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Have Modern Gamers Lost the Patience For Puzzles?
Brainy Gamer has an interesting reflection on old puzzle games and why their style of gameplay seems to be a dying art. According to the author modern gamers seem more interested in combat and seem to have lost the patience for difficult puzzles. "Despite my fondness for the adventure games of yore, it appears the days of puzzles in narrative games have come and gone. Puzzles - especially the serial unlocking variety found in the old LucasArts games - seem to have become a relic of a bygone era. Where they once provided a necessary ludic element to a—clever and often complex narrative - designed to add challenge and force the player to earn his progress through the story - few modern players have the patience for such challenges anymore."
...
...as opposed to ancient gamers? Preindustrial gamers? Renaissance gamers? Pre-war gamers?
Advice: on VPS providers
... but the comment thing was just too much of a hassle to figure out.
Also, not enough blood or tits.
Maybe he's just tired of math.
Misery loves company. Online misery loves unsuspecting random strangers.
"I don't think you CAN do this..."
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Thanks t0qer
for the very interesting
poem about a java game
It was touching
and yet
left me confused
wanting more
Wow. That was a triumph!
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The author misses his puzzles, and now yells at the neighbourhood kids to get off his lawn.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
That's an interesting combination of post and sig.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
It's not like you have to transport into your own brain and rip out your common sense in order to can pick up the Tea and the No Tea at the same time so you can so impress the ship computer that he opens the door for you. Discussing any puzzle less complicated than that is just whining.
Burma Shave.
Each processor would proceed sequentially as if it had been better for them not to rise against Saul.
I have to say, I've never read such a honest and touching poem about the complex relationship between a man and his java game.
Please note that we have added a consequence for failure. Any failure will result in an unsatisfactory mark on your official testing record, followed by death.
Portal can be a pretty harsh puzzle game, too...
gentoo-pc ~ $ LC_ALL="C" appletviewer http://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/
Warning: tag requires name attribute.
Warning: tag requires name attribute.
java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 288
at d.a(Unknown Source)
at d.a(Unknown Source)
at dust.a(Unknown Source)
at dust.init(Unknown Source)
at sun.applet.AppletPanel.run(AppletPanel.java:419)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619)
Java.
Write once,
run anywhere.
Yeah. Right.
Hell yeah, modem gamers don't like puzzles!! They MUCH prefer getting that init script juuuust rii@#$%^)(*%&$ NO CARRIER
all alike.
Actually, that is a pretty good description of slashdot.
AccountKiller
Gentoo eh? You must have compiled your JDK wrong! Try setting ARRAY_OUT_OF_BOUNDS_EXCEPTION=false before you do the build.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
WELL !
HAVE THEY ?!?!?!
Unbelievable! You, [Subject Name Here] must be the pride of [Subject Hometown Here].
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
Argh. No. Never. The important part is I am not bitter.
My favorite story about this was the game where all the commands were of the form "verb noun" where only the first four letters counted. The correct action was to "scream bear" which caused the bear to run away. However, if you got really frustrated at trying to guess the correct command and wrote "screw bear" instead, the bear also ran away.
The guy who wrote the article said that he was rather surprised at that result...
In those days the game world was smaller, and a single person could, through diligent gaming, acquire a thorough knowledge of every character class.
Take L30n4rd0, the wizard/technologist/tank/healer/DPS/accountant. And he was good at all of them.
Nowadays there's just too much to learn; you have to specialize :(
there is no god but truth, and reality is its prophet
Floppy? You think floppies were "really early"? You're kidding, right? The early puzzle games came on cassette tapes, and took half an hour to load. The really early ones came on punched cards.
Also, you're on my lawn. Fix that.
ME: Pick up saber
Computer: I don't understand "pick up"
That's when I tended to eject the floppy and try to see how far I could toss it.
Usually a quick look around would help you find the right word. The good old times when one had to actually read the text and not mindlessly click the highlighted words in the text.
ME: look
Computer: You are standing in a dusty room. The ceiling is clogged with webs from long dead spiders and the windowpanes have gone blind, giving the room an abandoned feeling. A musty odour fills your nostrils. The floor is covered in a dusty carpet. In the twilight you can make out a door to your east and when to the north.
An ancient knight's armour with a big claymore, once placed at the western wall has fallen over, it's parts now scattered on the carpet.
ME: pick up claymor
Computer: I don't understand claymor
ME: puck up claymore
Computer: Learn to type you moron!
ME: take claymore
Computer: You stagger under the weight of the big sword. You can barely carry it and how someone could weild this in a fight is beyond you. ...
One hour. Seriously, that is how long it took me to complete Portal the very first (and only) time I played it.
He's just grumpy becuase he found out that the cake was a lie!!!
Shhh! Some game developers will figure out the obvious corollary - that if they only increase the size of the possible solution space until it is becomes impractical to try a breadth-first search, they will have created the next Day Of The Tentacle.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.