TheDuriel on 15/4/2013 at 20:46
Quote Posted by bartekb81
Games are faster, shorter, easier with controls and gameplay, much more forgiving. You have auto-saves every 5 minutes and checkpoints every 20 meters. You have objective and direction markers all the time, levels are often straightforward. Graphics and audio effects are very important. Narrative is very movie-like.
this is true in some cases but yes
games today are meant to be beaten and are easier because of that
but also the gaming "communits" (i hate that word together with gaming" changed alot
today you just go online and watch a video on how the game works and all that stuff
you know more about the game before you buy it
back in the games you bought thief and had no idea what to expect and if you are able to beat it
Springheel on 15/4/2013 at 23:16
Quote:
Because you already read the statistics in such way that you conveniently omit important issues. First of all, the age of average gamer dropped from 37 to 30 in one year. Which is a bit strange isn't it? But, since it fits your theory better, you didn't investigate it further. Well, that's the reason.
Actually, I didn't have the 2011 values, so thank-you for pointing them out. I can do without your personal theories about my motivations, though.
Even if it's true that the average age of gamers has generally increased over the last ten years, that still says nothing about how often they're gaming. The 1.5 hours per day figure has remained constant over the past ten years, and the age of people
buying games (presumably the ones being targeted by the industry) hasn't changed much either.
jtr7 on 15/4/2013 at 23:25
In the U.S., we have a whole generation of new gamers who went to schools where teachers' use of red ink for corrections and grading has been forbidden as too alarming. :mad:
Myth on 15/4/2013 at 23:34
Quote Posted by jtr7
In the U.S., we have a whole generation of new gamers who went to schools where teachers' use of red ink for corrections and grading has been forbidden as too alarming. :mad:
The US government allows GMO crops as "not proven to be harmful" but they disallow red pens in school? :eek:
demagogue on 15/4/2013 at 23:41
GMOs only attack European DNA with their cosmic ribonucleic rays. So that's understandable.
Red pens, on the other hand, imply that Americans are imperfect, which is clearly not acceptable.
MasterTaffer on 16/4/2013 at 01:18
Quote Posted by Captain Spandex
Dark Souls isn't 'easy', but how exactly is it not dumbed-down?
It's not terribly deep. As an RPG or as a dungeon-crawler. Even modern triple-A titles offer more character customization and role-playing elements than it does.
Difficult games can be streamlined and shallow as sin like anything else. Worse still, their difficulty can become a gimmick, as in the case of Demon's / Dark Souls. Super Meat Boy, for example.
I actually really enjoyed Dark Souls for it's complex and cleverly concealed storyline (on top of the amazing combat). Not many players even notice it on their first playthrough because several important elements of the story require you to discover some rather convoluted secrets and read a ton of item descriptions, it took me almost a dozen playthroughs until I began to fully explore and unravel it's depths. I enjoy that kind of cryptic stuff, it's like Blade Runner all over again.
Aja on 16/4/2013 at 05:14
My girlfriend is completing her last term of student teaching right now, and her placement is in a junior high school teaching social studies. She said that her students (grades 7 to 9, so ages 12-15 or so) are constantly talking about games. She said the other day that they were having a debate as to which game was better, Battlefield 3 or Bioshock Infinite.
I just kinda chuckled to myself, thinking that the games that we all play and scrutinize over and take so seriously are also the ones that this group pre- and perhaps only partially-pubsecent teenagers are playing and taking seriously, too. And from what my girlfriend tells me of their behaviour, the kids sound rather undeveloped. So I guess we need to bear in mind that in spite of the ESRB ratings, the games that we're all hoping will be developed for us, the so-called thinking people, are also being developed for a demographic that still isn't quite clear on how you get pregant.
(I guess, in all fairness, though, some of those kids are apparently adept programmers in multiple languages, so we can't claim that they're universally dumb. Their grasp of mathmatics is surely better than mine, anyway)
henke on 16/4/2013 at 06:36
Quote Posted by Aja
isn't quite clear on how you get pregant.
PREGANT? DONT U MEAN PRAGNENT
I think you need to see this informative clip on how babby is formed:
[video=youtube;w_RaPOOVX1Y]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_RaPOOVX1Y[/video]
Judith on 16/4/2013 at 08:47
Quote Posted by Springheel
Actually, I didn't have the 2011 values, so thank-you for pointing them out. I can do without your personal theories about my motivations, though.
Even if it's true that the average age of gamers has generally increased over the last ten years, that still says nothing about how often they're gaming. The 1.5 hours per day figure has remained constant over the past ten years, and the age of people
buying games (presumably the ones being targeted by the industry) hasn't changed much either.
Ok, so your mistake was that you didn't check it, my mistake was an assumption that you did it on purpose, I think we can agree on that :)
Also, I'm not sure there's an average that will tell us how often people really play games. As grown-ups we have a lot on our hands, but that doesn't mean that we don't play until morning from time to time. I don't know if any statistics include the fact that the amount of time you have for playing a game varies from 30 minutes to 4 hours for example. I'm not sure that statistics will give you a meaningful answer for such huge range. IMO it's more like that saying about me and my dog, statistically we both have 3 legs.
What is more important is what I've been repeating for quite some time now: the systems that enable you to play games for as short as 15 minute sessions are already in place, since current-gen console era or maybe even earlier. And that changed the way we play games, not even because it forces anything (it doesn't), but because we can use those options right now. It helps reaching the broader audience, it's more flexible and it works towards the goal of console being an entertainment system in your living room, not a box in your kid's room.
And, AAA titles have enormous production costs and have to reach the broader audience to make a profit, just like the Hollywood movies. Of course, that can go to some ridiculous extent, like SE or EA saying that a game selling in 3-4 M units is not successful enough and it will be scrapped. Still until Thief has a reboot as an indie game, we can expect similar approach.
bartekb81 on 16/4/2013 at 13:37
Quote Posted by TheDuriel
this is true in some cases but yes
games today are meant to be beaten and are easier because of that
but also the gaming "communits" (i hate that word together with gaming" changed alot
today you just go online and watch a video on how the game works and all that stuff
you know more about the game before you buy it
back in the games you bought thief and had no idea what to expect and if you are able to beat it
And I'm missing the times when each new game had many surprises and unknown elements to discover since there were no much info about it; when I didn't know almost everything about the new game until I played it myself... Internet has its strong and weak elements. Now we know more about a game to make a decision of buying it or not. It is good, but at the same time something important is lost: a pure joy of discovering games' secrets ourselves.
