Have I Lost My Gaming Mojo? 418
danabnormal writes "Increasingly I'm being frustrated in my attempts to find a game I want to play. In an effort to catch up, I've been using my bog standard Dell laptop to dig out treasures I have missed, such as American McGee's Alice, Grim Fandango and Syberia. I don't often get the time to play games, so I like to have the opportunity to dip in and out of a title without feeling like I'm losing something by not playing it for periods of time. But when I find a title I like, I make the time. Heavy Rain is the last game that gripped me, that truly engaged me and made me want to complete it in a single sitting. I'm tired of the GTA formulas, bored of CoDs and don't have the reaction time to think on my feet for AOE III. Is it about time I tossed in the controller and resigned myself to the fact that the games I want only come out once in a blue moon? Or have I just not found that one great title that will open me up to a brand new genre? Lords of Ultima is going OK at the moment — is there anything of that ilk I've missed? What are your thoughts? Do you stick to a particular genre? Are you finding it harder, as you get more mature, to find something you want to play?"
Re:Chess (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, because getting older means that you can't have fun.
The older that I get, the more I realise that maturity isn't about being stiff, serious and trying to appear "adult", it's about having fun doing what you enjoy without caring about what anyone else might think of it. I might have thought the way you did ten years ago, but gradually I just stopped caring about appearances.
Make some kids (Score:3, Insightful)
Games are not so important for adults. The biggest use for games is learning how to learn fast. Maybe you have that down now and your subconsiously just not as interested.
Go make and raise some kids and let them learn some games. That is a fun, rewarding, and quite complex game. All stages of it.
Re:Yeah.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah... yeah.
Well FUCK THAT, I will still be playing games as much when I am 60 as now that I am 30.
If you can't find something fun, look harder or GTFO.
Now get off my lawn.
Re:Make some kids (Score:4, Insightful)
How about go adopt a kid instead? There's a world full of children that need good parents.
Quite frankly, I think it's irresponsible to have children of your own with so many that need the love, protection, and guidance that a good parent could provide.
Re:Chess (Score:2, Insightful)
In fact, 'go's impermeability to computerized victory is attributed more to a lack of computational power. Make a game small enough and min/max trees will make it impossible to win against the computer.
Absolutely not. A min/max tree as a primary method of strategy is a primitive brute force hack approach to game theory. We humans don't nearly rely as much on computational brute force because we simply don't have the capacity for it (mostly because our brain's short term memory has a very high write latency). The fact that one trick pony computer programs are quite successful in chess is the exact reason why I find it less stimulating: it mostly just requires a lot of 'looking ahead'. Go, on the other hand, requires a player to combine that skill with keen pattern recognition abilities and showcases how a combination of diverse skills ability enables a very long lurning curve (the difference between a high kyuu and a high dan in Go is truly a marvel). The go tree branches so quickly that no Moore's law in the foreseeable future is going to be of much help, without developing more intelligent AI / game theory, in particular (probabilistic) pattern recognition. So yes, the state of computer theory and the intellectual depth of a game are very much related, I believe.
Re:Your needs differ as you get older... (Score:3, Insightful)
The most engaging game I've played recently is Portal. Unique, and fresh. Looking forward to Portal 2.
Let me just point out that there is something ironic in your opening statements.
Re:In a word.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the drive to "have a storyline" is what's killing games, by turning them into movies. What was the storyline of Asteroids or Pac-Man?
The problem with modern games is that the gameplay is exactly the same across many many titles. Most FPSs have pretty much the same gameplay. The breakout indie successes are almost always about gameplay, not storyline.
Re:Chess (Score:5, Insightful)
You should be modded troll for that one.
I'm in my mid 40's as of about a week ago. I still play games, single and multiplayer, and I still own the kiddies who think they are hot stuff. Getting older doesn't mean you can't have fun.
Lack of Real Depth (Score:3, Insightful)
What's really missing from the games is depth. Part of this is because the more they try to out-do each other with fancy effects and eye-candy, the more it appears to be like a loud commercial rather than a nicely done presentation. But beyond that, games are now churned out like Hollywood does - all scripted, simplified, and by the numbers.
For instance, they take time to explain *everything* in such horrendous detail and have trainers and all sorts of idiot-hand-holding. Compare this to Baldur's Gate. You knew nothing, you had to learn it as you went, and there was a real sense of a story, precisely because they didn't tell you everything that was happening. Deus Ex? didn't tell you much of anything. Diablo didn't either. In fact, the "great" games were designed to be a good game first and never worried about trophies or making it so that some addle-headed eight year old could get 100% on it on their XBOX or PS3. They were "hard" because you had to think. And they didn't have guides and books available before the game itself came out, either.
Now, compare that to Mass Effect 2. I liked the game, but it was so much more simplified than it had to be. Even the Citadel level was a coupe of barely larger than room-sized areas and was designed so that even a moron couldn't get lost. Everything was possible to obtain as well as complete. Compared to the first game, it was a massive let-down. You never could get off-track with your missions. You never could get lost in a city. You never ran out of ammo. I mean, with that much space on the DVD, they actually *shrunk* the square footage of almost every level in the game.
Depth. Hardly any. Replay-ability? Nearly zero. It doesn't feel like we're entering a world so much as watching a made for TV movie. And, it's everything now. Assassin's Creed? I've played games from the 80s with more depth to the character interactions. Shoot, they couldn't even randomize the dialogs for the city missions. Just the same 4 or 5 canned scenarios. Would it have really killed them to spend another 5-10 hours to bring that up to 20 or 30 so we feel like it's a realistic mission? And, this gets worse as you get older. Eventually you want something that isn't mature because it has lots of sex and violence in it, but because it respects your intelligence enough to not treat you like a child while playing it.
From rubber-band AI to canned dialog to overblown effects and "trophies" for the most useless and inane things possible, it's no wonder people are so nostalgic for the days when gaming meant more than sitting through an 8 hour interactive movie on their screen.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Danabnormal is an Asshole (Score:3, Insightful)
Heavy Rain is about as much a game as those old interactive laser disc games... or Dragon's Lair.
Are you sure you've actually played Heavy Rain as it doesn't sound like it. It's absolutely nothing like those old interactive laser disc games. Unless you want to claim the same about games like the original PC Alone in the Dark. If anything it's a successor to the point and click adventure games of old, but with a forking narrative and a bit of old school 3rd person horror thrown in.
Try this (Score:3, Insightful)
Get a huge hard disk. Enormous. 1.5Tb or something only costs as much as a game or two now.
Dig out all the old CD's of games that you used to play, buy them off Gog.com or Steam if you don't have them any more. Read all the iso's onto the disk and / or install the Steam/GOG games onto there.
Remember all the games / systems that you've ever played. Find emulators for them all.
Have everything set up so that you can run any of those games from a couple of clicks and no technical hassle (nothing kills a gaming session more than having to diagnose your PC in the middle of it). By the time you get here, you'll have remembered several games that you never completed but loved. You'll have got back into playing all sorts of older games. You'll remember hearing of their sequels / prequels and want to try them out. You'll have been exposed to numerous games on Steam / GOG.com that you find interesting, and also others for the systems you are emulating (even if that's only DOS).
I did this and it's great. No more cutting-edge PC required, just double-click and go. A quick game of Chaos on the Spectrum followed by learning how nice a game Comix Zone was on the Megadrive (bought it on Steam because it came with some other Megadrive games that I wanted for free), followed by a quick bash through a handful of indie games. Hell, I have 200 games on my Steam account now and most of those have been purchased since I did this.
Most importantly - stop buying those headline games until a year or so after release. Headline games are only good for "I got it first" arguments among kids. It takes a year or so to realise whether a game is actually any good or just another FPS and you could have saved your money.
Browse through the Steam store's less than £4 section. Some wonderful things in there and if you click through you can often get a whole series of games for the price of a single modern one. Don't buy *everything*, just buy yourself a couple of things that seem relevant. Demos are always good here. If it doesn't have a demo, wants a brand-new PC, or has some icky DRM attached to it - ignore it for a year until those problems go away. Suggestions from others for particular games are unlikely to inspire and most of those games are only purchased if you come back to it later and decide that *you* want it.
Just get back into the gaming mindset - don't spend forever on purchases, don't await hyped-out games, don't struggle to run the latest games, don't wait for the 10 minute intros to cut through. Just get into the game (even if that's a slow-paced adventure) at a double-click whenever you like. All that matters is the time on the game, not all the related gumph. And if you get frustrated with something, kick back to a game you last played when you were a kid at the touch of a button.
Re:In a word.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. Ridiculously big budgets are killing games, just like they are killing movies and music. The more money there is on the line, the more pressure there is on the creators to go with a tried and tested formula, in the hope they can minimise the risk. In other words, the variety and creativity from the early days of computer gaming is being sucked out by the games industry.
If one wants to see something fresh, indie games are the way to go (World of Goo, Osmos, Amnesia, Minecraft). Adventure games from smaller European companies can also be quite good (The Longest Journey, Black Mirror... check out www.adventuregamers.com).
This is not to say that no worthwhile games are being published through the industry. The problem is, the non-clones usually remain obscure because they don't receive the advertising budgets of the clones.
My 2c.
this phenomenon is not specific to games (Score:3, Insightful)
Most people, as they get older, find it harder to get into new games, new music, new movies, new food, new sports, new friends, etc. Getting into new stuff takes effort, uninterrupted time, attention span, and a certain kind of ignorance that comes with youth and that lets you see warmed-over crap as exciting and fresh. You eventually reach an age at which it's hard to find anything that seems genuinely worth your excitement; you get jaded . It doesn't work that way for everyone in every arena, but that's generally how it goes.
Re:Chess (Score:5, Insightful)
Something happened to the context of Chess too, essentially rather suddenly.
Back In The Day if you went to a bookstore, Chess was virtually the only competitive hobby that solidly rewarded studying, and the rating system was near-perfect (with certain blips like scholastic or isolated areas.) Before the internet, poor man's info feed was the bookstore, and I for one found it not possible to interact as an accepted peer in most other areas "off the street". Also, up until about 1995 chess had a "culture" with its past heroes, and its famous benchmarks, etc. It was a solid outlet that lasted pretty well.
Suddenly the real power of the internet took hold. At first it was like a "secret weapon" to train for Old School Chess, but somehow, being able to dig around in all kinds of other interactive activities took away the silent monopoly on accessibility that Chess once had. I have remarked that my time here on slashdot, if intelligently compiled, could form four college courses, aka intro classes on the topics covered well here.
(Basic computer security and exposing corporate tricks, the rise of Big Brother vs. politics, etc. )
Yet also, when we joke about not even reading TFA's, we're saying that we don't look toward our past heroic moments anymore. Without the lineage-culture mood, coinciding exactly with the rise of computers, Chess stopped being fun when it became just position crunching up to the point you hit your particular wall. (Typically 1800 aka "just below expert" is a well known barrier when the additional work now required exceeds the fun.)
But the last sad point is when you hit that wall, you know exactly who you can beat, and who will beat you. On a particular day it moves around a little, but the metagame is the same, and its effect on your local crew. Joe the Expert beats you, you beat everyone else. Go to a tourney and you can beat up to the 1600's, and the Sandbaggers who should be 1900 beat you, and you score 4/6, just enough not to win money.
On the net, you can collaboratively Do Stuff, and even if you plod along for years you can eventually add your little pocket of cultural contribution to something. Whippersnappers are fresher, so be it, your experience counts elsewhere as it grows, and ... Net Life intersecting with training real skills that can actually go towards a job is more fun overall than even the Grand Old Game.
Now a days, I use Chess only as a mental metric to test the shape of my sadly erratic nerves. There's some value with it as a study on force & initiative too. But as a grand pursuit, for me it has become a matter of RIP.
Re:Yeah.. (Score:5, Insightful)
As a counter perhaps I still enjoy playing games because I have a richer imagination. That my desires are less shallow, incapable of being fulfilled by the latest version of CoD, or Madden.
I still play games because I enjoy them. I enjoy them in the same way that enjoy a good book, a good movie, etc. I'm not limited to video games either, I play new boardgames and table top games. I do so with my children.
To answer the OP as you get older your life becomes more complex. You have more demands on your time. You might not get the same joy out of playing because you believe you should be doing something else, or that there are other things you'd rather do. If its the former then that's a shame, if its the later embrace the other things.
Re:Reaction time for old age (Score:3, Insightful)