
Game Over is like family to me.So there's this article on Gama Sutra about what they call
Missing Gamers, people aged 25-35 who used to play games but no longer do. Well, I happen to belong to that same age group and I certainly can't be bothered to play the rubbish that passes for "games" today. So naturally I immediately felt compelled to read it, expecting to find some kind of acknowledgement in the esteemed web site's words.
But no.
The article in question turned out to be a magnificent disappoint right from the very first chapter. The people Gama Sutra dug up to represent the "missing gamers" consisted mostly of inept facebook zombies with a fancy for online poker. I'd bet a fair sum these are the people who click on spam. Apart from their tendency to view gaming primarily as a social event, they were
nothing like the 25-to-35-year-olds-who-used-to-play-games I know. And trust me, I know a lot of them.
Having spent roughly 10,000,000 times more time with the demographic than Gama Sutra, I believe I'm entitled to say a thing or two about the subject myself. First of all, it is of vital importance to understand that most people in this age group were never gamers at all. Many people today, including games journalists, often overlook the fact that video games weren't always as popular. One might even say that despite their presence in every toy store, video games used to be an obscure pastime. Those who enjoyed them, belonged to an ill-understood minority who could count on little understanding from their non-gamer peers.
One might be tempted to draw the conclusion that the gamers of yore were social outcasts, loners or even hermits. But nothing could be further from the truth. Gamers looked each other up, and played together in the same room. Since online gaming has now replaced the simple joy of playing side-by-side, anonimity has replaced face-to-face conversation. Thus, the missing gamers will most likely perceive modern gamers as hermits.
Secondly, many video games in that era were
HARD. And when I say hard, I mean the kind of hard that gamers today can't even begin to comprehend. There was no quick save. In fact, there was no save at all! You didn't wiggle a remote control pretending you were actually in control of something. In the time it takes to wiggle a controller, you'd be dead! And no inifite continues, either!
Game Sutra didn't pick up on this fact, but even if they had, they probably would have drawn the same false conclusion that most people do. Although a game like Gremlins 2 (NES) or Nam 1975 (Neo Geo) required nigh-religious commitment to finish, it would be wrong to assume that the missing gamers' interest could be recaptured simply by making today's games relentlessly hard. Easy games were also available back then, and many people preferred them over the harder ones. So what's the point I'm trying to make here?
My point is twofold:
1) It's not that the old games were hard, but that they
dared to be hard. The industry has become cautious, even cowardly. When pouring millions into the development of blockbuster games, to earn back those millions they have to reach the biggest possible market. That means every
idiot has to be able to play them, and thus modern games cannot be too hard, too clever or too different.
2) The old games, regardless of their difficulty level, were typically based on the same principle: try to reach the end without going "game over". Modern games often don't have a game over screen. In fact, many of them don't even have an end. The new basic principle of games is to keep people occupied
without posing a challenge, because challenges lead to failure, and failure leads to frustration.
I could go on, but I think my point stands out fairly well already: the gaming landscape today is completely and utterly different from what it used to be. And
that's the thing Gama Sutra completely missed, the one thing all the missing gamers have in common: it's simply not their world any more.