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The New Reality of Gaming
Hugh Pickens writes "Video games used to be about fighting aliens and rescuing princesses, writes Rohin Dharmakumar in Forbes, but the most popular games today have you tilling your farm, hiring waiting staff and devising menus for your restaurant or taking your pets out for walks while maintaining cordial relations with the neighbors. 'Reality, it would seem, is the new escapism.' Video games of the pre-social network era were mostly played by boys or young men but 'now the core audience of social network games are girls and young women,' says Alok Kejriwal, founder and CEO of games2win, an online gaming company. The tipping point in the US came in 2008 when women outnumbered men on the Internet. Combined with millions of parents and grandparents who're new to the Internet, the traditional face of the gamer is changing from that of a 25-year-old male to a band stretching from 16 to 40 years comprising men and women in almost equal numbers, says Sebastien de Halleux, one of the co-founders of Playfish, who predicts that someone is going to create a social game very shortly that pulls in a billion dollars a year. Gaming for this new set of players is less about breathtaking graphics, pulsating sound or edge-of-the-seat action and more about strengthening existing real world relations through frequent casual gaming. 'Think of these games as a sandbox where everybody has the same tools, yet everyone achieves different results,' says de Halleux."
Clueless idiots. Just a replacement for other activities. Solitaire anyone?
Games such as the Sims, WOW, Eve Online, CoD etc all provide a level of social interaction and a simplistic view of real life. Everything from live action, social interaction, and economic activity are all there to play with. Basically, it's just another form of playground and lemon-aid stand to toy with. Given the demographics, why is this so hard to understand?
Life is not for the lazy.
You know, as a form of challenging relaxation, only coding and writing prose really satisfy me. I used to watch people playing Doom in the computer lab for hours and maybe days, but I could never get into it. Sim City was worse. Even among the geekish, I guess I'll never really fit in.
I think I just had that billion dollar game idea... you play a person on facebook, collecting friends and doing other statistic whore activities. Plus bonus feature, all the normal facebook games are playable as minigames within the facebook sim game!
'Think of these games as a sandbox where everybody has the same tools, yet everyone achieves different results,' says de Halleux."
Sounds like a perfect description of Minecraft.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." - H.L. Mencken
While it's not hard to see social games making huge amounts of money via a number of schemes, it's hard to see how in the near term they would turn out profits even close to the pay to play gaming market given that they have all the monetary avenues of the 'social' game but got the players to pay for the game as a start. It seems more likely that Massive Multi-player will become more social, more reachable and those games will easy away at the social games over time.
Perhaps gender has something to do with it, but it seems likely to be more complex than this narrative of, "well most gamers used to be boys, who love dragons and shooting things, but now most gamers are girls who love cooking food and growing crops". (Actually, isn't farming a traditionally male occupation, anyway?)
The biggest confounding factor is that the technology setting is completely different. It's not very easy to put Doom inside Facebook in a way that makes any sense or gets people coming back. Facebook lends itself to games that need a little bit of interaction here and there, several times a day perhaps, but easily interruptible. People also seem to like it when stuff happens when they aren't playing, because it keeps them coming back to see what's changed. That style of gameplay naturally lends itself to "some mostly mundane stuff in the real world" types of games. You plant some crops, and over a few hours they grow, and you come back periodically. Your restaurant gets some customers coming in and out. You move your tow truck around to find cars who parked too long. That sort of thing.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Sure more females are using the Internet and now with Facebook, every game seems like something novel when in fact it isn't. Simply because new gamers are entering the population doesn't mean they ARE the population. We see paradigm struggles even today with more veteran gamers. Blizzard is pushing for a more difficult version of WoW with their new expansion and you have games like Super Meat boy introducing extreme levels of difficulty into gameplay that goes well beyond the mentality of catering to the casuals. More casual gamers are merely being exposed to games. We saw people play Farmville because they didn't know what video game grinding was, so it seemed new and exciting, or games like Bejeweled or Angry Birds. These are old ideas, repackaged in new mediums. If anything, games like Minecraft and Meat Boy are a breath of fresh air with sandbox games and/or extreme difficulty games becoming more popular. While it may be true that casual games are gaining momentum, I wouldn't bet on that shifting the entirety of gaming. Rest a sure, we haven't seen the last of video games that blow up aliens or cherish WWII heroism. Another point to keep in mind is that casual players may not have the same retention or activity rate as more hardcore gamers, which is more important when you have games that introduce micro transactions rather than subs.
Carl Sagan quotes get you an automatic +5 on all posts.
there are no girls on the internet
I think people like me seriously got way too good at doing anything video game related as far as old school ones go. I'm a Mario Kart and pod racing diety, can shoot anything with anything you put in my virtual hands, and will be optimized at any RTS game in minutes. People just got far too good at tradition video games so they had to make them more open ended and "complicated" while actually making the actions simpler.
That and the fact that most "gamers" now aren't gamers. Not many people originally were so they dumbed it down to bring in people who wouldn't have classified themselves as video game enthusiasts before. Now they outnumber hardcore gamers so it looks like tastes have changed while in reality it's the audience that changed.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
-And this time next year, Rodney, -we'll be millionaires!
Likewise, someone who plays games it not a "gamer." Just like not everyone who swims is a swimmer, sings is a singer, etc. If everyone who played games WAS a gamer, then the first gaming revolution was with solitaire. Just look at all those gamers there in those cubicals! Me? I'm a gamer. I play it all, solitaire, minesweeper, little farmville, I even go low-tech with some sudoku ever now and then. I am all 'bout that!
Take your reality based @#$% and !@#$ off. DO NOT WANT. If you want to market to girls who want to play reality tv style games, go for it, but leave my games alone. I want to learn to fly like a fighter pilot on a realistic sim. I want to rescue the princess. I want to slog my way up a beach in a WWII where I kill nobody the only consequence if I fail is restarting the level. You take your Sims and Farmville and Pet simulator and @#$@ off.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Um having a facebook account and dinking around on farmville doesn't make you a gamer. It makes you a facebooker with too much time on your hands.
Mean what you say...say what you mean.
And gaming for this "old" set of gamers is more and more about replaying the old stuff they still have in the closet, since the newer games with "breathtaking graphics" etc seem to be lacking this thing that used to be hugely important "when I was young" (I'm not old by any means, not even close), you know "gameplay". Mainstream game mechanics get simpler and simpler, resulting in less and less challenge and less and less replayability.
And that's not even mentioning how we're being treated as cash cows and morons by the gaming industry and game reviewers alike, getting less and less for the same money (but hey, it looks yummy!)
With HYPER-INFLATED reality TV! Now with three spinoffs about Flava Flav!
There is no -1 Disagree.
Casual games are designed to waste the people's life and money away not to be amazingly enjoyable. They're a grind that at first give a sense of accomplishment. I've played some before and after a few months, I looked back and went "wow that was a waste of time and my life." I'm not saying there won't always be new people to suck in or that some people will never realize how life sucking casual games are, but right now they are peaking. They have hit a fresh market of users that do not realize how much this is taking time away from other things they could enjoy or need to do. It is not some limitless cash cow like some people think. Sooner or later the market will stabilize and social games will simply be another genre of gaming, albeit a poorly respected genre amongst people who play any other kind of video games.
Funny, I was just discussing this with a friend recently. I used to game a lot when I was younger and got out of it for quite sometime other then playing a few PC games. I recently got a PS3 and although the graphics and everything else in new games is awesome, I felt like I was missing something. What I noticed was games seem and feel too real these days. To an extent, that's what we've always strive for it to make games more real and exciting but have we passed a point? I love Call of Duty but at the same time I feel like too much is going on and at some point I just wanna shoot some sh*t and be happy. Games are supposed to let you zone out and have fun and I feel as if this is hard sometimes when you make games with physics resembling real life. I want to take a turn down a street at 90 MPH without braking or hitting a wall.
Housewives and little girls play World of Warcraft. Subscribers: over 12 million. 90% of the ones signed up as female are male, but about half the players are female. Did I just blow your mind?
Also, Cataclysm dropped 1 hour ago.
FOR THE HORDE!!!
Does it mean men are more aware of reality? :)
We don't play farm or walk your dog games, because we know that we can just do all this things in the real life. Having virtual farm is pointless if you can have a real one. And more important - what fun is doing chores?!
Fighting the aliens is something completely different. Video games are the only way to do this. And it's real fun
Minecraft
Heres a comic i read a while ago that seemed very related to this topic and hilarious by itself.
http://static.vgcats.com/comics/images/090423.jpg
'Reality, it would seem, is the new escapism.'
Games like those described may seem to be about reality on the surface, but they're actually more about escapism than ever before. What players are escaping from is chaos: a world where the rules are unknown, or at least imperfectly understood. In comparison, games have relatively simple, consistent rules to master, and a mastery over those rules gives the player a feeling of power and, by extension, the impression that the game world is "more fair." This is accentuated in a game that takes place in a realistic setting, as it encourages the player to draw direct comparisons between his success in the game world and his success in the real world.
These sorts of games have been around since at least back in the NES days in the 1980's. I don't know if anyone talked about them or wrote about them, but some people must have bought them, otherwise the game makers wouldn't have kept making them.
Farmville is not even the first blockbuster farming game. Harvest Moon was a huge hit both commercially and critically back in the mid-1990's.
The new reality of casual gaming maybe. Although plenty of sites hosting a variety of flash games might disagree.
Personally, I didn't know what the hell the summary was talking about (Harvest Moon?) until I hit the word "social". A Facebook game is only a game in the loosest sense of the word.
Stupid, fluffy escapism gets big.
"Fred and Ginger" for ninety minutes beats focusing on the gnawing hunger in your gut.
'Think of these games as a sandbox where everybody has the same tools, yet everyone achieves different results,'
You mean like Life? And isn't there a money component to these games as well? Like, if you have cash, you can leapfrog the third world?
The only difference is that the dangers are imaginary and the rewards are fake. But the energy wasted is quite real.
-FL
[...] grandparents who're new to the Internet,[...]
Seriously, "who're"? That must be the worst abbreviation ever. :P
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
The female and casual market is an addition to the games market, not a replacement. No one is going to throw away their Xbox 360 in favor of Farmville.
"Different games attract different people."
No shit.
http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=280
The "princess rescue" type games still exist. I'm currently playing Kirby's Epic Yarn. The basic story is that Kirby is sucked into a "yarn-world" thanks to a magical, yarn-based bad guy with plans of taking over Kirby's world. Kirby and the entire world around him look like they're just threads, buttons and fabric. The gameplay is fantastic and not realistic at all. I can't remember the last time I was confronted by someone so I grabbed them, pulled at a loose thread and watched them rip apart into untie into pieces of string.
The simulator-type games might be rising in popularity with some people, but they aren't the only games being made. Nor are they a completely new form of gaming: SimCity, ring a bell?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Your idea has some merit, but I prefer to believe that people are willing to pay for stuff which they think has value (assuming, of course, they have the ability to do so). Even in the case that they can get the same stuff for free.
This is especially the case if they feel that paying is important for making it more likely that the free game continues to exist.
A few years back I read almost exactly the same article, but about deer hunting games.
Where once gaming had been dominated by wizards and space aliens, games about deer hunting for the redneck market had come out of nowhere to be the top seller. There were just so many more rednecks than computer geeks. And the rednecks, being new to gaming, were happy to play games with extremely low production values.
This is the same thing, but with girls instead of rednecks, and social networking instead of deer hunting.
It is all a natural transition from games by computer geeks for computer geeks to games by computer geeks for anyone with disposable income.
http://xkcd.com/756//
I disagree with the idea that people don't care about graphics, plot, etc. My wife started playing games with things like The Sims, but she has grown as a gamer and now plays things like Mass Effect, Fallout 3, and Starcraft 2. She loves the graphics almost as much as the story line. That's not to say casual games like Plants vs. Zombies aren't enjoyable, but for the longest time my wife believed the blockbuster games would be too hard to play and just watched me. The VATS system in Fallout 3 made it much easier for her, and has broken down her casual game barrier.
By the way, yes, my wife is awesome!
Eve Online at www.eve-online.com is exactly as you say " a sandbox where everybody has the same tools, yet everyone achieves different results" in eve.. you do have to level up, but it has a real world economic structure in the market where an individual person can have trillions worth of assets and steal or destroy thousands of dollars worth of asses in real world equivelent value download the video here >> http://www.eveonline.com/download/videos/Default.asp?a=download&vid=269 . I'm really supprised EVE is not more popular than WOW in the level of sandbox style gameplay
Girls/Women buy stuff, sometimes without proper cause or consideration of effect. Therefore advertisers target them. Why would a company that markets games be any different?
Slowly waving my hand - "This is not the sig you are looking for."