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Diary of an Aging Gamer
eToyChest has an insightful column up looking at the realities of the modern game store shelf, and how the titles there relate to the youth of today. From the article: "This year's summer trip to the software store made one thing very clear to me: In its efforts to follow initial adopters into adulthood, the videogame industry has--inadvertently or otherwise--left children in the dust.
There is no denying the fact that today's kids aren't going to have the same experience we had when we were young. Back then, the bread and butter of the big game companies (i.e., Atari, Sega, Nintendo and others) was the child market. Games were appealing to grown-ups, too--if only for the tech factor--but appealing to the kids was where the most money could be had. Walking into the game store meant finding a wall full of games dedicated to the young player."
Leaving children behind? Well, duh... Adults seem to have far more money to spend than children. Just follow the money and there's your market.
The game industry only follows the money, but if it continues like this, they will only lead themselves to a generational gap, where millions of young kids are uninspired by games, if this situation is not rectified what happens when all of us "first gen'ers" get tired of games? The bubble bursts.
I plan on introducing my kids to the classics with simple gameplay like Mario, Tetris, Asteriods and the like.
Forget all those complicated "hit points", not enough mana, and other things that are best left to more complicated games. I further reccomend this route to any person that is new to gaming or just jaded of current titles. Now I didnt RTFA when I started this comment, but I see it says much the same as I have.
There is truth in humor.
I don't think they've left the children behind. They just haven't given up on their first customers, and now they've got that much more market. Let's use RPGs as an example.
Pokemon: cute, easy to learn, good value. This one's for kids. You've just introduced a 10 year old to hit points and turn based battles.
Final Fantasy: middle of the road. This one's accessible to everybody, but adults will probably do better than your average 13 year old. The stories are starting to pick up here.
Disgaea: almost definitely for a more mature (read patient) crowd. The story is there, but the focus is now on the battles themselves. The thinking person will definitely triumph over the button-masher here.
By the time little Johnny grows up, he'll have made it through all three types of RPG, and along the way he'll have given the video game industry its fair share of his money.
Games appeal to everybody. _That's_ what game developers have realized. They can sell to 20 year olds just as well (if not better) as they can to 10 year olds.
e2 | LJ
The key right now is buying the right console. I own all three - a Gamecube, Xbox, and PS2.
There are plenty of games for the Gamecube that will appeal to kids. They have simple game mechanics, relatively simple controls, and colorful and meaningful graphics. The awesome thing about Nintendo-developed games is that they're also very in-depth - they can appeal to almost any age.
In the last ten years, the game market has turned into shit.
There's really nothing new. There are piggy-backed enhancements of first person shooters, which culminate in hyper-twitching frag-fests like Halo and Unreal, or anti-social technoligized anarchist stupidity like GTA. And what's left over are the same tired RPGs and war games. It gets old real quickly.
There have been some promising games in development. I think SWG was really trying to be revolutionary, but that game has been murdered by corporate overlords who have micromanaged the design so that the game is essentially unplayable. That goes for most of the MMORPGS.
Don't even get me started on console games. The last console I bought was the N64. There were maybe a half-dozen decent games, and then the rest were crap that was stupid and badly designed. It used to be that anything that made it to cart was considered decent quality, but that's not the case any more. There's nothing more soul-sucking than spending money for a game that bores or frustrated you a half hour into it.
There is a reason why the game industry is in a glut. They're making crap. They've become too big and slow and dumb. They keep putting a fresh coat of paint on the latest thing from 1994 and finally people are tired of it.
I've skipped several generations of consoles. I still have no desire to get one. I don't think I've missed a goddam thing either, which is a sad state of affairs.
With the PSP being popular, the blowback from suck-ass game developers is beginning to turn full circle. The older the software supported, the more likely people won't throw the stuff in the trash because the new software sucks. I expect this trend to continue until people rediscover Missile Command, Joust, Asteroids, Robotron, Stargate and the hundreds of truly original and creative games from the 80s. If you think about it, there was more innvoation in six months of any given year from 1980-1990 than there has been in the entire last decade. Pathetic.
This month's Game Informer has an article addressing this same issue. I think the title was "The Greying of the Super Mario Crowd" or something similar. Basically, the article talked about how the game industry is catering to the people who played Mario Bros as kids, but are now older and have more mature tastes. When they were younger, they played Nintendo; when they aged, Nintendo was too kiddy for them, so they migrated to SNES and Sega. Then it was PS, then it was PS2 and so on.
While I think this is a great idea, I have to disagree with the idea that the game industry is more focused on older gamers. I used to work for a game publisher (the one we're all sick of hearing about these days) and our most profitable games were not the M or Teen rated games, but the kids' games. I never would have thought that if I hadn't started working there, but I think it's because we're all older and out of touch with what kids (10 and under) are into.
I don't think the industry needs to market to these kids though. Most of the kids games tie in to some kind of cartoon, kids movie (Charlie And the Chocolate Factory, anyone?), toy, etc. The kids already know of the characters and would probably want to buy the game just because it has their favorite cartoon character on the box. The thing with these games is that it's parent-friendly too. A non-game-savvy parent may stop by Toys R Us on the way back from work to pick junior up a treat. Is the parent going to buy some game he's never heard of, but there are posters of all over the store? Probably not. The parent will buy Kids Next Door or Britney's Dance Beat because he knows junior likes watching that on TV.
It makes sense that computer games, like any other form of media, should have a market representation similiar to other media. Just look at childrens books, childrens movies, childrens TV shows... all quite a niche market.
It hasn't been in the past, but this is only evidence that the market is still growing and maturing.
The same follows for women in gaming. Women don't necessarily like watching action movies, so why should the same women be expected to like playing action games? As more women become involved in the industry they will be able to shape it towards the kinds of games they enjoy playing.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Even worse - I had to explain two things that a Dad doesn't want to have to explain to an 8 year old daughter after a stroll through the game isle at CompUSA:
* Why do they always show pictures of girls with their underwear on on the front of boxes?
* How come people like blood so much?
Of course, I cut through the phone isle to miss the pop CD section...
-- $G
Women don't necessarily like watching action movies, so why should the same women be expected to like playing action games?
A lot of the traditional interests of women would probably be AI-complete to simulate. Women are thought to like chick flicks, which tend to be heavier on the drama than a typical action movie. It's a lot harder to simulate emotional responses to English sentences than it is to simulate the effects of a bullet.
Ever felt a need to complain about 11 year olds in a MMO? I know I've seen several people complain. And in one Taskforce on COH when someone said he had to go and he'll let his son control the character, the answer from the team leader was swift: "Is he older than 13?"
It's not even about kids as such, it's about new gamers, IMHO. Try introducing a older non-gamer to some modern titles and watch them be just as clueless and disoriented for hours. Try it, really. I know I've experimented on various family members.
In some genres (e.g., some MMOs) they're just utterly hopeless between steering a character in 3D, wrestling the camera, having to mix 15 different attacks and buffs, watching the enemy _and_ your health _and_ your spell timer simultaneously, all at the same time. They got utterly lost between all actions they had to manage at the same time.
It used to be that you only needed 1 joystick or Missile Command, or only the joystick in PacMan or Pong. A new gamer would understand all there is to the controls within _seconds_. And we kids were the ones who ruled supreme and topped the high score tables.
We grew up gently on more and more complexity, learning that we need just one more button, one more thing to watch for, one more nonsensical action to take for granted, one more RL instinct to ignore. It slowly piled up. New players nowadays are supposed to _already_ know all that.
As someone else called it in a post, some time ago, there's a "game grammar" you're pretty much supposed to know. What goes where, what goes well with what. And that's what it is.
And very few games take the time to hold your hand and guide you through it. To abuse the grammar analogy some more, a lot of tutorials basically assume that you already did beginner and intermediate language courses already, and they'll just give you some of the finer points. "Here's a list of words. Now use them in a small essay proving your mastery of the ablative and less-than-perfect tense, or this monster will bite your balls off." But you're supposed to already know what "ablative" is, how/when you use that case, and wth of a tense "less than perfect" is. Or for that matter WTH of a language _is_ it you're supposed write in.
It must be said, not all games. But some can be a nightmare as learning curve goes.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Somehow....the final fantasy series, the dragon warrior series, pilotwings, metal gear series, golgo 13, etc..... all seemed to me to be aimed at a much older age group. Games like Micky's Magical Adventure, and Mappyland, etc., never sold all THAT well as compared to the "older" games. To be honest, there really seems to me to be 4 different age groups of gamers. The Edutainment age (2-6 yr old), the kiddy game age, (7-10 year old), the target audience age (11-35 years old), and the mature gamer age (40+). The first group plays educational games bought and picked by their parents. The second group plays kiddy games bought and picked by their parents. The third group however is easily swayed by advertising and has HUGE disposable income. Furthermore, their tastes generally don't change THAT drastically from pre-teen years through teenage, through college, and into post college life. It's only once they really settle down, become parents of their own, and begin preparing the next generation of gamers that you get: The fourth group. Older gamers don't necessarily like different games from the target audience group, hell many of them love games like WoW, CS, Command and Conquer, EE2 etc. But, they're much less capricious with their spending habits, and also beginning to become concerned for what their own children are going to view. Thus, their overall spending level goes down. So where is the big money at? that 3rd group, the 11-35 year old target audience. That's why the games are target to that group. It's not that the games are being changed over time, it's the age group's tastes are maturing over time. (11 year olds back in the 8-bit days were playing caveman games and skate or die. 11 year olds now are playing Counter-strike, Doom 3, GTA series, and other more "adult" games. It's not that the younger games aren't out there on the consoles especially, it's just they're not being played.)
It has nothing to do with focus on adults, it has nothing to do with 8 bit vs 64 bit, it has to do with the learning curve. That's all. So all the rant about Sony vs Nintendo is nice, but off-topic at best.
Stuff changes, yes, but it changes in a direction that's harder and harder to grasp for a new gamer. Regardless of age, a new gamer is utterly lost in most current PC games. Kids just happen to be an example of new gamer, but try introducing your old mom or grandma to some games and you may notice the exact same phenomenon. That's the whole problem.
_You_ have likely had the privilege of having that learning curve flattened across a decade or two. We older ones have started on stuff that had just one joystick and often one that only went either let-right or up-down, but you only had to use one of the axis. (E.g., Pong.) Then we had a joystick and one button. Then a joystick and two buttons, but still, you had to mash A and shoot bombs with B when it hit the fan.
Now a console has some 12 buttons to memorize, and some PC games need you to use half the keyboard.
The move to 3D too introduced a bunch of stuff that's an extra pain in the butt, without actually making gameplay any richer. E.g., also wrestling the camera. E.g., FPS "jump puzzles" just for the sake of one extra thing to spend time learning, not because it actually adds anything to the story.
Other stuff was also added just for the sake of complex controls, not because it was needed to enable you to do more stuff. E.g., at the end of the day, between Final Fight and my martial artist in City Of Heroes, the difference isn't that big: both run around and punch hordes of NPCs in the face. But COH makes me also manage some 5 toggles, several buffs, an endurance (mana) bar, and try to string the best combo of 7 different attacks.
Etc.
That's the problem: new players are supposed to just _know_ already stuff that you and I learned in two decades.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.