I am ready for video games with these beautiful moments - and please keep them short! I don't want to spend hours and hours on a game anymore, at least not traditional ones - but I have no idea where to find them.

I do remember staring at the in-game sunset as it cast shadows across the open prairie and thinking, "Wow."

There are frequently scripted introductory sequences to familiarize you with the mechanics and attempt to hook you with a story, but they will consume your time but once, and can provide you with hundreds of hours of entertainment and escape thereafter.

Of course, if driving is your thing, there are a ton of racing simulators out there, from F1 to rally cars.

Other categories of nonviolent or non-FPS games would be puzzle games like Tetris or Candy Crush. Also, video games can reproduce or make single-player versions of the classic board, card, and dice games like chess or yahtzee.

is GTA, really.

Granted, player agency in Skyrim is pushed way down compared to earlier TES titles but you can still affect the game world by choosing quests, choosing sides, Hell, Morrowind allowed you to kill a main questline quest-giver, ruin the prophecy, keep playing, and still fulfill the main storyline.

In the end, playing games labeled with either "theme park" or "sandbox" doesn't change the fact that you are still playing within the confines of someone else's world; I can't create a functional X-Wing in Minecraft and fly to Tattoine, no matter what blocks I put together.

The parent was enjoying driving a car around through a fictional (and populated) setting, so pointing them towards a "build your own adventure" game is probably not going to tickle their fancy nearly as much.

This is where table-top role-playing games really shine. You can totally do that in, say, GURPS (among a great many other games, a tiny fraction of which I discuss below).

N.B. Forgive me if I'm preaching to the choir, or if you're simply not interested. It's currently NaGaDeMon (National Game Design Month), and I've been swimming in TTRPGs lately, spending nearly all of my free time researching, playing, philosophizing, and designing a TTRPG of my own for the past week... I've really got to hand it to my anti-depressants, as this time last year I couldn't find the passion nor the energy to do this :)

Perhaps GURPS is too focused on realism for your tastes. How about Robin Laws's HeroQuest? where the probability of success doesn't depend on an action's difficulty in the "real world", but rather on which results produce the most cinematic and exciting stories? Or Fate [Core]? which emphasizes characters being larger-than-life and doing larger-than-life things in larger-than-life situations? These sorts of "narrativist" games are pretty popular lately, and not without good reason.

And then there's Apocalypse World, which focuses more on characters: the interactions between characters, their histories together, co-operation as well as conflict. Experience points are awarded for developing your relationship(s) with the other characters, rather than for slaying foul demons or hoarding precious loot. It's a game where the players are expected to be involved as much as the the gamesmaster in creating the game world and driving the narrative. Its mechanics reflect that, making the game difficult for a gamesmaster to railroad. As an added bonus (imho), the book itself is written in a very casual, conversational, vernacular style, which I find refreshing compared to the too-often sterile, textbookish style of these rulebooks. There are quite a few other games that come from the same school of design as AW, as well has plenty of third-party "rules hacks" — adaptations of the core system to other settings and genres, sometimes with very different goals than AW's, other times with surprisingly similar ones.

That's not to deride demon-slaying or loot-hoarding, though! The "Old School Renaissance" is now! Tons of games, ranging from free to cheap to pricey, all attempting to emulate that old-school early-to-mid-80s (sometimes even up to the mid-90s, by some accounts) TTRPG feel. If that's your bag, [Revised] Mazes & Minotaurs is quite well-designed (and free!), whereas something like Labyrinth Lord or Lamentations of the Flame Princess prefers to mimic old-school Dungeons & Dragons, complete with its quirks, much more closely. Then there's Monsters & Magic, somewhat unique amongst the OSR games, in that it's very much a new-school game that nevertheless is readily compatible with all (yes, all) of those old fantasy splatbooks from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, with any necessary conversion happening on the fly. Oh! and Tunnels & Trolls recently had an 8th edition published through Kickstarter, if you want to play something actually old-school ;)

Or how about a game where the rules themselves are as customizable as the fictional universes they power? Something like Fudge (free), or even Basic Role-Playing? Games which are as much toolkits or frameworks for creating a game of your own as they are games in and of themselves? (Fate Core (also free) leans a bit in this direction, too, though it's noticeably less flexible than Fudge in many ways, despite being similarly modular).

Maybe something more middle-of-the-road is more your style, and games like True20 and its successor Dragon Age/Fantasy AGE can give you a nice balance. They manage to be traditional but with some modern mechanics carefully blended in: a little more gritty than the likes of Fate or Apocalypse World but not so much as GURPS or the typical OSR game, and they balance cinematics with simulation pretty elegantly. Traditional yet casual, these games feel mellow and relaxing to me somehow, with less demand to constantly be table-consulting and jurisprudently brilliant than more classic-style games, and less demand to constantly be super-creative and imaginatively brilliant than many of the more modern-style games. (I tend to recommend this type of game for players about to embark on their first long-term campaign — usually after they've had a few one-shots with a nanogame (see below) or two under their belts, though that's hardly necessary).

Or maybe you just want to grab a few beers and shoot the shit with your friends. Nothing drives out boredom like a good one- or two-page "nanogame" RPG, such as Everyone Is John, Police Cops 2, or Lasers & Feelings (free, free, and free).

I introduced a few friends to TTRPGs at my bachelor party a few years ago, in which we grabbed a cozy table at a cigar & whiskey bar, busted out a d6, and played a few hours' worth of Everyone Is John. They all said that they had a blast playing it (as did I), and a couple of them have since picked up "the hobby" themselves. The "rules" and the "setting" are just tools to help you maintain direction, to occasionally introduce complications that make the fiction more engaging, and to enable the group to engage in a shared imaginative experience. And those rules and settings are not sacrosanct — tweak them to your heart's desire, or do away with them and substitute your own. Do whatever you think is fun, or awesome, or epic, or interesting, or amusing, or cool, or funny, or... really, just anything you want. Let loose t̶h̶e̶ ̶k̶r̶a̶k̶e̶n̶ your imagination, and set your creativity free!

Compare that to a video game, where you can do literally anything the developers decided you could do (and had enough time to implement before the deadline...). Not to hate on video games (gods know I enjoy a good video game myself), but TTRPGs are a totally different experience. —"Wow, did you hear that Dragon Age Inquisition has over 100 hours of gameplay? And it's still only $60!" —"Cool. I dropped $40 on the Dragon Age TTRPG, which has literally ɪɴꜰɪɴɪᴛʏ hours of gameplay. INFINITY. (Plus it looks pretty damn cool on my shelf, to boot... quite possibly the prettiest book I own, and I own lots of books...)." Of course, video games have the advantage of single-player mode(s) — despite Tunnels & Trolls featuring many popular "solitaire" modules, the experience is so different that it feels like a totally different game, even if all the rules and mechanics are the same. Whereas video games can actually be (and often are) fun to play solo, I don't think I've ever had much fun playing a TTRPG solo (though, full disclosure, I've only ever played two solo adventures before I lost interest). So grab some friends and some dice!

There's even a decent amount of "open-source" TTRPGs, if you care about licensing terms & conditions :)

---

P.S. If you're really hung-up on Star Wars, there have been some half-dozen officially-licensed Star Wars TTRPGs (West End Games's original back in the 80s being rightly considered a classic, and Wizards of the Coast's early 00s version providing the mechanics for Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic, while Fantasy Flight's current trilogy has been generally well-received despite requiring strange, custom dice (grr...)). As you can probably imagine, there have also been tons of fan-made, unlicensed Star Wars TTRPGs as well, usually provided as splatbooks for existing sci-fi/space-opera games or generic/universal systems, not to mention plenty of "Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off" games/splats, such as West End Games's D6 Space (now free), which they produced after they lost the IP license. Both types of game/splat are easy to find on the Internet. Of course, if you and your party are comfortable enough with the Star Wars setting, you can just grab an appropriate game/system and just wing it (Traveller being the classic sci-fi game, while just about any game mentioned above would work (most of the OSR games, nanogames, and Apocalypse World would be considerably more work to adapt than the others, although Uncharted Worlds is a space-opera game using a slightly modified AW system (PbtA—"Powered by the Apocalypse"), so at least that work has been done for you already), as would a great deal of others).

Game progress of story-heavy offline games should be unlockable at will without importing save games. Or there should be some kind of an AI play mode, where you only take over that autopilot if you seem interested or just like to watch.

For most linear games with an actual story a youtube replay, including fast forwards, will be as good as the thing itself. This might as well explain a part of the let's play success.

Most games seem to stick to some simple linear variation of a difficulty model: Easy, Medium, Hard, ... Why aren't there more options? Why aren't there more custom options? For many games, why is "easy" have to be so "hard" as a baseline. If I want to play a game as a 100% power trip, why not let me?

I only have Vice City, nowhere near as visually spectacular, but I get myself a car and just drive around with the radio on. It's the same for Assassin's Creed through to IV, I often just go for a walk and look at the scenery, immerse myself in a time and place that's long gone. Often enough, the missions get in the way.

I used to clock hundreds of hours on Flight Sim 98, not necessarily learning how to fly (though that was fun too) but going to various cities in Flight Sim, checking them out in Encarta and doubling back to Flight Sim again.

Now that I'm older and financially capable of visiting these places, its pretty surreal. I hope the new AR/VR movement brings about these kind of experiences.

Not very demanding on time, and it's not about killing zombies.

Very story oriented, and you get attached to the characters in the game.

I myself abandoned games over a decade ago - they just required too much from me. Only recently I decided to check some games out from the library. Not sure why I picked this one to play and was very pleasantly surprised.

Damn I want my holo-deck. What's taking so long?

You sound like you'd love the mostly open-world, graphic-centric (MMO)RPG genre! Something like Black Desert Online or FF14 Online. Where you can optionally focus on the story here or there and are mostly free to explore the world (although areas that outlevel you may be a bit dangerous...)

    [0] http://i.imgur.com/oV4smNW.png
    [1] http://i.imgur.com/XqGjx5e.jpg
    [2] http://i.imgur.com/lpJ272N.jpg
    [3] http://i.imgur.com/1w9yCy2.jpg
    [4] http://i.imgur.com/QCRQLIP.jpg

I've got nothing against combat elements of games, but if it falls into endless repetition and involves lots of grinding, etc, to advance, then it just becomes work, not fun.

Want to drive around town obeying the laws and enjoy the sites? Do that.

Want to partake in multiple instances of non-violent side missions such as racing, skydiving, and more? Do that.

Want to stand at the boardwalk on the beach and watch people walk by while enjoying the setting sun? Do that.

Want to take flying lessons? Do that.

How about some tennis or golf? Do that.

At one point in the game you can even do yoga for crap's sake. There are actually several examples of exploration-type tasks that you seem to be interested in as well. There's a great deal more to GTA5 than the violence you hear about from people, that only focus on that one topic, that have a narrative and rhetoric to push on people for their own agendas.

Still have negative opinions towards GTA5 because of moral reasons? That's cool too. But consider you may be missing out on tons of stuff you would actually enjoy because you might dismiss it immediately for reasons.

When I got bored with GTA5's regular mission based mechanics, had finished all the missions, I spent just as much time getting two characters in a car and driving back and forth as fast as possible between the furthest auto body repair shops on the map just to see how long I could last before the car blew up.

From "My 4-Year-Old son plays Grand Theft Auto":

At this point my son was familiar with the game’s mechanics and hopped into the ambulance. As he put the crime fighting behind him, he wondered out loud if it were possible to take people to the hospital. I instructed him to press R3, and he was off to save a few lives. He was having a blast racing from point to point, picking up people in need, and then speeding off to Las Venturas Hospital. During one of his life-saving adventures, he passed a fire house with a big, red, shiny fire truck parked out front. He didn’t want to let his passengers down, so he took them to the hospital and then asked if I could guide him back to the fire truck.

http://venturebeat.com/community/2010/06/05/my-four-year-old...

No, you literally can't. You have to kill people en masse from the very start of the game. And, if you want to progress far enough to unlock the various features of the game, you have to do downright reprehensible things.

I've played, and enjoyed most of, GTA5 (though I think the developers, at this point, should fuck off with the faux-satire, they lost the plot a long time ago), but I understand why other people don't.

Once you have reached that point, you can do pretty much anything you want. Yes, I understand you have to do bad things to get to that point. That's why I agreed with the comment about if you still have moral objections to the game, then that's cool. I personally would prefer they allow you those options from the start, but I can understand why they do not for gameplay purposes.

Sounds like you would enjoy Euro Truck Simulator 2 or American Truck Simulator. Yes you still have a mission (taking a trailer from point A to point B) but you can choose from a long list of "jobs" that will take you to many different cities, and you even have the option to free roam.

If you are interested in the genre, you can follow Squirrel on Youtube, I especially like his "trucking diaries" but there are flight sim videos as well: https://www.youtube.com/user/DaSquirrelsNuts

But try playing it as a child or a woman marginally interested in a gaming experience and you get unnecessary swearing and tropes from a man's perspective.

Oh well. I wish there was possibility for a mode. Not one you are forced to select, but one based on a profile, more akin to the predictive one advertisers already have on you.

Most of the time, games are structured by people whose viewpoint and incentives are radically different from the players. In the short term, the industry doesn't "care" if you play because you're bored and there's no real choice (for AAA levels of production effort) and because that's what your friends are doing, and there's a little variable schedule of reward that's gotten its hooks into you.

The most memorable times I had in Eve Online were entirely through emergent gameplay. I and my fellow alliance players in 0.0 security space couldn't give a rat's ass about anything the content team generated -- except as a source of resources in our own player-generated drama of building a player owned station. The emergent stuff is what really engages the mind. That's the real "play" that's going on in games -- not the publishing company's interest in keeping us paying a subscription. That stuff was 100X more engaging than anything some content team could dream up.

I find there's a whole subset of gamers today who remind me of the college students who would come up to you at the beginning of a course, and ask if you'd play their "college game" with them -- You tell them exactly what to spit back out during exams, they memorize that list, they get their grades, they satisfy their requirement, and no one has to actually care or be engaged or actually learn anything. Those students remind me of a lot of gamers. It's not about finding fun, genuinely engaging, unexpected gameplay. It's about getting expectations met, and getting the stuff they're entitled to.

I got fed up, and I've decided to do something about it. I'm self-funding and making my own MMO, and I'm going to do my best to have it be about emergent play. I'm very far from being able to tackle those issues, but I have a server cluster that can spawn any of the 2^87 star systems, and support 70 players in the same multiplayer battle. All but one of those 2^87 star systems are identical at this point, however. But that's the next thing on my list. No RPG progression yet, but we'll get there. I want to make an MMO that's specifically built for smart people, where no one gets nerfed, no one grinds, and devs never give any sympathy to forum whiners.

http://www.emergencevector.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3DPalL7p5w&list=PLnAL8xf0QQ...

(I'm planning a game that you'd have to spend hours and hours on, overall, but I'm going to try and structure it so you can play in half-hour, hour, or two hour sessions.)

Buy gamess from small studios, made by a few people or even one guy, usually a lot of them are in Steam Early Access (yes, it is risky, some of them get abandoned or just never improve much)

For me this is like a reneissance in gaming. Have a look at Factorio, Starbound, Rimworld, Banished, Pillars of Eternity, SotS:The Pit, ARK:Survival Evolved, 7 Days to Die, Hearthlands. Some of those have multiplayer and are something else completely to play with a few friends

A whole lot of people don't even know there is entire world besides CoD or 50th fucking Asassins Creed...

I also play Dota 2 on and off, since multiplayer interactions in it are so intense and so unpredictable

I have a sniper that never hits anything, ever, and I've started having little pep talk with her before each mission, trying to get her to buck her game up and be a useful member of the team.

Shooting aliens in the head isn't the fun bit. Caring for my little gang of incompetents and nursing them through each mission is the fun bit.

Yep, that's a good rule to live by. There are a lot of great games out there if you put in the effort to look into them (and know where to look)

I think movies have this same problem. Your weekly superhero blockbuster's are fun, they definitely aren't everyone's cup of tea. But if you weren't ever really into movies, and started jumping in, you'd think that's all there was.

It's a shame to see how AAA companies have butchered the Dota-like genre. There's Valve's Dota 2 which is the shining example of what the genre should be and then there's all these garbage rehashes out there that have just tried to dumb down the game or introduce some kind of gimmick or cliche.

AAA games are just a race to the bottom in terms of design. They just try to appeal to the lowest common denominator and games get more shallow and casual with each iteration.

Look at the difference between Starcraft Broodwar and Starcraft 2, Diablo 2 and Diablo 3, Dota and every clone like LoL and Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone, Overwatch. All of the sequels and successors are more shallow and casual than what came before. And the novelties these games introduce are better characterized as gimmicks to hook casual players. Why make a game that caters to a hardcore audience? That's just limiting your playerbase and limiting your potential profit.

Sony's user experience in the store just really is horrible. It has gotten better, but its been how many years now?

Most titles don't have any screenshots or trailers or previews of any kind.

Most payment methods simply don't work.

A paypal account where you want to choose a payment source? TOUGH LUCK

A mobile payment from your telephone? NOT ON YOUR PROVIDER

Okay, fine don't take my money. I got a credit card to work once though, I saved that one.

For instance, the biggest blockbuster movies usually contain unrealistic scenarios of violence and heroism. The biggest romance movies are usually unrealistic. The most popular music is usually describing a hypothetical situation that people feel drawn to.

I think that's responsible for the trends we've seen in graphics, 3d, virtual reality. People willing to consume media are people that don't have or want the opportunity to be extraordinary in their lives. The more realistic graphics become, the more they feel that their experiences in media are real experiences.

So my point is basically that games exist not just for the novelty of playing a game, but also to let people live their fantasies, and some fantasies are less realistic than others, and therefore will be better represented in games. Anyone can have a relationship with another person. You don't need Lydia in Skyrim for that, and likely if you try it in real life, it'll be much more rewarding than in a video game. If you try gutting someone with a sword in real life, you'll go to jail.

This whole portrayal of video games (and other media) as "art" will never take off outside of technological hipster circles, for the same reason most people don't spend hours in art museums ever day. They're not interested in media for its own sake as artistic, they're interested in the proxy experiences that it offers, that people can't get elsewhere.

That’s an interesting thought that I can’t disagree with.

Myself and many people in my circle, including clients, have had played games in the past, probably to the point of unhealthy obsession when we were kids and getting an education.

But all of us became less enchanted by the medium as we became more successful (success in terms of increasing our financial wealth, control of time and ability to experience or get what we desire in life). We just couldn’t justify the time to play the games that were coming out, which we believed were not sparking the same fire in us that games we played years ago had (possibly due to rose-tinted glasses).

According to the article I guess I now seek games with more depth. Games that can impart some useful knowledge and help me reframe things in life, like a good book can. To use BioWare as an example, I believe their older RPGs like Jade Empire did this well, that struck a balance of philosophy, problem solving and interesting narrative. But this went away when they dove more into RPGs that dived deeper into the power fantasies that most consumers want.

And now, with the demands of family and sick loved ones, and with the added money which can build the sort of system I could have only dreamed about in my poor teens and college years, I'm home much more and games are suddenly appealing again.

It's a fantasy life because it is not actually reality! I always wondered why people play Guitar Hero when they could just practice the guitar instead. But playing the guitar is hard and takes a lot of work, a huge investment of time. Social relationships are hard, too, and if you screw them up it can wreck your life. Establishing a social identity takes a lot of care. Who wouldn't want a fantasy social life to experiment with different identities and kinds of relationships?

My point is that different people will enjoy different kinds of games, which is fine, and should be fun. This was an article about why the author's friends didn't enjoy many video games. And it's hard to use yourself as the yardstick of other people's preferences.

One reason the industry keeps churning through the same ideas is because they're relatively tractable. Graphics, physics, texturing etc, are all solvable bounded problems.

It's easy to make trite multipath social games, but it's incredibly hard to make a social game with genuine depth. And realistically, if you do that you're not competing with other games, but with dating apps, job interviews, and the real social world.

Second Life was an interesting experiment. It started off as the great new hope for social gaming, and turned into a sterile strip mall and giant pimp hotel. It turns out that even if you give people free rein with their fantasies, most fantasies aren't all that original or interesting.

When I read that she didn't like "Journey" because the snake could kill her, I thought back to how much I hated some of the ridiculous cheap death at the beginning of one of the first games I played, the original "King's Quest III" here http://icdn8.digitaltrends.com/image/kings-quest-iii-screens... (which I presevered through, although it seems like she would not). And it's true that many of the women I know who occasionally play games like things like "The Secret of Monkey Island", which has puzzles and RPG elements but dying is impossible. "The Sims" is another game with a large female audience that focused on building and exploring social interactions and identities. And IRL you can't actually lock your kids in a closet, drown them, or set them on fire, like you can with digital dolls.

Thinking in terms of board games, social games like Liar's Dice and Werewolf don't require good AI. Pandemic is a huge hit as a game without any social conflict at all, where the players are collaborating to solve puzzles (the game).

Early on you find a region which contains groups of Templars battling rogue sorcerers, so I thought that you'd get some interesting interactions where you have to pick a side, or play mediator, lending your strength to one of these opposed factions. Instead we got the worst kind of videogame logic - both sides were hostile to me, permanently, with no chance of talking to either of them. Approach within a certain distance and they'll attack you until they or you are dead - the sort of mindless hostility that can only be excused in zombie games. And to top it all off, both sides kept respawning after I killed them, so their silly, pointless tussles go on indefinitely.

Like real life, doing anything meaningful in Eve is going to take a lot of time and planning. In some games, you can grind to max level in a matter of days or weeks. In Eve, max level is more than 15 years (roughly speaking). If you choose to focus your training on one activity, you will be weak in another until you put in the time to train it as well. Because of this, you are always behind your elders on an individual basis. This means that cooperation with other players is invaluable - no, imperative, if you want to make your mark or become effective quickly. Because of this, real social skills are incredibly useful. (Just like how, in the real world, networking is almost everything.)

Trust is the biggest currency in the game - trust in your partner not to skim from your share of the profits, trust in your CEO to recruit quality people and not traitors, trust in your fleet commander to recognize good vs suicidal engagements, and trust in your alliance leader to keep diplomatic ties strong. However, because "it's a game" and creating alts is easy (and incentivised), it's incredibly easy to trick and be tricked, and reprisals against bad actors are often very difficult to enforce.

So, there is this constant tension between the inherent insecurity of trusting anyone and the huge power available to savvy individuals who are willing and able to persuade and inspire and cajole and threaten until they are at the head of an army 18,000 accounts strong. On top of this, the free market economy means that a player is not limited to pursuing combat power, but also economic power - opening up avenues of play to people who aren't particularly interested in blowing up spaceships but who very much like to think about micro and macro economics.

You mention Second Life; I have never played it, but I imagine that it suffered because of the lack of real conflict / meaningful objectives / the lack of mechanics and/or enforcement of limiting policies designed to keep players comfortable and happy. I.e., no trolling, griefing, market manipulation, etc.

Eve Online is famous for the near-purity of its sandbox nature. It's not perfect - there are still actions that can get you banned from Eve - but it is much more permissive than any other MMO I've played or heard of. When Eve players appear in other games in organized groups (Black Desert Online, Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen - at least on the forums), chaos, forum tears and often bannings ensue. The content in Eve is extracted from other players; the NPC quests coded by the developers are the stuff of jokes.

Actions in Eve have permanence. Ships that blow up are gone, along with their cargo. There are no safe spaces. Names cannot be changed. The years-long account training process discourages constant recycling of "main" characters, so names are remembered for what they have done. A famous reputation blown by an injudicious action or an momentary lapse in opsec is forever tainted.

There are some interesting results from this stew of influences.

One such result that I'm often reminded of is that democracy isn't effective at producing a stable Eve entity. People have tried it, and the bureaucracy/middle-management leads to slow decision making, which leads to playing catch-up and eventually to member bleed and implosion. One fairly effective model is anarchy - a group of experienced members that understand each other quite well, are are all very capable on their own, and all "find content" often and make the others aware of it without asking for permission or making excuse for misplays. A couple of groups with ties to 4chan operate very much like this, unsurprisingly - including one of the most feared (but not even close to largest) alliances in the game. Another, more common model is the dictatorship - a personality cult, where one member makes the calls and steers the group according to his will. He might have an inner circle that he delegates duties to or receives counsel from, but there is no question who is in charge, internally or externally. This group is nimble, able to react quickly and operate in a united fashion, but the responsibility often burns out the leader. With the leader not logging in and no organic transition to an equally respected replacement, the magic is lost and the group dissolves.

Another result is the remarkable approach of an Eve player's duties to "real life" duties. In Eve, one interviews people, one researches people's work histories, one hires people and one fires people. In Eve, one reviews weekly, monthly and quarterly economic reports, collect and pay taxes, and audits franchise managers. In Eve, one configures up forums and websites and chat servers and SSO authentication systems and automated alarm systems. In Eve, one inserts watermarks and cross-references IP logs and administers barium meal tests and more, as means to maintain infosec. Some people say they would never play Eve, because it isn't really a game, it's a job. Some people play Eve precisely because they thrive on real challenge. Some people do just fine playing Eve to blow up ships and never do a single one of the things above.

Another result is the overall tendency towards stagnation and lack of meaningful conflict. I'm not sure yet if this is simply because of the current game mechanics or because of a larger, systemic flaw that video games cannot inherently overcome (or because of human nature). Most of the game map is "nullsec", space open for the taking to any alliance of any size that wants to plant a flag there. At first, this was motivation enough. Later, people needed a reason to take and hold space, which usually meant "it needs to be profitable to hold space." When the devs made holding space very profitable, nullsec alliances started to make non-invasion pacts with their neighbors. They'd fight as fleets of ships, but not attack holdings. It made sense financially; people were making enough money with the space they had; no need to evict the neighbor. Trying to do so would start a war, and that would be more painful than making fat stacks at home. Eventually one coalition of alliances held half the map and another coalition held the other, and only play fights were happening. The devs made a number of mechanics changes in an attempt to encourage balkanization, and that, combined with an unprecedented announcement by an fabulously wealthy player (he made his money from a player-owned and developed in-game casino, btw) to make essentially limitless funds available to anyone who attacked the leading alliance of one of those super-coalitions lead to a large breakup in the nullsec geopolitical landscape. Unfortunately, now it appears that many feel it is no longer worth holding space under the new mechanics (attacking is easy, defending is hard, burnout is real). So if it is too hard, no one plays, and if it is too easy, everyone works out deals and it becomes boring.

So, it turns out that in the game with some of the most freeing mechanics and policies, people still get bored. The practical strategy (from a game design p.o.v.) is to tweak the game back and forth looking for the sweet spot where it is fun, but not too hard. From a theoretical standpoint, it's hard to know whether or not video games are fundamentally and inevitably boring, or whether a perfect game has simply not yet been created.

>realistically, if you do that you're not competing with other games, but with dating apps, job interviews, and the real social world.

Nail on the head.

Nonsense. Games that try to do more than entertain, that actually try to use the medium to express a message, much in the way an art film might, are generally well recieved by the press and gamers alike for mixing up the formula and trying new things.

For examples, look at games like Spec Ops: The Line (A vicious deconstruction of the FPS genre: do you feel like a hero yet?), Undertale, Papers Please, The Stanley Parable, and Master Reboot.

Do you feel like a hero yet?

What if there's a huge untapped market for games that don't focus on war, combat, crime, apocalypse, and gore?

Personally I'm more interested in exploring than in killing enemies. Put me in a shoot-em-up and I'll turn on god mode and play through to the end to experience the scenery and locations. The aliens/enemy forces/demons/monsters are mostly just a diverting distraction.

I don't particularly want to have relationships with characters. But I do want to have novel experiences I can't have anywhere else. Mainstream games don't do that for me.

A personal anecdote - I loved single-player video games until I was 18, but I stopped cold at that age. 5 years later, I tried to get back into it. I played some games that I used to like. I don't feel the things I used to feel while playing. Leveling up in Diablo just feels like accomplishing a chore - it feels meaningless.

This author seems to think that video games, in general, are definitely for everyone. I don't agree. Just like there are people who don't like reading or listening to music who manage to live whole, well-rounded lives, there are people who don't like playing video games.

These days it falls out just like you wrote: if I try to play a game, I mess around for a bit and then think: I could spend this time doing something creative. Making something, learning something. If I found some modern equivalent of a hidden city in a game, I'd think: so what? Who fucking cares? What does that get me?

I still can't figure out if this means there's something really wrong with me, that I can't even enjoy meaningless pursuits; or maybe that my sense of 'meaning' is so restricted; or if it's the opposite, and my reticence to do those things is a sign that I'm spending time the right way, or at least, that I have the right objective function in how I evaluate my time?

Of course, I'm a miserable bastard. That's probably an important data point. But I'm not sure how I could change even if I was sure that I should.

Neither. Your interests have just changed as time has passed.

Now, I'm in the same boat as you and GP, nowadays not really enjoying the same types of games that I used to. However, there are some things I still enjoy, and there are new things I've discovered that I enjoy. Any psychologist will tell you that your waning interest in something is only a problem if your interest is waning in general, and that as long as you still have something you're still interested in, not a problem. Otherwise, it may or may not be a sign of depression, burnout, or other malady, in which case I'd urge you to see a counselor or therapist, perhaps even a psychiatrist.

That said, it's important not to think of media consumption as "wasting time", per se. There's a point where it can become a problem, but for most people playing games or watching TV is a vital source of stress relief. I myself have fallen into (and am still in...) the trap of feeling like if I'm not constantly doing something productive, I'm wasting my time. It's important to slow down once in a while and give yourself a break when you need one, and to take care of yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, etc.

Videogames taught me (some) history, geology, geography, chemistry, phsyics, math, psychology, anthropology, etc, etc.

But as I got older (and as Internet got better), there were more and more real things to learn about, and life skills to work at (earning real money, doing real exercise, meeting real people), and a lot of videogame tropes stopped being novel. So they hold less appeal.

I find that joy of discovery varies wildly game to game. I could never get into Bethesda RPGs, new or old. There is lots to discover in an Elder Scrolls game, but none of it feels like it has much weight or import. When the Ultima games really hit their stride (V through VII p2), discoveries had weight and import. The Witcher games feel similar, to me, I spent way to much time exploring every damn polygon in the world. I can't really pinpoint why these games feel so different, but hey, I still find new games to trigger that same sense of wonder.

I don't care about beating other players or grinding out at some arbitrary mechanic that's going to get patched in two months just to be "better" than my friends. I'd rather sit back and enjoy a well made game for 40-100 hours and talk about my experiences playing it later.

A lot of video games are designed to satisfy our desire to be accomplishing things. I think if you already have things in your life you are working towards then these kinds of video games don't have much of an appeal.

I used to spend a lot of time playing video games, and one of the things that allowed me to break away from it was realizing I was using video games as a proxy for accomplishment in real life.

I think this one of the reasons games like diablo are more appealing when we are younger some of as kids/teens don't have things we prefer to do with the time.

I can and do relate with the sentiment that Diablo is an endless grind - but that's because it always was. Just like duke nukem always was a parody of action heroes and doom never really had a story; our younger selves simply chose to ignore that for some reason. Now we're a bit older and really spoiled - we want triple A graphics together with a solid story that, if it were a movie, would get an oscar, minimal grind and repetitiveness (looking at you, borderlands, you're just teeedious). And you know what, there are games that provide. The "walking sims" for your storyline needs, say, Firewatch; Frictional studios games to make you miserable; Stanley Parable and The Beginners' guide for your mindfuck needs; Sunless Sea if you don't mind an occasional grind and presentation from 1999 - but you're rewarded with lush writing that alone makes the game worth playing... Hell, even if the good writing's not your cup of tea, you still can enjoy such beauties as Braid, or great weirdnesses such as Antichamber.

We have this whole area polished to a place we don't even have to play - there are countless "let's play" videos, forum threads and i bet there even is a "let's play" podcast somewhere out there.

I feel the point of the article is that people who enjoy this art (notice the lack of quotes) are looked down by the people who "don't like video games" and think that candy crush or call of duty are the pinnacle of modern gaming. There's no way they'd leave that zone of comfort and give a good game a shot instead of insisting people do "something that is obviously more meaningful". The author claims that the "industry" produces "boring games", and she is partially right - games that are interesting for working adults that do not want to spend time in trivial pursuits do not get enough exposure. Should they? Probably not. Should the notion that games are a waste of time, a grind, a simulacrum of work and totally useless, change? Probably yes.

What are you basing this on?

"Growing up", that's what you are describing; I purchased Fallout 4 the day it came out, and after few minutes of playing and all I could see was bad hit-boxes and every NPC feels like a sound-recorder with a few different pre-recorded phrases. That game got pretty good reviews so its probably not about the game, its my perception of it. Old hobbies feeling meaningless happens to almost everyone, some people spent their youth reading but at their forties they barely read the news.

>This author seems to think that video games, in general, are definitely for everyone. I don't agree. Just like there are people who don't like reading or listening to music who manage to live whole, well-rounded lives, there are people who don't like playing video games.

Couldn't agree more; some people like extreme sports, some people don't, doesn't mean there is something wrong with every extreme sports, its just that we are different from each other, that's all.

You might want to edit that to "people change", since that's what it sounds you meant, instead of a phrase that evokes "becoming more mature/adult".

The point isn't that only youngsters can enjoy video games, nor that video games are inherently immature, nor that the act of growing up necessitates that someone lose interest in gaming, nor that adults can't enjoy games.

The point is that video games are something the poster enjoyed as a youngster but no longer enjoys as an adult. That's all "growing up" means. You could s/video games/*/g, and it would still just be part of "growing up".

Yeah, but compared to younger people who appreciate video games, they are few and far between.

I find other people (like public servers in Battlefield or the screaming/hacking teenagers in GTA Online) ruin games more often than make them better.

This article resonates with me because I have nearly the same story. I used to play a lot of games, and I worked in console game development for a decade on some reasonably big titles. The game design patterns are somewhat derivative, I witnessed the echo chamber myself. But FWIW, it's very hard to push the boundaries and end up with something people want to buy. The market likes familiar (derivative), with incremental changes.

These days, I have enough other things to do that games aren't a priority and I can't get involved in most games. It even stresses me out to think about trying to finish a game. Enough of my goals and the people in my life want my time that adding a game to the list takes away from something else I care more about.

If the inconsistent UI or graphics give you pause, I'd suggest taking a look at Rimworld, currently in Early Access on Steam (or available directly from the developer's site). It has some of the deep qualities of DF but is a bit more forgiving.

Primitive graphics are no barrier at all. I am a graphics programmer and graphics lover through and through. But I can say with some confidence that graphics only matter sometimes, and even then are only a part of what makes any game good.

I saw a great talk at GDC many years ago that had a study of what makes good games good and "realistic", and graphics was 7th or 8th on the list. The number one item on the list was how well players understood their own identity in the game, whether they felt like they fit in and knew what to do. Such an interesting and important and IMO underrated piece of gaming psychology.

DF is (primarily) a fortress management game, akin to something like SimCity. But with vastly more depth.

The first time you play DF, the game will generate a world. It will attempt realistic simulations of a variety of properties to try to create realistic landmasses, and randomly generate wars between random civilizations, create random historical figures, and generally wreak havoc on your CPU.

Then you embark with a party of Dwarfs (yes, dwarfs), and journey into the wilderness to start a new colony. Each of your dwarfs has specialties, a personality, opinions, and an incredibly complex body model, keeping track of everything from broken bones to strained tendons (I'm not exaggerating). But it goes further because everything else in the game is just as elaborately simulated, down to waterflow, the densities of various woods.

There is no win condition: Your fortress will collapse. The unofficial motto of the game is "losing is fun"

The game is still in alpha (0.42, meaning it's 42% feature complete), it's programmed by one guy, and the eventual goal is to simulate existance (or at least, the narratively interesting parts), and allow people to create their own stories. At least, better than it already is.

Well, it's Unicode actually — displayed by OpenGL! — and not really a roguelike (although IIRC there is a roguelike adventure mode). It's incredibly difficult not so much due to the graphics but rather to the fantastically complex world, and also the control interface, which is … baroque.

Subjective.

I think this hints at a big part of the problem. When we frame something as a game, we tend to evoke the concepts of winning and losing. The most brutal and obvious (lazy?) way of implementing that is to turn it into "kill or be killed". And that brutal, obvious, violent metaphor underpins the vast majority of the mainstream game industry. That's why something like Undertale is seen as fresh and subversive. That's probably even a big part of why Tetris sold so many Game Boys. But too many of us can't or won't see it. The author is probably right: those of us who have been immersed in this culture for 20+ years are like fish who too easily forget that not everyone likes to get wet.

It's (relatively) much easier to find an audience for a film or book that is focused on dialogue, social interactions, and whatnot, than it is to do so for a game. I applaud efforts in this area, but I can see how it's easier to go for kill/win/compete style games.

Games can be so much more than mainstream gaming has allowed them to become.

Besides, sometimes you just want to shoot sombody with an absurd weapon.

> At my studio we are making games with people who don't like video games because we want to break out of established paradigms.

There are a lot of games out there, more than enough to fill any niche you could possibly want to fill. The trick is that they aren't all made by Bethesda, Activision, or EA. If you really want to get your friends interested in videogames, listen to their interests (something that the OP didn't seem to do, for all that they're starting their own studio) and point them at games that cater to their interests, not your own.

Which is somewhat surprising, since as with any art form, there are games which are masterpieces, and there is mass market junk. Why would people specifically not like games "because they lack depth", but have no problem reading books or watching films, while the vast majority of them are drowning in the sea of mediocrity as well?

I suppose it comes from the general lack of perception about games as an art form. While established art exists for many years, computer games are relatively young art, and I suppose you can compare it to the negative view on cinema by some in its early days.

> Skyrim has the depth, but not the taste.

I wouldn't agree here. While Skyrim draws many with its exploration element, I'd say it lacks depth if you compare it to really good RPGs. It's not on par with Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment, Knights of the Old Republic, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines or the Witcher series. The story in later Bethesda games is pretty generic and outright boring. I'd say the last good game in the series was Morrowind.

Going back to the art point above, it's the result of mass market appeal. Publishers don't want risky things which can become masterpieces. "Safe bet" of mass market mediocrity is more comfortable for them. Luckily, crowdfunding today helps with that to some degree.

Which why people still play it, and there was even work in bringing Morrowing to the Skyrim engine[0].

[0] https://tesrenewal.com/skywind-faq

Plus there are some enormous mods such as Tamriel Rebuilt, which aims to add the entire province of Vvardenfell, and Skyrim: Home of the Nords, which aims to depict Skyrim during the game's time period.

The amount of content that has been made for that game, even beyond normal mods, is kind of staggering.

It may be correct that women want something different than men, but I don't think its true in the way they imagine. A lot of women seem to have enjoyed "The Sims", but many of them appear to have spent their time in-game torturing their hapless sims.

You see something similar recently with "art games" that are trying so hard to be "art" that they're pretentious and overbearing. The only good "art" games are the ones that ended up being interesting works of art by exploring an idea, not because they set out to be art games.

I hate to say this, but I kind of worry this could just be the same thing, but instead it'll be "serious adult" games or "feminist games" or pick whatever social movement you want here. But it won't really be about the game, it'll be about the movements values.

I'm not even Christian, and I found myself enjoying an evangelical Christian rock CD as just good music, until I listened close enough to realize that I didn't agree with many of the lyrics.

Your second paragraph is simply the No True Scotsman fallacy, or the "all gay men are flamboyant" observational-bias fallacy. You are just saying that you don't like things you don't like, and you don't notice the intention behind things you like.

Well no, my point is that when a work is primarily created to service an ulterior agenda (in my example, theology, but it could be any agenda), rather than for its own sake, the result is generally kitsch. I don't even mean that in a pejorative way, most entertainment is kitsch, and it's fine, people are entertained. Many (not all) "art" games tend to end up being kitschy because they're designed to signal and appeal to an elite in-group's values rather than being a true expression of ideas of their own. I think a piece has more artistic merit if it reflects ideas and truths the artist discovered for themselves, drawing on influences, instead of ideas that are designed to appeal to a certain set of people while signaling adherence to group values.

I can sink hundreds of hours into Civilization, X-COM, or Minecraft—games of strategy and games of world-building—but for me computer RPGs are almost entirely inferior to tabletop RPGs, especially in the "open world" aspect. Shooters especially bore me: fast reflexes on a control pad are not something I particularly want to spend spend dozens or hundreds of hours developing. Then you see the YouTube comments of the people who deride everyone else for not sharing their commitment for some specific styles of twitchy games. Some gamers have developed a weird and toxic little cult around their lifestyle games.

I think board games have grown so much because they have been able to attract people who are interested in different paradigms of play: cooperative games, for example, because it seems like so many people hate player conflict. Competition adds a whole layer of interest to most board games IMO, but the most important thing is just for people to have fun.

Board game publishers actually encourage innovation from game designers (...to a certain extent. They also like safer bets when available too), much more so than video game publishers, and Kickstarter exists to fund the ideas that game publishers don't go for.

Kickstarter exists for video games too, but board games are succeeding on Kickstarter at a much higher rate than video games lately, in no small part because video games are funding development, for a game that may take a lot longer to develop and be impossible to complete with those funds. Even the darling Shovel Knight burned through all of its Kickstarter money 5 months before release and they all went broke just to get the game out the door. But board games are usually funding production of a completed design that's already priced out so they know how much it's going to cost them.

There are over a thousand new board games that came out this year at Essen alone, only one of several major board game trade shows. That's tons of opportunities for new mechanics and experiences. They're even getting deeper in their storytelling capabilities, as evidenced by the games Pandemic Legacy, Time Stories, and Above and Below.

Board games are still defining new genres even (most recently the Legacy genre which is only 5 years old, and Deckbuilders which is only 8 years old), I can't think of any new genres in video games since Grand Theft Auto 3 came out and popularized sandbox games 15 years ago. That is, unless you count 'Free 2 Play, Pay 2 Win', which is a perversion of game design dictated by market forces, not a true genre.

So I think part of the problem this designer is having is she's been too myopically limiting herself to only video games as an interactive form to draw inspiration from. Games exist in many forms. Board games in particular have a huge wealth of mechanics and ideas that video games have mostly left unexplored, and role playing/social games of late are no slouch either latel (just saw one that focuses on language and how it is formed and dies in an isolated community on Kickstarter, called Dialect).

Shovel Knight source: http://www.polygon.com/2014/8/6/5974557/shovel-knight-sales-...

Great. That's fantastic. We always need more games, and more types of games. Just about anything can be made into a game (for evidence, just look at Phoenix Wright. Being a lawyer was never so much fun). And frankly, I'd love to see different games from more perspectives.

But.

Sometimes I want what this article dubs, "gritty, toxic pseudo-realistic pseudo-masculine nonsense," or "frustrating time wasters that leave you feeling dead inside." I get home at night, and maybe it's just me, but I want to raid dungeons and slay dragons. I want to storm the tower and save the princess. I want to kill sentient mushrooms by jumping on their head. I want to battle a handful of strangers, armed with a Rocket Launcher, improbably large collection of other weapons, and my own wits and reflexes.

And sometimes, I want to fit together blocks falling from the sky in a demented abstract russian nightmare.

In short, I want your experimental art games, but I also want the kinds of games that we already have. And we already have a lot of good ones, so stop insulting them, please.

...Anyways, if any of you are interested in game design, and also in the idea of games as art, and that games can be more than just entertainment, can appeal to more than just gamers, I would reccomend checking out Extra Credits (they're on YouTube now). Plus, their channel also does a pretty cool history show.

/s

But I recently started to play again after years of no touching one. I weirdly enough I love it again. I can play solo games, enjoy them and finish them. I can play online games and enjoy the competition.

I think a lot has to do with how people cannot focus anymore on anything more than 10 minutes. I used to be like that. Checking phone notification, look at reddit every 5 minutes, etc. I worked on it for a long time. Stop running after the quick gratifications and enjoy the long term. And now I am back to being a gamer :)

But in the same way that I seek out 'old movies' carefully, I'm very selective in my gaming choices. Currently I'm working my way through Red Dead Redemption and the Avernum series, but a large amount of games from the Xbox 360 area don't appeal to me at all anymore, for example.

I then ordered a ps4 and I am catching up on everything I missed! ;)

Minecraft is essentially computerised Lego. There are few higher accolades I could pay to any game, because Lego is a phenomenally deep plaything. The more semantic meaning that the designer of a Lego set provides, the worse the play experience becomes. A bag of plain bricks can become anything, but a dragon molded as a single piece can only ever be a dragon. Likewise with Minecraft - Story Mode is a brief, dreary and hollow experience compared to Survival or Creative.

Each football match or chess game tells a unique story. The players create a spontaneous drama using the particular interplay of their skills and ideas. Infinite variety emerges from a leather ball and two sets of goalposts. A box of crayons and a piece of paper are in themselves meaningless, but create boundless meaning in the hands of an imaginative person.

My gripe with most modern games is that they try too hard to tell a story. Designers in the AAA and indie space are often preoccupied with emulating the attributes of other media, rather than exploring the unique possibilities of video games. Any modern gamer is familiar with the "movie with quick-time events" trope, games that shoehorn meaningless interaction into linear storytelling. A game can (and perhaps should) be a blank canvas rather than a work of art.

If you can't find meaning in a boxing match, if you can't grow and learn through playing Catan, if you take no joy from a lump of modelling clay, then the problem lies with you. We have many media that are infinitely better suited to depicting relatable characters and portraying the real world. The unique strength of games is play; games are at their best when they emphasise this core strength.

The common problem is not with "trying to tell the story", the problem is usually as you said with its linearity. Making a reactive story with meaningful consequences to choices is hard and time consuming.

> A game can (and perhaps should) be a blank canvas rather than a work of art.

It should be a work of art which allows player to participate in a meaningful way. Compare it to a form of art where actor plays a role, but the play isn't set in stone, and you are that actor.

Roleplaying however is just one type of gaming activity. There can be other types of games, more focused on exploration for instance, puzzle solving or simulation and etc. While quite different categories, they all can be enjoyable computer games. Some tend to be more sport, than art.

And also, we need to move away from the idea that some games or genres are objectively better or more interesting than others. It's all relative to the audience - some people have a stronger reaction to some experiences than to others, and will seek out different things.

Nick Yee has been doing excellent, data driven research on the interaction between player preferences, game types, and personality types - there's some intro material from his gdc talk on their web site: http://quanticfoundry.com/gdc/

I would say the more likely issue is discovery.

Of course, the piece also reads as an advertisement for their new gaming studio the OP is building, so I think that figured into the narrative as well.

It's important to be clear whether one is describing gaming as a whole, or "mainstream" gaming. Many criticisms of mainstream gaming don't apply to "gaming" as a whole, which includes things like a visual novel community, hidden object games, and the "walking simulators" that have almost no presence in the mainstream but definitely exist. They have almost no discoverability, being buried under games with advertising budgets an order of magnitude larger than what those games will make in revenue (let alone profit), but they exist.

So when you say something like "we need to step out of what we consider games and try to think of a different audience who wants a new kind of experience with attributes, such as depth or relatability", it's easy for those who already have to perceive that as a bit of an insult. "We" may not be as encompassing as you or the original author think it is, and some people may resent being categorized into that "we".

I don't know about "almost all", but even if 90 percent of games indeed fit that description, the remaining 10 percent would take 100 lifetimes to consume. Really--if all you bought were the bi-weekly dollar bargains on humble bundle, you'd have all the gaming variety you could have time for. I suspect most of our complaining is for the sake of complaining.

But I think it's very important to acknowledge that these "problems" with games are not born out of laziness, lack of creativity, or an inability to see outside the cultural in-group. Games boil everything down to easily countable abstractions, because games are, at their heart, nothing but systems of rules. Your health meter is an abstracted version of your physical well-being. Objectives are abstracted goal setting and cause-and-effect. Even if the game doesn't show you these numbers, it is still using them under the hood. What's the alternative? A deep, nuanced simulation? That'd be great, but it's well beyond the scope and means of the vast majority of developers.

Why do so many games include death? Because it's the only universally accepted fail state. It is simply impossible for 99% of games to provide anything more meaningful than that, because doing so involves exponentially more complexity, storytelling, and asset development. The best most can do is just cover the death up with new coat of paint (a la Braid).

Why have a fail state at all? Because the interactive nature of the medium loses a lot of its weight when your choices/actions don't seem to matter, and simulating anything other than simple failure is, once again, exponentially more difficult and expensive.

It is tragic that there is a certain vocal group that rejects alternative types of games like Dear Esther. I won't apologize for them. However, the games that are "mainstream"—and the games that are not—are not selected by some game industry cabal. The easily consumed, easily understood games sell so much more than the niche stuff precisely because more people are interested in that kind of thing.

Although the point of the article is that we need to think of different audiences (which is hard to disagree with), my main takeaway was that society is full of judgmental elitists who love to denigrate things they don't understand. In particular, the author's cousin seems like a very unpleasant person. Although the story of her encounter with Lydia is superficially touching, it's hardly a revelation, and we've all heard these stories before: friend/relative hates video games, finally plays one, is brought to emotional tears, yadda yadda. Finding a good game is roughly as difficult as finding a good book; the culture is not to blame for people's ignorance.

(As an aside, the true tragedy is that the cousin's experience had a lot more to do with her ignorance than with Skyrim its. Avoiding video games for your entire life practically guarantees that you'll be blown away the first time you find one you like, because the game is still "magic" to you. The magic wears off very quickly, however, and after that the meaningful experiences are much more rare. If you continue playing games, you find yourself wanting more than just some scripted dialogue, and that's why games so frequently feature the challenges and spectacles that the author says turn the non-gamers away.)

The problem I saw as I read was that those games don't get publicized. Shooters and RPGs are a big public entry point, while great oddities like Papers Please are mostly advertised in-market. If you don't open Steam or read gaming sites or talk games with friends, you'll never hear about them. It's a real shame, because there are people who would love these games but can't get there through the traditional channels.

The other claim, which was stated in the article, is that there's a shortage of these games. That the industry is uncreative and demographically challenged, and so it doesn't make these things. I'd love to see more of them, certainly, but it's hard to see how that will bring in non-gamers who aren't learning about what already exists.

So I think it was not just implied but stated. It felt like an inconsistency at the heart of the piece, where we got two disjoint stories; one about making unusual games, and one about publicizing them.

But I liked portal 2, I actually finished it all in one single session, but it was because the story is thrilling, every puzzle different enough from the previous and makes me think, not because I could drop the controller and forget about it.

You have to throw out a lot of evidence to come to the conclusion that video gaming is even remotely the exclusive domain of "white males".

I'd submit that rather than building games based on your political conception of what other people might want, you'd be far better off bringing in the non-gamers into the design process directly. Or even just letting other groups of people build the types of games they like instead of taking it upon yourself to build the games that somebody else might like, which is already sort of, shall I say, culturally imperialistic? They're doing it already, after all. I know; I've played some of them, and enjoyed them, and they didn't need permission, help, or angst from the "white males" to do it.

The problem may not be "the industry", so much as a game player who doesn't realize that even within the context of gaming as a whole, they are less widely-experienced than they think. If I were to try to entice my wife back into gaming, who plays Mario Kart with the family and a mean Dr. Mario, "Skyrim" would not even make my top 50 suggestions.

What she really is looking for is games for what she feels is an under-served demographic: The kind of person who lives in "a state of constant shock, of constant stimulation" like her friends do. Her friends just happen to not be white males, so she latched on to that.

Out of interest, what would such a game look like, to compete with such a state? Farmville? Candy Crush?

But the author's friend, in addition to being overwhelmed with constant shock and stimulation, is also a bit of a snob, so she won't play those low-brow games. I don't know what high-brow relaxing games are like. Maybe Papers, Please and Dear Esther?

Playing around with some old games over the weekend and last weekend, I forgot how addictive they were.

Yesterday, I told myself "I'll play a bit of Super Mario Bros. 3 and see how far I can get on one life"... and before I knew it, I was in World 2.

The weekend before that, I played some Golden Axe, and I got a huge chunk of the way through the game before I had to turn it off to go do other things.

It's my personal opinion that 1985-1995 was the single best era for gaming, as it was dominated by addictive fast-paced games that you could just pick up and play. One of the things that turns me off about modern games is that the "just pick up and play" mentality is gone... too many unskippable cutscenes, forced tutorial levels, etc.

Perhaps in the AAA space but down in the more indie spaces, you don't get those. My current set of favourite games (Rocket League, Binding of Isaac, Risk Of Rain, Rogue Legacy, Delver) certainly don't have any of those.

Thanks!

My main gripe with video games is that they're addictive. Boring or not, they push you to play another 5, 10, 60 minutes... before you know it, you ruined your evening, and wasted your time and the next day at work...

Kudos to the artists, developers, psychologists who can build that. And probably I am weak.

At the end of the day, they are very successful in making me addicted, that's why i am staying away, that's why I am not a gamer.

Once you realize that, you're free.

Never buy anything that has in-app-purchases where for $ money you get something and for $$ money you get more something.

If you see a screen that has $1.99 for 5 gold/gems/points/cards and $4.99 for 20 gold/gems/points/card then RUN!

Some Swede actually did this, and made a couple Billion.

Just because it doesn't have a "set in stone" story, that doen's mean that there isn't one. I've seen stories unfold in The Sims that would put to shame most books and movies.

Have you looked at Terraria? Also, you mentioned Freespace 2. I'm doing a self-funded project where I'm building an MMO space game aimed at deeply emergent gameplay.

http://www.emergencevector.com

There's a lot of lifestyle gamers who get angry if games are 'too short'.

These days, my infrequent gaming time doubles as friend/family time with a board game played around a table.

Entry to market for garage devs with a quality title is far easier today than 20 years ago.

Anyone who likes video games and wants to make it their career is free to do so, but shouldn't expect to be able to strong-arm others into their way of thinking.

I really appreciated the tone and themes of growth she expressed in the article. But she seems to currently have a state of mind of "if I can't think of an example, it must not exist", and not one of "if I can't think of an example, I must not have encountered one yet". In terms of understanding and perspective, you can tell she came a long way; but she still has a ways to go, too.

I think the best example of all time is The Sims. I saw that game draw in non-gamers like nothing I've ever seen before or since, and draw them in with a passion and obsession only matched by hardcore gamers. That's all the evidence you need to prove that there's big money in something that doesn't have a "kill" button or a win state.

Another bright spot: the entire Wii platform. I agree that the problem is probably due to a lack of diverse perspectives. The games industry disparages these experiences as "casual." Ouch.

I used to be into RPGs, but they just take too much time now. The things that give them depth for one player, makes them impossible for me to play in short 30 minute chunks.

I spent hours playing N v1.4 in grade school, and the update, v2.0 is free online [0]. There is also a more reworked version, N++, on Steam that I can't vouch for but is probably good. There is also Dustforce [1], which has some very unique mechanics and is on Steam. Super Meat Boy [2] was inspired in part by N and got a lot of press. It has the same fundamental gameplay that N does (everything kills you, run and wall jump with physics) but not written with Flash and with some bells and whistles (I still like N and its physics better).

Also in the bucket of skill-based, storyless games is Devil Daggers [3], though it is first person, not a platformer. Some people love it, some hate it. I found it very compelling.

[0] http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/

[1] http://dustforce.com/videos

[2] http://supermeatboy.com/

[3] http://devildaggers.com/about

A master programmer passed a novice programmer one day. The master noted the novice's preoccupation with a hand-held computer game. "Excuse me," he said, "may I examine it?"

The novice bolted to attention and handed the device to the master. "I see that the device claims to have three levels of play: Easy, Medium, and Hard," said the master. "Yet every such device has another level of play, where the device seeks not to conquer the human, nor to be conquered by the human."

"Pray, great master," implored the novice, "how does one find this mysterious setting?"

The master dropped the device to the ground and crushed it underfoot. And suddenly the novice was enlightened.

I've played video games since before I could walk. Some games I connect with and can't stop playing - Undertale and Papers Please come to mind. Most don't anymore, not even an old favorite like Doom.

I feel like there's something to this article, but I think it's larger than "I don't like Game of Thrones". There is room for games that really dig into humanity, rather than being meaningless mechanics.

I mean, I like sports. But I like books, too.

The game sounds somewhat controversial with some liking it a lot, while others quite disliking it. I might give it a try at one point.

It's kind of like bad shark movies - there is a group of people who love them, and everyone else is fine not being in that group. It's not that either group is better or worse, it's just a niche.

There also seem to be parallel missteps in the invention of new forms of media. It took generations for the industry to get a handle on all of new tools, techniques, and vocabulary of cinema. It took generational change for the field to give up old forms adapted from the theater. One generation's daring and pioneering work would also become the next generation's stultifying, overused tropes.

I find that many of the pretensions of art in games are well meaning but misapplied things learned in film school. Higher budgets seem to result in more production with less interactivity and less intelligence credited to the players. There are leanings away from intellectually engaging interactivity and towards sensation and addiction through variable schedule of reward. There are also some of the same unjustified pretensions to "art" or intellectualism, as well as a few justified ones.

As always, the way forward is partly through the self honesty and self awareness required of art.

1 - not every medium is for everybody. Getting my friends to play videogames (or getting my few gamer friends to play niche/weird game I recommend) is something I already gave up. I don't dislike cinema, but most of the movies the are made simply don't appeal to me. There's nothing wrong with cinema. I'm just not that attracted to the medium.

2 - the author's friends' attitude to videogames. This shows lack of knowledge, lack of humility and elitism. Just because they don't know any games that "change you as a person" or cater to their "cultural preferences and interests" that doesn't mean that there isn't. People should be humble when judging other things. I don't like hip-hop. But I don't assume it is all bad or that I will dislike it all. Sturgeon's law applies both ways, and to everything.

3 - about the author's suggestions. I like the suggestions. I thought Skyrim would be a bit too heavy to a new gamer (specially to one who was really on the fence) but it worked! It showed the power transposing ourselves to a new world and live within it. And that Lidya story.. It was the best outcome it could happen. Sure, Kristina later abandoned the game. But the theme wasn't of her liking. But it showed her a glimpse of what is possible.

4 - I dislike the demonization of the bulk of the medium. Sure, there are a lot os FPSs and violence and twitch-reflex action games. We have Call of Duty as we have Katy Perry and Transformers[0]. And these get a lot of imitators and visibility and money because... there are a lot of people who like these things ans are willing to play for them. And this is OK. Niche stuff, out of the mainstream is always harder to find.

Finally 5 - The author is there and clearly knows videogames. If a friend wants to try videogames you should, like the author said, ask what they like or expect to see and direct them to a game like that. Skyrim is a good choice. Papers please is also nice. Maybe a puzzle game. Or a walking simulator to someone who just wants to experience a story in his own pace. And maybe you could, I don't know, give them Call of Duty. They might enjoy it. And they might even dislike everything. Because, as I said, not every medium is for everybody. but The demonization os the mainstream simply shows a clear lack of understanding of the market and an extremely "hipseristic" attitude.

[0] - I'm using these as an example of something low-brow, made for the masses. This is only my opinion and you are free to enjoy them and regard them in whatever way you want.

But it seemed in the 90s, both PCs and consoles were putting out their best stuff. I still look at the old Sega Genesis games and early 90s PC titles as some of the best the industry ever put out.

As a result, I just bought a new PC and decided to not even bother with a high end gaming machine. I'm using a Skull Canyon NUC, first time in 30 years I wasn't concerned with meeting current specs in the latest AAA games. We're going on two decades of rehashing 90s ideas and I'm done.

I will be buying a Nintendo Switch though. The social gaming aspect of Mario Kart is still magic for me but there is no other entity out there with Nintendo's polish, charm or fun. I think it's an open secret that 3rd party publishers often run from Nintendo systems not due to API lock-in but because they simply cannot compete with Nintendo 1st party titles.

Oh, and my username is actually a homage to the Buck Rogers Gold Box titles from the early 90s. I never got into the D&D stuff but played the heck out of the two Buck Rogers releases.

A. Game value is in the eye of the beholder.

B. What takes my eye changes over long and short terms (as a function of spare time available, economic circumstance, hardware at hand, effort/reward ratio, but mostly the ever-intangible "what takes my fancy at this point in time" - a reflection of my personal psychology that also changes over time).

C. At best you can please some of the people some of the time.

I'll admit that I'm of an age where I lost the capacity to devote bunch-of-hours-per-day to gaming just as MUDs were becoming really popular. I think as a result I never really got into massively multi-player gaming. I've played Diablo III - but single player.

My favourite games of all time include (in no particular order):

- Moon Cresta (table-top)

- The Hobbit (C64, cassette)

- Nethack (VAX VMS)

- Impossible Mission (C64)

- Balance of Power (C64)

- Bards Tale I (C64)

- Dune (Amiga)

- Elite (Amiga)

- Nethack (PC)

- Need for Speed: Most Wanted (original) (Mac, via Wine)

- Diablo III (Mac)

- Nethack (Mac)

- Backgammon (iOS - at least 10K games played on this sucker! I had to delete it!)

- Nethack (iOS)

Lately, I've been really getting into Really Bad Chess (iOS). Was never a chess player but it's is a clever wrinkle on this (for me) very boring (i.e. too hard) game.

Can you beat.. The White Western Male??

I am sick of all of this. There is gender parity in video gamers. There is huge amount of diversity in video game titles for whoever wants them. Think you have spotted a gap in the market? Great, make your billions, others will follow very, very quickly.

"For years I've been bored of trying to prove to my colleagues that women are human, that women aren't too unpredictable to study, that what women like is not less worthy nor boring nor wrong nor hard to understand. That it's garbage to say that women don't need deep, rich experiences."

The disdain for The White Male in this is ridiculous.

"For years I've been bored of trying to prove to my colleagues that women are human"

Does anyone reading this believe that his colleagues believe women are not human or worthy of respect?

This person is aiming straight for bullseye of a niche, vocal man hating demographic in order to make money.

From the outside it definitely looks like it has the same problem as the movie industry, that is lots of money going into large conservative projects, where change is perceived as pure risk and little upside.

To be honest the article itself put me off first with the "white male" stuff, but I must admit that it sums up mostly what I feel about games today. While I really admire the graphics (Battlefield 1 for example), the kind of dead end gameplay makes me sad.

I'm wondering what the necessary environment would be to incubate change there. It's still not the size of the movie industry (on a company level at least), so there should be room for development.

On the other hand, from a technical perspective, with the tools we have today (Unity etc.) there is a very solid foundation for quality independent developments. So that's at least one positive outlook.

The industry is building games for what market research tells it is wanted by people who play their games. The claim is that part of the market is not being targeted, and this is a group of women who do not define themselves as gamers, nor are they interested in gaming.

It is quite possible that there is no unserved market.

I'm currently enjoying Planet Coaster. If I had kids I would be granting them more "screen time" if they played these applications rather than shooters. For younger kids, titles such as Minecraft fall into this category too. Having something to show after countless hours of playing is always better than not having anything to show.

That said, who isn't guilty of sinking hundreds of hours into nothing more than thrills and rank in some action/sport game.

Citation needed.

The css for the page enables ligatures however, and falls back to the browser's own serif; so you were probably seeing the ligatures from your own default font. I'm guessing Adobe Caslon Pro, because it's widely available and has a very distinct loop ligature for 'st'. http://myfonts.us/td-C4VrUX

Games can offer a free space to explore, play and excel, away from the judgement of real life, often with a completely arbitrary character. For the entire bottom half of society, that's very appealing, and it's not "pseudo-masculine nonsense". Relationship mechanics are popular with men too, with Mass Effect's crew of cameraderie and romance being a hugely popular AAA example. So popular, the lack of a respectful ending pissed off its fanbase, whose desire for meaning and depth then got spun into an accusation of entitlement and obsession.

What we've seen the last 10 years is games have become more shallow, favoring gambling systems and skinner boxes over mechanics and systems. Ironically, it's mostly women playing these social and mobile games. In fact, it is hilarious that she talks of "rich, deep experiences" but then holds up "Kim Kardashian: Hollywood" as an example in the very next sentence, which is literally a cash-grab celebrity reskin of an existing game.

She complains that "we've stopped listening to each other", that the conversation is "evolving slowly" and that people don't think "women are human", but she pulls the same dehumanizing routine by painting the entire existing industry and its customers with the same tired old brush. Perhaps she should consider "that what [men] like is not less worthy nor boring nor wrong nor hard to understand". And if she wants "compassion and respect and fearlessness", she could start by practicing what she preaches.

They are made by guys, for guys, and girls can play along.

The 'mission orientation' - the 'guns/violence' - and 'sports' - while not exclusively a guy thing - they are definitely guy-leaning.

Let me say it differently: if you took a totally random sample of girls and gave them each $100M to go off and build the 'best game for them' - they might look really, really different.

I don't like the political aspect of 'isms' in games ... I really could care less. But I do think that there are pretty big differences between genders - on the whole.

I'm inclined to believe that gaming in general is tilted towards the things that men like (whether culturally or biologically). And I'd welcome game producers/financiers/whatever to invest in games that offer things that traditionally non-gamers would be into, but I can also understand that those kinds of projects are riskier than going for an existing market.

With that said, if you see potential in the market, by all means make a video game targeted towards everyone & get rich. That is your right.