I think I get what you are saying, and I don't think it's some sort of fun-defining elitism. There is a distinct lack of substance in a lot of the games, and I am really curious to see how the upcoming Civilization Facebook game turns out. Of all of the major players in the space, I would expect the most of them.
Also it's a compounding process. Having a game that's fun only when you're succeeding selects for players that like that, which creates a social component that makes it so it's only fun to succeed.
I don't find this genre fun whether I'm succeeding or not, for me it's 100% journey (casually and socially exploring the way mechanics combine into interesting gameplay - including failures as much as successes) and these games and their player base seem to be the precise opposite of that.
I'd say it's true that social games create a wonderful opportunity for people to socialize. That said, there is nothing challenging or cutting-edge about making these games.
I agree that if the game is fun people will play it. The problem is getting them to try the game for long enough to know if it is fun. Popularity is obviously a factor in achieving that since lots of people associate mass marketed products with blandness, juvenility, etc.
Part of the issue with this is that a lot of games get very boring when you treat them seriously and people do not originally get into them for those boring parts.
By making a game that people actually enjoy playing and tell their friends about.
I think the thing that people miss in their discussions of video games is that “enjoyability” or “fun” are not 1-dimensional quantities. In fact, there are many different ways to evaluate a game: meaningfulness, emotional range, decision complexity, flow state, educational/pedagogical value, literary value, societal/social impact, etc etc etc.
Furthermore, many of these criteria can be good at multiple ends of their range depending on individual taste and/or mood. For example, sometimes I’m in the mood for complex decisions to really sink my teeth into. Maybe a Zachtronics programming game or engineering game like Factorio or perhaps a challenging roguelike such as NetHack or Slay the Spire will scratch that itch for me. Other times I’m really burned out from work/studying and I’m just looking to unwind so a super relaxing, simple, flow state game like Stardew Valley is better for me.
By pursuing the free to play model, games like Genshin Impact are incentivizing their developers to optimize the game for two things only: engagement and gambling-like rewards. That is very bad. These games are the junk food of the game industry. Even worse. They’re casinos as well.
Eh...a lot of things that seem like they should be relatively stupid on the surface are loved and revered, maybe even enjoyable. I still don't get why people pour so much over baseball statistics, but clearly its an enjoyable pastime for many.
Some other sources of fun to mull over: Tamogatchis, fantasy football, pulling a lever on a slot machine.
I spent more time playing Adventure Capitalist than I'm really willing to admit to, but despite being an idle game I have to admit it has a fun core game loop that rewards you for checking in on it occasionally. I don't really recommend that game, since its ultimately a huge waste of time, but I'll just admit that it was fun while it lasted.
When I played Universal Paperclip I realized that the whole idle game genre has a lot of untapped potential. That game has neat shifts in gameplay as well as a story arc that ends in a pretty satisfying way. http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
It's a possible conclusion. I wouldn't bet on it. Pretty much everywhere, the only two things that get eyeballs in significant amounts are novelty or polish. I mean, look at FB games - the company that's taking the market is rather unoriginal, but polishes the heck out of every game they ship.
They just found a way of doing that that is less asset intensive than "visual fidelity".
If you've found another way to make that work, you're set. But you pretty much by definition need to make an entirely different kind of game.
A lot of strategy games and RPGs suffer from the same.
Starcraft II for instance was a lot more fun IMO when it was new and the strategies hadn't been refined. I remember wasting a ton of time/resources turtling, building a giant mass of carriers and then steam-rolling the map, just because I could and thought the visual of a dozen carriers sweeping the map would be awesome (it was). Good luck doing that now in a public server.
Too many games have obsessive fans that are hell-bent on discovering the mathematically perfect way to play a game, and once the one or half-dozen working formulae are discovered, that's it. No one else can play any other way and hope to win, and that really takes the creativity and fun out of it. I'm not sure where these people come from, I got into video games as a distraction from math homework, not an extension of it. :P
"Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction."
If you can't loose, and hooking up random input to the game solves it after a while, how can you consider that challenge? Is it really enough to say "we have more content waiting for you, and challenge you to find it by either deliberately or randomly mashing buttons" -- ?
For example, Monkey Island is a great story, and I still adore it; but in the way I would remember and like a movie, not in the way I remember playing Speedball or Empire Deluxe as a kid.
Those enthusiasts you mentioned, do they keep playing these games over and over and over, like a Chess enthusiast would? Is there any measure by which one could say they improved, until they mastered it? I doubt both. So that they're nostalgic about something that they have long sucked dry, just reinforces my point about that not even being a game. I mean yes, skipping over the cracks in the sidewalk is also a game, but come on..
I feel the same way about games that he feels about jigsaws. They're fun enough but they're inherently contrived and produce no real value. I read books and watch movies for narrative experiences. While there's a growing minority of games that have real emotional, sophisticated and even literature-level narratives, at the end of the day, most games require you to solve contrived puzzles to advance the narrative.
On the other end, there are games like that one where you build pieces from blocks and it's a little world, people have expressed their artistic side with whole castles with automations and calculators. These are more like LEGO, Meccano or other tool; they're a substrate, like a programming language, something you build on. I wouldn't call them games.
Although I will grant that games that pit you against or collaborate with other human beings is worth it to some degree, because you're spending time with people (which is why Chess is bloody boring and pointless to play against the computer), it's all noughts-and-crosses with bells and whistles.
Coming back to his point about jigsaws, while it is satisfying to complete one, personally, any time spent putting in active effort (as opposed to passive effort, like in the case of a novel or movie or theatre), I'd prefer to be doing something actually constructive; to produce something real, either artistically (I paint canvases), or technologically (I'm a programmer). Rather than maintaining these “farms” and cyberpet-style games, or the games where you're digging for gold and collecting resources, I'd rather maintain my bike, go grab some materials from the store and do some DIY in my apartment, plant some things in my garden, etc. Whenever one of my gamer friends explains a game to me, I'm thinking more about how I'd make that than how I'd play it. I'm not saying people who like to spend time doing these things are wasting their time, just that I don't share that desire at all.
Puzzles in a job interview are a poor idea. People don't solve puzzles on their job, with their manager watching them do it. They don't get sacked for failing to solve the puzzle (which failing a job interview is tantamount to; your career depends on it). And if they can't solve a puzzle in 15 minutes, they spend all day on it. Or all week. They ask their colleagues for help. If it's too hard, the product manager considers breaking the problem down. Asking contrived puzzles is such a silly idea that I'm biased against companies that try to ask them for job interviews.
"It's the same with magazines, review sites and events for gaming."
If a game isn't fun, people won't play it for long. Spore is an example. Googling for 'spore fun' reveals quotes from people along these lines:
Yeah, its a pointless game, but still fun at the same time. Sure, you have goals, but they’re just there to get your creations moving. And really, they’re boring as hell and wouldn’t last if it weren’t for the creation aspect. The only redeeming gameplay modes are the cell stage and the space stage. The other ones are short, easy, and a chore.
And another:
I played the game for maybe 10 hours. For the first 30min its pretty cool.. i mean being a cell is kinda fun... simple eating and running away. When you get to different stages like creture, tribal, civ, and space.. first few minutes is not too bad when you get to try the new stuff.. but soon after you know how the stage works, its gets repetitive and boring. The concept is pretty sweet that you get to evolve and design your own creature and buildings and vehicles.. but the game gets repetitive and boring. It gonna take a lot of time and trust me youll just get bored of it.
Spore had an insane amount of hype and PR surrounding its launch. They even had a public demo of Robin Williams creating a character before much was known about the character creator. And yet, Spore appears to have fizzled out, and rightly so. Consumers might put up with DRM if the gameplay is good, but DRM + boring gameplay = 1 1/2 stars on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Spore-Pc/dp/B000FKBCX4/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1...
So the PC/Console gaming scene isn't very similar to the music scene, mostly because games have to keep people's attention for more than 4 minutes (or ~1 hour for an album).
However, casual gaming is an entirely different beast, and does share a lot of similarities with the music industry. But all I'm saying is, if a game is bad, people are going to find out.
As a random bystander it also reads as potentially pretty dismissive to me. Some points:
You only note negative things, not positive things. This colors the whole post.
You use italics and "Oh,", which makes it more conversational, and it sounds exasperated to me.
Your questions at the end could be construed as rhetorical, rather than constructive, partly because you suppose an answer.
Suggesting that the games that are there exist because they are "easy to program" could be seen as a negative comment on the creator's programming ability or drive.
As the poster of this link and someone who enjoys the games a lot, I think your criticism about lack of variety is valid (if out of place for a collection of free games) and your phrasing wasn't aggressive or anything, but the above are some points that I watch out for in my own writing, particularly the first one - even if I don't like something, I find it useful to point out positive aspects to make it clear I'm trying to be constructive.
While I agree with everything you've said, I really only apply these criticisms to the so-called "triple-A" developers out there. There are quite a few indie developers out there that are making engaging, thought-provoking puzzle games. They are typically short, have interesting gameplay mechanics, and inexpensive.
One great example is SpaceChem. It's a joyously frustrating game that revolves around "programming" reactors to create molecules from other molecules. The joy of finishing a level (particularly if you can beat the curve in terms of time/instructions) is tangible.
Don't despair too much at the state of the game industry, just don't look to the "leaders" for your interesting games.
In that whole analysis though, there's no mention of fun. In today's world of indie games, we're being constantly reminded fun != more power. It's orthogonal.
People care about the complexity in those games only because of the legacy culture and competitions
I think this is less than half true. People wouldn't care about those games, if they didn't have the amount of emergent complexity that they do. It would be more accurate to say that they soak up so much attention because of legacy culture and competitions. But those wouldn't exist, if those games didn't have certain qualities which made them eminently interesting and replayable in the first place.
Could they have been replaced through different accidents of history with other games entirely? Sure. But those games would have had many of the same qualities.
Yours is the only reply that didn't use absolutes to describe human behavior, and I genuinely appreciate that. I agree that there are situations where a similarly-structured playing field becomes important to the main function of the game, but the OP made sweeping generalizations about every game type needing to be developed in a hyper-specific way (his way), otherwise the game is automagically bad -- and I hope we can both agree that's pretty silly.
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