Maybe it was recess once and you were “it” playing tag but everyone ran faster than you and you stayed “it” the whole time. There used to be a sense of accomplishment beating a level (beating the game was crazy), but now the feeling tends to be “yeah that was pretty fun, what’s the next big game?” Less of an achievement, less of a feeling of accomplishment, at least if your mind is still active while playing VGs.
It’s more than a feeling
So what does this really show? People don’t like when things are hard so they like turning their brains off and simply “experiencing” because on the surface games today are better than ever. Games, good or bad, become popular for the wrong reasons: not because they challenge you but because they let you do something you wish you could see and do. Sure creating a virtual world is a fundamental quality of games, but what’s the value if you’re not accomplishing anything worthwhile in real life? There are always lessons to be learned if you’re looking hard enough. You might realize that you’re playing the wrong games, and the right ones are getting harder to find.
I don’t really agree with the whole nostalgic view of video games. Old games just boiled down to being frustrating, and to me that doesn’t make it fun. A good example is the original mario where losing all your lives meant going back to the beginning of the world. Not cool. Life systems are pretty archaic anyways, dating back to the times of arcade machines.
Personally, I usually have more fun playing a game on a moderate difficulty rather than 1shoturdead difficulty. Maybe I’m just weird. Anyways, I think online multiplayer is the most important aspect of games for me. Single player is on the backburner.
Well the games are getting easier argument doesn’t really apply to multiplayer games.
I wasn’t exactly saying games should go back to the NES days, games need to grow like anything else. I was pointing out that they are getting easier. There’s lots of good stuff out there now, but I think there is more bad than good.
Life systems may be archaic but dying (losing) in videogames is not.
If online is the future and the present is any indication, that’s a lot of Halo/CoD/WoW coming up.
Games have definitely become easier, I don’t think there is any argument about that. But I think most games still have a variety of difficulty settings which make it possible to tailor the experience to your choosing. Bioshock has a Prince of Persia-esque solution to death in the form of vita-chambers, but they can be turned off if you’d like a more challenge. I think most games do a good job at offering a complete range of difficulties, and that a lot of games that are accessible to the masses still have quite a bit of depth (ie. rhythm games). Prince of Persia is regrettable since it doesn’t offer alternatives but I think it’s an oddity.
Now if you want to get mad at something casual get mad at that damn Wii. That’s ruining video games by forcing other companies to become less hardcore to try and steal some market share. Pretty damn stupid!
We do not talk about the Wii on this site
I would get mad at the Wii…but then again what’s “hardcore gamer” really mean? In this market it just means you own a 360 and a good chance you play lots of FPS. Maybe a PS3 if you’re Carson.
Wii’s trying something different, I applaud that, but Nintendo’s not doing enough to move games forward with it. They just made a new genre of non-games which “hardcore gamers” find annoying.
I agree with most of what’s been said in this article. Games seem alot easier and require less thought, and to me they are less fun. But who’s to say that’s a bad thing? The truth is that games are able to give you an experience that other forms of media cannot.
My only problem with this is that almost all games are doing this. There’s a poor balance between “skill” games and “experience” games. That being said, I conclude that games have changed.
^if you think that games are less fun, then that is probably a bad thing.
One major way that games have become easier is through features such as save-whenever-you-want. In a game like splinter cell they could have made it more difficult by making you go back to the start of a level when you die. Would this make it more challenging? Yes. More fun? I don’t think so. Like scott said, games now have multiple difficulty settings which are a much better form of challenge imo.
Also wii sucks.
Well the saving system in the older games was largely because of the lack of technology, but, as you earlier referred to mario, I’d still say it had a good system. You have a certain amount of lives, u lose one you go to the start of the level (or the halfway point if you’ve made it) and you lose all you are allowed to continue at the start of the world; seems fair enough. But I was not at all talking about the game-saving system…
The gameplay and game mechanics themselves were being referred to. Games like Assassin’s Creed and Prince of Persia (as stated in the article) promote a system where success it’s guaranteed without any effort whatsoever. I think this is because the focus is on the experience of the game rather than the actual process of playing it.
Now that being said, I would like to emphasize earlier that I said games are less fun TO ME. I would not say that games are worse than before, just different; changed. In the modern gaming scene, the satisfaction of completing a game comes more from the feeling of being part of the game rather than the feeling of accomplishing something challenging. My personal preference is the latter.
If you guys are looking for a challenge why don’t you go for achievement points heheheeheheheh
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