Losing Interest In Games - A Natural Progression?

MotherInferior writes "I'm 27, soon to be 28. I used to fiend over the newest games and eagerly play whatever I could get my hands on. Team Fortress Classic, Civilization, WarCraft, these were all games that I could literally lose myself for days in. I still drool over the newest games at Best Buy, but now that I actually have the money to buy them, I find myself saying, 'Nah, I'll just play what I've got,' or 'Y'know, I'd rather design my own game then play someone else's.' Even still, I don't really play the games I have. What's up with that? I'm sure my mom would sagely say (with some satisfaction in her voice), 'Wellll, you're just growing up...' Am I not as capable of having fun as I once was, or what? Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy gaming, but I can tell there's some kind of trend happening. Will there be gaming Viagra in my future, I wonder?"

Comments

Disillusionment with current crop of games

[Proud like a god]

I dont think your age has much to do with your disillusion, the more recent games just arent as innovative. Genres are already formed from the ground breaking classics, and now it's just a race for the best graphics.

Re:Disillusionment with current crop of games

[TwistedGreen]

Actually, I had a discussion on this topic with my brother the other day. It seems that the real advancements in gaming come only every few years... which coincides with the release dates for the established and experienced game companies like Id and Epic and Blizzard. These are the people who actually know what they're doing, while the rest just remake existing games with better graphics or a slightly different plot. It's rare to have a new revolutionary game company arise out of the blue. There aren't very many of these companies, and they can't be releasing new games every day. Thus, you have only sparse releases of good games which lesser companies will models in the years to come.

Unfortunately, many of the innovative game companies of old (Bullfrog, Sierra, Psygnosis...) are all but dead. Their hollowed-out carcasses have been commandeered by money-grubbing shareholders simply using their brand to try to absorb as much money as possible. None of the original talent on which the company was built remains. It's sad, really, but new talent will eventually arise.

Re:Disillusionment with current crop of games

[PainKilleR-CE]

It seems that the real advancements in gaming come only every few years... which coincides with the release dates for the established and experienced game companies like Id and Epic and Blizzard. [...] Unfortunately, many of the innovative game companies of old (Bullfrog, Sierra, Psygnosis...) are all but dead.

Look at the companies you mention as the current innovators, and then look at their titles over the past few years. Id: Doom, Doom 2, Quake, Q2, Q3, now Doom 3. Epic: UT, UT2k3, now UT2k4. Blizzard: Diablo 2, WarCraft 3.

These companies have succumbed to the lure of money as well. Instead of innovating, they let others do it, and then simply evolve. The UT line is trying to follow the sports-game model of yearly releases with modest improvements. Id has turned into a factory for new game engines, with other companies like Valve putting those engines to use to create the games people seem to enjoy (though Valve is creating their own engine now), and with Half-Life's success id has decided to build a more story-based game, reverting to the Doom label (and taking quite a bit of lead from the survival horror genre popular on consoles). Blizzard's Diablo 2 was an evolution of Diablo, which manages to be the only title of it's kind that really holds up well in the market. WarCraft 3 was a move in a direction that many others had taken, in a slightly different way, not only moving to 3D but to smaller numbers of units with hero units at the center (an idea used by many other RTS games earlier, but the smaller numbers of units can also be attributed to the limitations of Blizzard's 3D engines).

None of the original talent on which the company was built remains. It's sad, really, but new talent will eventually arise.

This is the real truth of the matter. Eventually some relatively unknown company will come forth to take the place of id, Epic, and Blizzard. After all, id and Epic came out of the shareware scene and Blizzard was a console developer in their early years. Eventually someone will come seemingly out of nowhere to take the top of the pile in the PC game development world, and more than likely when that happens it'll be after releasing numerous moderately successful games just as it was with these three companies.

Re:Disillusionment with current crop of games

[PainKilleR-CE]

I think there's definitely room for the MMO genre to grow, but we'll see that growth become more rapid when developers more familiar with the original genres come into the MMO realm. Planetside could've been so much more if it had only been developed by someone else, like Valve, with a real idea of how to build a team-based FPS and scale that idea to MMO size. FFXI may be the first sign of that, although it could be argued that Ultima Online was built by the designer of Ultima, and therefore was the first (I'd just point out that that was done before people really realized how big an MMO game really could be).

Cavedog made the first movements towards MMO RTS, but at the same time didn't go the full distance to actually making it possible for thousands of players to battle each other at once (instead relegating the battles to smaller groups with the overall war being handled outside of the game), yet no one seems to have really picked up on the idea and made it reality (now someone will point out an MMORTS that I haven't seen before).

I believe that MMO could be the future of many genres, but I also believe that it will truly come into it's own from the more common sources, rather than from the companies like Sony just trying to cash in on the trend. I think the real breakthrough will come when someone comes up with a method for distributing the load between company servers and independant servers, reducing or eliminating the subscription fees, and giving players more reason than simple level treadmills to continue playing. Most current MMO games are made simply to keep people playing (and paying) rather than to provide interesting and entertaining gameplay, and I think that trend needs to be squashed before it really becomes as revolutionary as online multiplayer gaming itself.

Re:Disillusionment with current crop of games

[*weasel]

Personally I think 'advancements' and 'id, epic, and blizzard' should only be used in the context of graphical advancements.

Yes, Warcraft was a little rough around the edges, and Warcraft II polished that up. But what did War3 give us? heros? A mechanism introduced essentially in the war2 expansion and starcraft?

Diablo was a refreshing change of pace from the RPG-stale early 90s - but what was Diablo2 and what took them so long? Sure, it was fun like the original, but it wasn't so much an advancement as a souped-up 'update'.

Why did Blizzard can the original design for War3, with the hero-centric focus? To me, that sounded really cool. But Blizzard chose to rehash the tried and true with newer graphics and keep the heroes. They just aren't interested in being on the cutting edge.

Sure, people loved war3 and I don't begrudge them that. It just isn't so much an 'advancement'.

And Id and Epic... well hell - They might be fingered as the predominate cause of the deterioration of innovation. their progress is entirely iterative and they don't even bother wrapping a story around their products anymore.

Again, I don't mean to downplay their significance. Indeed the skill with which Id and Epic craft (and resell) technology is unparalleled.

Even Molyneaux (by way of Bullfrog) doesn't seem to be innovating. Black and White had a fairly innovative concept in the avatar, but that was long years ago, and prior to that was a veritable avalanche of incremental tweaks to Populous. His mindchild Big Blue Box still hasn't delivered their overhyped 'advancement' for RPG gaming.

In every interview, the founders of those companies nearly unanimously claim that advancements will always come from small teams - unheard of teams. And frankly, they're right. Look at the half-life mods: Natural Selection, Counterstrike, et al - They're massively more innovative than half-life itself. Look at how desert combat has all but become its own brand.

Quite simply, success itself is a barrier to innovation. After a big hit, you are economically incentivized to play it safe with future projects. There's more money riding on the development side and there's plenty of risk in releasing any game, let alone an actual gaming advancement. Plus, it's no longer just a handful of friends coding in their spare time - wasting weekends and vacation. It's the jobs of 6 other coders, a dozen office and technical support professionals, and 2 dozen artists on the line.

So while it's lamentable, I'm not surprised, nor do I particularly bedgrudge them, that success tends to cut off further innovation. But it's still a measureable and predictable effect.

its natural

[fireduck]

by the time you're old enough to really have really disposable income, you usually have a job that takes up 40+ hours in a week. There's less and less time for games, so you're less likely to buy something new on a whim, more likely to stick with what you know (i.e., established franchises), and since quality game releases are few and far between, even more likely to just play what you've got.

The last game I actually purchased for my PC was War3 expansion. The next game I'm planning on buying is either Doom3 / HL2. Other games have slightly caught my interest (was eyeing galactic civilizations for a while), but I just don't have the time to get lost in a big game, unless it's something I really want to get lost in.

the same phenomena typically happens with music. mid 20s and you start listening to what you have rather than what's new...

Minor case of burnout.

[Drakin]

Work, like in general, and just problems with sitting in front of the computer for who knows how many hours add up.

Find something to do that's differnt than what you normally spend time doing.

Sit and play with lego
Read a book
Work on a puzzle
Build a model
Walk around outside
Take some time and just wander around a nearby mall

Wanting what you got

[sjoperkin]

It's all about the fact that you now have the possibility to buy most of the games you want.

It just isn't that exiting anymore when you don't have to decide whether to buy QuakeIII or Unreal Tournament2003. You buy them both, and get the short end of the stick, because you don't have the time to play both, or find it hard to decide which one to play at any particular moment. A problem which increases in size the more games you buy.

For us with families, the time spent playing games gets ever shorter, which is why we put higher demands on the games we play. Which in turn leads to the conclusion that all of a sudden, games are no longer that good, because you cannot find the time to really get into more than a few games per season.

I buy fewer games nowadays, but instead I really try to play through them. This pays off most of the time.

Born again gamer..

[kilauea]

I went off games for a period - still bought some but rarely played and never completed. Turned out I was suffering from clinical depression and since recovering I have been right back into gaming and enjoy it as much as ever!
I am 31 btw...

all about time and getting people together

[kisrael]

For me, a soon to be 30-yr-old, it's all about two things: the time some of these games would like you to consume playing them, and then the increasing difficulty getting people together for the on-the-couch (as opposed to online) multiplayer games that I like so damn much.

Also, games get no respect from the world at large. Even though I'm mostly a social gamer, though I will play through the occasional one player adventure, my soon-to-be-ex-wife cited that as one of the (minor) issues, my devoting hours to gaming, despite her own f***ing introvert need to sometimes burn hours watching the crappiest of movies on TV to unwind/recharge.

Happens with music, too

[Chilltowner]

Back in one of my college anthropology classes, our professor noted sociological studies that showed people's music buying habits dropping significantly at age 25. Anecdotally, that seems to be true. The history of games is much shorter, so I don't think any similar studies have been done, but they both may be manifestations of the same root cause. That root cause, though, has not yet been revealed.

Some nature, some circumstance

[DuckDuckBOOM!]

I suspect your move away from gaming parallels my own, so here's what moved me:

• Time, or rather the lack thereof. A decade or so ago I usually had several hours a day to game & code. Now I'm working more, (usually) sleeping more, maintaining a home, getting laid regularly, and engaging in face-time with relatives/friends every week or two instead of every other month.
• Improving taste. I burnt out on FPSs and flash-bang-for-its-own-sake long ago. I burn out on MMORPGs (sp?) quickly through sheer monotony - another monster vanquished, [yawn]. Nowadays my main interests are sims and strategy games, and there are at best one or two good releases per year in those categories.
• New hobbies. I transitioned from flight sims to the real thing a couple years ago, and quickly discovered I'd much rather blow $60 on an hour in the air than on Final Fantasy Pi or whatever.
• Maturity; i.e., the realization that There Are Things In Life More Important And Rewarding Than Finding The Faerie Hat So Zelda Can Get Past The Pond Full Of Zombie Sharks. This is the only thing on the list I really regret. :)

Re:Are you f'ing kidding us with this?

[ronfar]

Video games ended up pigeon holed as "juvenile" like comic books and animation did. While I'm familar with the political history that doomed comics and cartoons to the children's ghetto, I'm not sure why video games shared this fate... Can any one offer any theories about this?

At home I have some EC library editions of Tales from the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear and the Vault of Horror. In many of these issues there are letters sections, and some of the letters are from soldiers in Korea. These soldiers talk about how great EC comics are, etc, and usually the Old Witch or the Crypt Keeper replies by saying she/he is sending some free comics out to the unit.

So, some portion of the readership were not only adults, but adults seeing horrors that I hope I never have to see. However, when Congress and Dr. Frederick Wertham decided to go after comics, they treated them primarily as a passtime for teenage boys. This is because warping teenage boys is an easy charge to make, while warping hardened soldiers in Korea wouldn't stick.

Fast forward to the age of the SNES and Genesis. Video games were resurrected from the crash by Nintendo, which deliberately marketed their NES system in the United States as a toy to overcome the post crash jitters. (Remember the little robot that came out with it? That was purely as part of this marketing campaign, not because it was a good idea for a peripheral.) By the time the SNES comes along, the big games in the arcades are Street Fighter II and, cue sinister music, Mortal Kombat. (Oh, and by the time these reach the home systems, these horrible video disk games, notably Night Trap were being pushed for the Sega CD.)

Well, Congress's own Music Man, Senator Joe Lieberman, figures out a way to pull in the fretful soccermom's vote in his next re-election bid, "There's trouble, right here in River City, with a capital 'T' that rhymes with 'V' that stands for Video Games." It is in the interest of Lieberman and his ilk to portray video games as primarily children's entertainment, just as Nintendo had done to get away from the post-crash, "video games were a stupid fad," jitters to get places like Toy's R Us to carry their consoles.

So we get to today, when people forget that originally video games were in places like bars to entertain patrons and people start talking about that, "put away childish things, " nonsense. (Of course, we all know that the early Christians loved to party, especially the dour St. Paul. Remember if you are going to follow his 'childish things' advice that he's also the guy who basically believed "it is better to marry than to burn." No wonder he gets the nickname of Captain Fun. But I suppose this nonsense makes sense in the still heavily Puritan influenced United States.)

Re:I know what you mean...

[Schemat1c]

It's been the oposite for me. I'm just turning 39 and I've loved video games since my Dad's friend showed us his amazing pong set back in the 70's. What I find myself losing interest in is passive entertainment such as TV and movies. I just get too bored just sitting there and not being involved. Unless it's an exceptional story or is actually teaching me something(which is almost never).

Besides I don't think playing video games is wasting your time. You are using your mind in new and creative ways, that can't be a complete waste. There are people that go to extremes and neglect other important parts of their life, but that goes with anything. I know people who have done that with cars, work, food, drugs, etc. As long as you keep a balance in your life it should be a positive thing.