Okay, as I said, its a short article that doesn't contain much in terms of sources for this, but they do exist and the article was mostly directly at people I was debating the topic "Is it just me or have games become too easy??" about, in the gaming industry.
Game Community vs Game Industry - Why games are easy & why we must outgrow that
I would just like to quite immediately say that I am very much sympathetic with those here who say that they pine for the days of yore of games that would keep you trying to beat that one levels, or several levels over the course of several hours, even days or weeks. Part of the fun in this, I think, has something to do with the desire of hard-earned achievements and sense of accomplishment (Even if only in the context of a meaningless game, objectively speaking that is - It was fun!) and much more.
Now that I've provided a terse preamble of my position, I would like to take the slightly contrary position in this and say that not only do I think we are seeing a slight curve upwards in difficulty in the overall, but also that I think in some way that we are ourselves at fault in some ways to this trend.
Video Games, in the 80's and early 90's were by the most common measure, a concept with which we had little understanding and mostly appealed to a, comparatively to today, very narrow group of people - Particularly (but not exclusively) those that are, by some generalized agreement, described as "nerds". Indeed the term "Gamer" to my knowledge (which is going on pure memory of my own time back then) wasn't one that really recognized in any sort of real way beyond those who cared about such distinctions, which to say at that time wasn't many.
Now the combination of a new concept (Video Games) and a very small (relative) interest group, meant that those who were likely to play anything at all in the first place, were people who by and large were already used to beating hard challenges with their minds (I would just quickly add here that I recognize that this isn't the only reason games used to be harder, but it was a big factor in my view) and the same kind of people making these games, this is what you got. Games that were made to beat the player, as opposed to help them win were very much the order of the day and to many, like myself, this was part of the fun..Beating the game, which I think is a large part of the reason that phrase came into existence in the first place.
Now all of a sudden in our modern day and age, we have gaming becoming much much more mainstream and as a result if you want some measure of control of success over your game, your safest bet is to make it as accessible and (here is the clincher) playable to as many people as possible without breaking the general premise of the game.
Now I know at this stage some of you (perhaps a lot of you) will be inclined to disagree with that and point to examples such as Portal, DayZ, Minecraft or some such games as either being hard or not tailored to a specific crowd and you would not be wrong. However that is not what I said - What I said was that if want to make life easy for yourself and consciously increase your chances of some returns on your game, the aforementioned "tailoring" is what you would do. Some people don't do this and indeed some come out on the other side with great victories in this respect - But that is a lot of gambling to do with, perhaps a lot of, money and its very rare that you will find investors willing to jump on that boat as opposed to doing something tested and tried which is, given the standards of those of us who consider ourselves "Gamers" in the old sense, unremarkable but still sufficiently profitable and most importantly, much safer.
Then, on top of all of that (as if it couldn't get any "worse") we come in (and by we, I mean us old and new Gamers that want a hard challenge and, as someone rightly pointed out, elements of fear and hard earned thrills) and still buy these games.
Why do we buy these games? Well, despite our annoyances with these various titles that sometimes bores the living daylights out of our challenge-thirsting skulls, we still like to play games and naively harbor some uncontrollable hope that lingers about one day things will return to "normal" . This isn't a bad thing, its just perhaps a little sad and/or unfortunate.
Many times, us that like really hard games are regarded as a "minority" in the gaming industry - A sentiment and opinion I cannot begin to describe my utter disagreement with, and even if we were/are a minority I think it can be said to some extent that by far we are more important to the ingenuity and progress of games and the people who play them (This may sound elitist to you but I am not trying to be, in fact I think elitism is missing the point)
To begin to sum this all up, the essence of it is that at the moment if you want hard/challenge games with truly new ideas, it has to come from indie developers and I applaud each and every one of them for their efforts, many of them don't get rewarded enough in my opinion.Besides all that, we have a gaming culture that is broadly speaking, still in its late infancy in regards to its tolerance-levels and challenge-expectations.
Until we collectively grow out of this (Which I think has begun) and for as long as you can get goodly returns on games that are often, in my view at least, a dime a dozen when it comes to design, flow, practices and difficulty, and for as long as you can get us collectively hyped up again and again over these titles even if we know whats probably coming (a disappointment) it will go on like this.
I could add a lot of examples about how there is a practice of building throw-away MMO's for the explicit purpose of making a profit in the initial year and the canning the title as well as other equally vile ideas like it, however for now I think I've made my point.
Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for reading and have a nice day. I look forward to any eventual challenges to what I've said
- Jacob Damkjaer
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Komaru, on 13 August 2012 - 10:41 AM, said:
