Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
'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
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.
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!
there are no girls on the internet
So 2 girls 1 cup is???
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Now you just need a programmer!
I find myself extremely reluctant to pay any additional fees if I've already paid for the base game.
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
Definitions change. Used to be a computer was a guy who did math. And a nurse was a woman who offered breast milk for sale.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
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
Sitting in front of a TV and mashing buttons doesn't make you a gamer either, pal. Grab some friends and an Axis and Allies board and play a real game.
[...] 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!
Well, the situation is that you are in the minority and always will be - the general population has now been introduced to networked gaming through facebook; and they and their wallets outnumber 'true gamers' 100-to-1, so they will get priority attention and developer resources, and you will get the remains or @#$@ off (or develop it yourself, 'by gamers for gamers' style).
To expand on "Games = Play" I have to suggest also that "Games != Work". I mean, please- "the most popular games today have you tilling your farm, hiring waiting staff" is something that should NEVER appear in the same sentence as "reality."
FarmVille isn't backbreaking, only amazingly repetitive when you consider the player numbers. Your crops are guaranteed to sell, don't spoil unless you let them expire, and don't even a drop of rain. It's pure fantasy. SimFarm back in 1993 was much more a fun and realistic game. Zynga should have called it " FarmVille: SimFarm's Inbred Country Cousin"
Likewise for "hiring wait staff", which I assume never come in late or drop a single dish and work at 100% efficiency shift-long day in and out. Nor will they ever have a bad day and give you attitude or call out of work ten minutes after their shift starts. Again, it's not stressful the way work would be and should never be compared.
Sure, being a farmer who can flood an infinite-demand market with chocolate milk that comes out of a cow pre-pasteurized, homogenized and packaged would be a less stressful job than yours. Unfortunately nobody has that kind of job.
Nor are they a completely new form of gaming: SimCity, ring a bell?
While SimCity and FarmVille have some similarities on the surface, they really don't have all that in common once you dig a little deeper. FarmVille basically has no simulation driving the world, instead it has an extremely simple set of mechanics: click once to plant a crop, return a few real-world hours later to farm it, if you don't return in time, the crop will weather and you have to restart the planting process. This means you basically need zero skill other then regularly checking the gameworld for updates. FarmVille is in that respect much closer to a Tamagotchi then to SimCity. On top of that the social aspect of FarmVille basically boils down to a window popping up after every little accomplishment that asks you if you want to spam your friends.
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//