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Muirdach · 09-04-2007, 07:28 AM

I believe that part of it is also a consequence of choice. The games you're talking about, they pretty much had a monopoly (or at least an oligopoly). They could afford to be "hard", because they were there first and there wasn't a lot of competition. If you wanted to play a computer game, you had to put up with the frustration, and ultimately get the reward.

Now, there are thousands of games out there. More come out all the time. You don't have to buy one in order to play it, you can get a free demo, read countless reviews, or in the case of most MUDs - they're free anyway. There's no investment other than your time, so there's no "sunk cost" to playing the game. If you play for an hour and then drop it, no loss to you. The result of this is that people tend to try games for much shorter periods. You can see it on most MUDs, where new players often are on for 5 minutes or less before they decide the game's not for them. No one tries to like anything anymore, because if it isn't perfect, well there are only another 9999 games to try, and one of them is bound to fit you just right.

So why are games easier? Because game developers are wetting themselves that there might be something in that initial 5 minutes of content that the player might not like. They want things to be all fluffy and wonderful so that the player gets hooked. They're scared that if something's hard, people will just go "oh well, this is too troublesome, let's try something else" - and there are thousands of "something elses" out there to sift through, so the player's gone forever. So I definitely think that there's an element of people not wanting to actually have to learn about the game, figure out how a complicated system works, not wanting to spend their precious time on actually solving anything. Time in general is a lot more precious than it used to be: like you said, "me, now" - and as a result people just don't want to put time and effort into something when there's probably something else out there that they can get right away.

09-04-2007, 07:28 AM	#2
Muirdach Member Join Date: Jun 2006 Home MUD: Karinth Posts: 64	Re: Declining Challenge in Games? I believe that part of it is also a consequence of choice. The games you're talking about, they pretty much had a monopoly (or at least an oligopoly). They could afford to be "hard", because they were there first and there wasn't a lot of competition. If you wanted to play a computer game, you had to put up with the frustration, and ultimately get the reward. Now, there are thousands of games out there. More come out all the time. You don't have to buy one in order to play it, you can get a free demo, read countless reviews, or in the case of most MUDs - they're free anyway. There's no investment other than your time, so there's no "sunk cost" to playing the game. If you play for an hour and then drop it, no loss to you. The result of this is that people tend to try games for much shorter periods. You can see it on most MUDs, where new players often are on for 5 minutes or less before they decide the game's not for them. No one tries to like anything anymore, because if it isn't perfect, well there are only another 9999 games to try, and one of them is bound to fit you just right. So why are games easier? Because game developers are wetting themselves that there might be something in that initial 5 minutes of content that the player might not like. They want things to be all fluffy and wonderful so that the player gets hooked. They're scared that if something's hard, people will just go "oh well, this is too troublesome, let's try something else" - and there are thousands of "something elses" out there to sift through, so the player's gone forever. So I definitely think that there's an element of people not wanting to actually have to learn about the game, figure out how a complicated system works, not wanting to spend their precious time on actually solving anything. Time in general is a lot more precious than it used to be: like you said, "me, now" - and as a result people just don't want to put time and effort into something when there's probably something else out there that they can get right away.