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| Thread: Games are becoming labor. |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 4 5 · NEXT» |
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Doomforge
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posted April 20, 2012 10:35 PM |
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Games are becoming labor.
Observing the market, gamers in general, I have come to conclusion that the time of my generation is coming to an end. In the old times, best players were magicians: we used to rule games by our superior understanding of the system, our ability to find the most overpowered/useful paths, and discover nifty tricks. We didn't really spend hours on games, it was the quick analytical thinking and a "kind of magic" that made us own games as kids/teens and be universally considered magicians by other nerds.
But now? The heavy online community turned gamers into slow, hard-working laborers. Gone are the time when you could become a really good player after a few hours - now it's all about mechanical repeating of the same action over and over again until you've done it so much you can pretty much do it in your sleep. Gamers have mentality of office workers: their answer to a low "salary" (winrate, or general success) is "work longer", and not "use brain" anymore. some examples include:
- Dota games, where you have to train last hit for hundreds or even thousands of games to develop a keenness on the lane which is pretty much the staple of being a decent player, not to mention other aspects that need to be played until you're pretty much automatized them.
- RTS games, where success is mostly derived of the amount of automatization in building your base "the best way" and rushing "exactly at minute XX:XX with Y amount of unit type Z". Which requires you to play the same matchup billion times until you learn how to precisely, mechanically execute every move.
Where are the times where games used to be all about fun, and not "hard work" ? don't we have enough work already in our lives?
Now, to be successful gamer, you simply have to work for it. The games being more and more schematic with highly-advanced rock-paper-scissors system (which is imho the source of the problem as it HIGHLY promotes automatization of gameplay) and - usually - are young, because obviously, in order to brainlessly repeat actions for 8-10 hours per day, you need to be a kid, best if from elementary school since those have the biggest amounts of free time.
I don't like that direction. of course there are still single-player games, but those pose no challenge to a seasoned power-gamer anymore, since they are mainly developed for casuals not wanting to be "competitive" online...
Conclusion is that one is either deemed to be average (or below average) player getting owned left and right in most online games, or devote your life to training like the kids do (and waste your precious lifetime mastering a game with average lifespan of three years...).
Thoughts?
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Adrius
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Stand and fight!
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posted April 20, 2012 10:46 PM |
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Yeah I try to avoid all games that try to make me work to have fun... like certain MMOs that have been described by my friends as only becoming REALLY fun when you reach level 80... yeah sure but what about the trip to that level? God no thanks.
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In the old times, best players were magicians: we used to rule games by our superior understanding of the system, our ability to find the most overpowered/useful paths, and discover nifty tricks.
Hmm... can't the stupid kids just google a Gamefaq build and copy your magician skills then?
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Doomforge
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posted April 20, 2012 10:49 PM |
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They can. And they do. And I don't like it 
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JoonasTo
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What if Elvin was female?
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posted April 20, 2012 10:55 PM |
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In RTS the problem is mostly about the majority of (US) gamers whining so much to the devs about certain strategies they consider unfair.
C&C3 is perfect example of this. Most of the alternative strategies that became viable at one point of the game are now canceled out due to serious nerfing in patches. That is a seriously annoying feature of modern developing. If there are alternatives, they are often driven into the same mold.
In the original game people complained about tanks winning missile trooper, while it was still cost-effective counter. Got changed, now it's quite cookie-cutter.
They also efficiently negated almost all stealth rush tactics, which is real shame since they weren't gamebreakers when you had someone who could actually play against you but it was still powerful enough to call for actions, now you don't even need to adjust your strategy because of them. They are just too weak or come too late to have any effect besides crippling your own economy.
It is sad that games are directed more and more to the big mass that can't come up with anything themselves.
One big thing all over the board is that games are more and more about DPS in a very short amount of time than longer drawn out duels. You simply don't have the time to think about your next action since 10 second can see your army obliterated or your hero lose 95% HP.
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Doomforge
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posted April 20, 2012 11:00 PM |
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Yeah. I'm pretty sad Stacraft 2 followed this trend. Battles are too short for individual micro to matter most of the time.
People brainlessly copy the "best" players. funny thing is the "best" players usually are weak at actually discovering the best strategies, so the final cookie cutter emerges after a few months, or even years, even though the perfectly imbalanced tools are there from day 1...
It took many years for Warcraft3 player to start using mass talon + AoW spam vs. orc for instance! even though they were super imba from the start. The ridiculously strong demon hunter was even forgotten for a hefty period.
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OhforfSake
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Initiate
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posted April 21, 2012 12:32 AM |
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Age 8, I played chess at a club for the first time. I did it for fun and I weren't very good. An average player.
Age 9, I really practiced and became the best in the club in juniors category.
Age 11, I entered tournaments and now I had to really think hard.
Age 12, I got tired, it was too serious and too much the same methods applied again and again, I decided to quit chess.
Something like that. The game didn't change, the way I played it did.
In the end, all games will always be a question of reapplying a set of methods to achieve certain ends. It's only a matter of degree and detail. The difference of fun and boring mostly comes with ones temper. If you try to play video games because you're nostalgic about the fun you used to have, but don't find it anymore, forcing yourself to keep on playing won't find it. It's not because of the given game, it's because of you.
What some think is funny, you don't, and vice versa. It's an emotion and it changes with time. Maybe when you've eaten or have read a good book, a few hours of gaming will be fun. But if you let it go on for too long, all the first fun hours will quickly be forgotten in the few extra you invest expecting the fun to continue. It's more a matter of knowing oneself than trying to blame ones source of entertainment.
It first becomes labour when what you do is not what you want to do.
Yes some games do promise you stuff you want, if you do stuff you don't want, but mostly that promise exists more in fantasy than in reality. It's the promise of achieving a high level, the promise of becoming king, etc. Sure it would be an improvement of those games, if they allowed one to choose what you wanted from the get go (not saying it's financially better).
Indeed games may very well develop towards a standard none of us guys would think is very entertaining, but that's because companies wants to make money more than they want to make a game we in particular find funny. It's an old saying if you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself.
Age 5 played old dos games, very funny. Exploring the unknown, reaching fullfilment through achievements, positively surprising myself, a general feeling of success.
Age 22 played old dos games, felt like labour. Going through known stuff, not finding fullfilment in achievements, negatively surprising myself, a general feeling of wasting time.
Edit: Not saying the serious chess wasn't fun at times. It sure was, but it was not the games, it was the aftermath. You see once in a while, I'd have great success in tournaments. Then I'd really enjoy being able to look at the score board and see that this other guy who'd won every single match so far, well he had lost to me.
Or another tournament where I helped a family member to the title, because I won against the direct competitor.
Or when I got promoted to the highest group (lost all games), because I was thought to be the best in a group of ~30. Or when I won against this junior champion from another city who'd been wiping the floor even at top groups.
So it's not that neither part hasn't got ups and downs, but at some point in life, you realise what is more important than something else, your priorities changes and so does your feelings for different stuff as well. You can always artificially hold something alive and hoping for the feeling to return, but in my opinion, it's like trying to stay in a broken relationship, you're just fooling yourself and it's harmful for you.
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blizzardboy
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Nerf Herder
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posted April 21, 2012 01:41 AM |
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I don't understand the accusations about Starcraft 2. The units, abilities, and structures are changed around, but all in all, the pace and feel of the game is still similar to SC1. A micro-monkey is still going to severely outshine a casual.
To be honest though, I don't see what's so negative (or unexpected) about certain MMO games being mostly based on your acquisitions (your level, equipment, etc) vs your hand dexterity and hand-eye coordination. Is there really anything wrong with that? Especially considering that - let's be honest - how good a person is going to be in a fighting/shooting game is more-or-less going to come down to your innate hand-eye ability? Sure, that's a lot of fun when playing with people of a similar crop, but the rankings systems are so flawed in games (or nonexistent) that the random people that just want to log on, chill out, and play for awhile get stuck with the ADHD kid that physically vibrates the entire time he's playing the game and has a 20-0 kill record. Now let's compare that to real life sports: can you imagine how outrageously lame it would be if you had these matches where you paired up 14-year-old players against a college team? Or a team of seasoned college players vs a bunch of random people that just like to play? The matches would be chaotic and moronic. That's why there are highly established and organized leagues that encourage the best, most exhilarating matches possible. This standard doesn't exist in the online gaming world for the most part, hence you end up with a dystopia of people that are upset with the structure for various reason. The hardcore gamers are sick of the casual gamers ruining the atmosphere with their noobishness, and the casual players are sick of the hardcore gamers ruining the atmosphere with their fanaticism. So all-in-all, it's not surprising that you find as many grievers as you do. Online gaming is tons of fun, but when assessing it from a competitive point of view, it's also pretty schizophrenic, and this isn't something that is likely to change anytime soon.
Ultimately, the casual but fairly consistent gamer will get their way, because they make up the largest group. This isn't to say there won't be certain games tailored for other audiences.
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fauch
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posted April 21, 2012 01:45 AM |
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when it comes to competitive playing, I've mostly played FPS games.
and I noticed that despite large amount of maps, players will usually always play on the same 2 or 3 maps that they learnt by heart.
and if possible, in a team game, it makes things much more predictable and learnable since enemies always spawn in the same place, and not all over the place like in free for all.
I myself prefer to play new maps regularly and build a lot of maps myself, but it's hard to get people to play on maps they don't know (actually on pretty much any map except the ones they have practised a lot) but that's fun to see new battlefields and see if you can master them.
that reminds me of team fortress 2. I have it on 360, I remember in the devs' commentaries, the devs praising the hydro map as a very strategical and unpredictable map. as a result, no one played it. most people played 2 forts which is much more simpler, probably because it is easier to master a map in which there are only 2 ways between each base.
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xerox
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posted April 21, 2012 01:50 AM |
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I don't get the criticsm against games like WoW either.
The first time I played WoW and leveled to 60 (which took like a year for the 10 year old Xerox who couldn't speak a word in english) it was seriously the best gaming experience I have ever had. I have never felt anything similar.
Now I only play the MoP Beta a bit but the fun in WoW doesn't have to start at 85. It depends on what kind of player you are. I think leveling is pretty funny, especially now that Blizzard remade almost ALL of the 1-60 zones (they are many times better designed than in vanilla). In Cataclysm, I didn't really like the lv85 content. I never even did any 85 raiding content this expansion though I have a lot of fun raiding memories from WotLK (Ulduar...)
But I was a hardcore raider back then and having to show up atleast four nights for Lich King heroic attempts got kind of dull after 8 months. It started feeling like a job.
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del_diablo
Legendary Hero
Manifest
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posted April 21, 2012 02:26 AM |
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Well, I agree there. But with several conditions to agree that is. Is old games better? Well, to be honest, a lot of older games suffers from interface problems, such as text taking too long to appere, extremely slow and annoying screen transitions, no clear indication on what to do, several large UI problems, graphics that was even barebone for its time, unskipable really long cutscenes, difficulty cranked up beyond reasonable levels, poor controls, and a lot of small issues.
With todays games, we have gotten a little spoiled, because a lot of these problems have been attempted to be fixed, but on the other hand, the current generation of games also develops their really large set of problems. One of the most notorious one is the well known "tutorial disease", where its assumed that you lack the idea on how to grasp controls on a gamepad even with a bit of trying, and as a result we get these extremely long and annoying tutorials. Another severe issue is that a lot of game designers want to be movie makers, and with the insane amount of storage there is on modern game units, its fully possible to emulate a movie, which leads to a lot of games overthinking things like plot, and make really really long annoying and senseless cutscenes. Another severe problem we keep on returning to is a extremely severe focus on realism, and various interprentions on how to do realism.
Games these days have to be extremely "realistic", which do ironically mean that it gets a bit more rare to see a game where the character actually has decent move or dodge speed. On the top of that there is the genre issues, a few really good genres are getting rare due a ever more increasing attempt to creating cash cow games, for instance a good metroidvanis game is getting a bit more rare to find, as is proper platformers. Another downside of this is that with the combination of cash cow franchises, and a overdone fixation on realism, we get a problem where the studios also focus solely how much graphic effects they can squeeze out of the consoles. At the first peek its not a problem, but at a second peek there is a obvious problem: The consoles are medium-high end computers with little to no RAM, from 2005-2006. While there is severe performance gains due bare to metal programming, that still does not change that fact it has been quite a few years. While the age itself is not a problem, the problem is that there is too much focus on pushing out realistic graphic effects, and hence we get games where a lot of things is sacrificed for this. While engine standardization has partially solved this problem, all studios still attempt to push out the most realistic game possible on old hardware, and usually cut some corners to achieve this.
Or they design a "realistic game" instead of making a bit colorful and "unrealistic game" that would be a lot of fun. Perhaps the focus will change once the "marked leader" changes, like it changed away from platforming and towards FPS during the century transition?
But lets talk about another severe syndrom that has plagued us: A lot of designers are also stuck with thinking about problems that existed in the 8-bit era, where worlds was small and the disk place sparse. The result is that they often ignore good game design, and instead focus solely on what was impossible back in a day: A oversized sandbox game, with severe amounts of cinematics. Usually with a overdone focus on size and lenght instead of quality.
The push for the "grindang MMO" is also something that is of today, with grinding artifically enlonging the vitality, whereas that role was usually served by making really really hard games in the 8-bit era. The feeling of mastery of a crippled character is now replaced by overdone amounts of tutoring and and too slow progress curve.
But is this all negative? For one, the entry barrier to the marked is sensible. The game needs to be playable for one, which is a extreme improvement compared to what the 8-bit era had. The downside is however that the publisher has a lot of control over what gets into the marked, and that can get troublesome, but on the flipside there is publishers like Paradox Entertainment who is a bit more lax on the enforced cash cowing. There is also the advantage of the globalisation of game corporations, which makes any sort of total video game crash for a region impossible(if everyone floods the marked with snow games, and people get tired, they in 1983 managed to crash the US regional marked).
Another positive thing is that we have had a >30 years of extensive testing and failing on game design, so whenever a studio takes advantage of this, the result is usually quite good. While there are a lot of studios that are blind to history, its still 30 years of pitfalls to avoid for those who have learned their history.
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DagothGares
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No gods or kings
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posted April 21, 2012 02:52 AM |
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Quote:
- Dota games, where you have to train last hit for hundreds or even thousands of games to develop a keenness on the lane which is pretty much the staple of being a decent player, not to mention other aspects that need to be played until you're pretty much automatized them.
In my dota-styled game, it's mostly about knowing matchups and item builds and counterpicking and safe picking, rather than last hitting, which is only real hard, if you play in the mage-type lane.
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fauch
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posted April 21, 2012 03:01 AM |
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about what you say on designers...
as I said, I like building maps. for example I made maps for far cry 2, and focused on making them well playable and bug free. but what I noticed online is that most people didn't care about the playability.
what made a map popular wasn't the level design, and the fact that the map was overall designed to be enjoyable to play, but the amount of eye candies in it.
I've seen maps that people seemed to enjoy but where a pain to play. for example, there are maps where there is so much crap littered all over the place to make it look more realistic, that if you want to move, you spend half of the time jumping over stuffs getting on the way. or the excessive amount of details makes it difficult to spot what is really important (sometimes even other players).
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Doomforge
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posted April 21, 2012 04:09 AM |
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I don't understand the accusations about Starcraft 2. The units, abilities, and structures are changed around, but all in all, the pace and feel of the game is still similar to SC1. A micro-monkey is still going to severely outshine a casual.
I guess you like that game a lot if you say that. Too bad it's not true. Typical SC2 game is camping to 200/200 then one fast battle in which individual units die too fast to blink, yet alone micro them.
As for pro games, if you do not follow the extremely tight schedules of build orders and rush/antirush rules, you will lose - well, kinda like in SC, but still - in a few minutes at best.
Most of that is an effect of playing the same stuff over and over for 1000+ games, until you can do a perfect build with your eyes closed, and with your keyboard disconnected.
Tell me it's not labor
I did not say anything about MMOs btw. They are a game that are exactly that, and always were.
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In my dota-styled game, it's mostly about knowing matchups and item builds and counterpicking and safe picking, rather than last hitting, which is only real hard, if you play in the mage-type lane.
Without last hitting and denying hard you will lose every serious game. Unless you're playing babysitter of course but he still should deny, and deny hard. It may may not matter for average gamer, but a professional absolutely HAS to perfect it. And yes, it takes months, years even of hard labor to master that technique. Don't fool yourself, Dagoth  I've spoken with competitive players from top clans. They all consider Dota fun, but also, a hard work. It took years for most of them to really get a grasp of clever picking, fantastic lane control... it's a hard work, couple hours per day.
Exactly what I pointed out earlier - to be good in a game, you need regular labor, and a lot of it.
It's not games' fault, however. In 8-bit times, there was no internet, no gamefaqs and no replays. You had no one to parrot from. You had to beat games yourself and make your own strategies. In those times, it was the smartest gamers that dominated, not the "hard working" ones that read strategies, watch 9001 competitive games and then start brainlessly parroting them in their hundreds of games until they can more or less do the same with their hands tied behind their backs.
I miss those times. Now you can't really play a game and do good with your perception and intelligence. Now you have to use whatever the "collective intelligence" of players have created as best strategy and learn to repeat it like a robot until perfection, and that's the ONLY way.
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Nocturnal
Promising
Supreme Hero
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posted April 21, 2012 04:32 AM |
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Quote:
- RTS games, where success is mostly derived of the amount of automatization in building your base "the best way" and rushing "exactly at minute XX:XX with Y amount of unit type Z". Which requires you to play the same matchup billion times until you learn how to precisely, mechanically execute every move.
The exact reason why I don't like RTS games.
Also another type of game I don't like, which, as you have put, is all about brainless repetitiveness is action games.
But other than that, I don't think the other genres suffer from this. I'm not one of the many nostalgia lovers that are against modern games simply because they are modern games (I'm not implying you are one of those). Cause I have seen simply beautiful old and modern games both. I won't go on to give examples but there are many games that go the opposite way of repetitiveness and I'm just sad I won't have this much time to play games after this summer, as I'll graduate.
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blizzardboy
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posted April 21, 2012 04:55 AM |
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I guess you like that game a lot if you say that.
SC1/SC2 is overall my favorite game ever. So yes, I'm a fan Maybe I'm a bit nostalgic from playing on b.net when I was 13 and getting my ass kicked while loving every minute of it, but even as an adult I think it's simply a great game.
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Too bad it's not true. Typical SC2 game is camping to 200/200 then one fast battle in which individual units die too fast to blink, yet alone micro them.
As for pro games, if you do not follow the extremely tight schedules of build orders and rush/antirush rules, you will lose - well, kinda like in SC, but still - in a few minutes at best.
Most of that is an effect of playing the same stuff over and over for 1000+ games, until you can do a perfect build with your eyes closed, and with your keyboard disconnected.
Tell me it's not labor
I have virtually no experience in my gaming history of both sides building up to 200/200 and then coming at each other. I don't know what else to say: this very, very rarely happens in standard Starcraft ladder, so I don't know where you got that premise from.
As for the later part: yes, builds can be mechanized until what you're doing is based more on conditioning than actually reacting and improvising, however I should mention that this is far less true in team-based play compared to solo, which I do much less of because I think it's an inferior game. In random team games the variables expand and things become more chaotic when you have 4-8 strangers thrown into a fast-paced game together. The counter system is a lot more awkward and intensive because you can't just patent your builds off one opponent like you can in 1v1. You have 2-4 opponents, each building different stuff and potentially each having different playstyles (all 3 might be pushing; 1 might be expanding; 1 might be teching) so your options for what to do and how to do it aren't so straightforward and you may be looking at several different options that each seem appealing. Also, scouting and keeping tabs on what the opponents are doing isn't nearly as simple either, since you've got 2-4 different opponents, and even if your teammates help out with scouting, you as an individual won't be able to monitor them as effectively as you would with one opponent. It's an overall more lively game.
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"Folks, I don't trust children. They're here to replace us."
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Doomforge
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posted April 21, 2012 11:26 AM |
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On team games on SC2: I've browsed SC2 forums far and wide, and here was an unusual number of posts about how SC2 team/random team sucks compared to W3 and that SC2 feels like it was made for solo. I guess there must be something about it
SC2, being much simpler game than WC3, can be easier automatized to certain actions. heck, WC3 at the end of its glory days was almost all about automation - and as I said before, it was much much more complex, so believing that SC2 is any different would be naive to certain extent (I played WC3 competitively for quite a while).
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Doomforge
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posted April 21, 2012 11:42 AM |
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Well, competitive Heroes is also about labor, let's be fair: to own the map, most great ToH players have a set path they always follow. Fortunately, it doesn't really require you to play the map 9001 times: a couple times is enough.
So it's acceptable in my book.
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Adrius
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Stand and fight!
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posted April 21, 2012 11:46 AM |
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The mark of a really good player is often that he can adapt to new situations, think up new strategies on the fly. A kid copying Gamefaqs cannot do this.
So perhaps what you'd have to do is make the game complex enough for really unexpected situations to happen. Situations that require you to adapt, instead of just sticking to the same routine over and over.
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OhforfSake
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Initiate
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posted April 21, 2012 11:48 AM |
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I was talking about random maps, doom. But you sure hit the nail on at least one reason known maps isn't very entertaining for me. except that it doesn't really require 10k tries to figure out how to best play any given map. sorry I read your post incorrect.
@adrius
I once thought for a game like morrowind, it could be pretty epic if the NPC world actually changed. Like war between cities, raiders and if you don't complete the game within time, then Dagoth get to collect his machine and spread terror. What're your thought about stuff like this in specific for morrowind and in general?
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Doomforge
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posted April 21, 2012 11:48 AM |
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That would be acceptable, yes. However, I believe a lot of the professional scene would complain the game is too unpredictable, perhaps even random, and there's one thing worse than cookie cutter labor: losing a game before you even start it
(that's why I dislike Dota public games.)
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