I'm not sure I agree that us not accepting certain difficulty and length considerations are necessarily good for us gamers. Â It's something we say we want, but we have a tendency to complain about the effects of it.
I mean, it makes sense. Â You want to achieve. Â You want to have the time you spend mean something. Â However, you also want to HAVE it, not to be working on it. Â So we've tried to make things easier to achieve and, conversely, more and more people are achieving it and the experience is becoming somewhat less meaningful. Â So we complain that games aren't meaningful anymore, that they're just transitory experiences. Â There's just dissonance between what we get from our short-term gains and our long-term expectations.
It's the same with game difficulty. Â Everyone says they want a game that's difficult, that takes skill to master, that isn't afraid to kill them when they make a mistake and for those deaths to have consequences. Â But when we're given those, we also tend to think the game is too grindy, too hard, new-player-unfriendly, etc. Â So we complain about these and the game gets easier. Â Then we complain that there's no challenge in games anymore.
Unfortunately, we may not necessarily like what we're getting anymore, but we're getting what we're asking for (and largely what we're paying for, in the case of F2P games essentially being the video game equivalent of the shows on TV to sell us toys as kids). Â Which is a shame especially to MMORPGs, since they were supposed to be communities. Â They were meant to be the future of gaming. Â And now, since they can't really offer us content that can keep us occupied for years and engaged in the story, they're one-and-done.
Most games these days are like TV shows and movies, entertainment content that plays out in front of us that, in this case, tends to require button presses to advance the story. Â It's not as satisfying, and we know that, but it's largely what we asked for.
In a way, I'm beyond really being frustrated about it and I'm just watching it all as a somewhat dissociated observer. Â We just don't, as a gaming audience at least, have much room to complain that the games we play aren't as engaging. Â By and large, we ordered that removed from gaming so we wouldn't be inconvenienced, not realizing that the interesting parts of the game were the parts that weren't built to cradle us.
I mean, it makes sense. Â You want to achieve. Â You want to have the time you spend mean something. Â However, you also want to HAVE it, not to be working on it. Â So we've tried to make things easier to achieve and, conversely, more and more people are achieving it and the experience is becoming somewhat less meaningful. Â So we complain that games aren't meaningful anymore, that they're just transitory experiences. Â There's just dissonance between what we get from our short-term gains and our long-term expectations.
It's the same with game difficulty. Â Everyone says they want a game that's difficult, that takes skill to master, that isn't afraid to kill them when they make a mistake and for those deaths to have consequences. Â But when we're given those, we also tend to think the game is too grindy, too hard, new-player-unfriendly, etc. Â So we complain about these and the game gets easier. Â Then we complain that there's no challenge in games anymore.
Unfortunately, we may not necessarily like what we're getting anymore, but we're getting what we're asking for (and largely what we're paying for, in the case of F2P games essentially being the video game equivalent of the shows on TV to sell us toys as kids). Â Which is a shame especially to MMORPGs, since they were supposed to be communities. Â They were meant to be the future of gaming. Â And now, since they can't really offer us content that can keep us occupied for years and engaged in the story, they're one-and-done.
Most games these days are like TV shows and movies, entertainment content that plays out in front of us that, in this case, tends to require button presses to advance the story. Â It's not as satisfying, and we know that, but it's largely what we asked for.
In a way, I'm beyond really being frustrated about it and I'm just watching it all as a somewhat dissociated observer. Â We just don't, as a gaming audience at least, have much room to complain that the games we play aren't as engaging. Â By and large, we ordered that removed from gaming so we wouldn't be inconvenienced, not realizing that the interesting parts of the game were the parts that weren't built to cradle us.
