A question regarding free time and game length

Not really. Often ADHD comes with ability to hyperfocus on interesting things. Like in being able to master complex games while having serious trouble with focusing at studying and stuff.

 

No. "Hyperfocus" is a made up term. It means nothing. Twitch gameplay is not focusing in a practical sense, especially in light of the addictive reward mechanism in games which is what keeps gamers gaming. Just like a sip of alcohol will make you want another, same for games. The "focus" in gaming is just the reaching for more alcohol.

See here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3220824/

Since ADHD is three times more likely in males than females my point still stands: It doesn't help the argument focus defined early games. That being said, I agree youth were a demographic back then, especially in console gaming. I agree reflexes were important, as youth have good reflexes. I do not agree that exploration was long and tedious because of the youth demographic, however. I think early attempts at exploration in games was just preliminary and it got better with the years. It had nothing to do with how much time gamers had to waste.

 

I'm not talking about twitch games. I'm talking about any interesting games. And it's not like complex games can't be very addictive.

 

I'm not a therapist but I took a lot of psychology classes and deal with therapists quite often in my job (education field) and I can tell you that "hyper-focus" is an often used term that definitely means something in professional circles today. Not sure about 20 years ago, but English is always evolving.

 

I want to add ADHD is THREE times more common in male BOYS. I had the mistaken idea it was five times more likely in males of all ages which is not true. Among adults, ADHD is evenly spread. I don't know the explanations behind all this though.

AFter reading a bit about hyperfocus it seems what it narrows down to is attention-dysregulation. Hyperfocus is what happens when they're focused on something and can't easily shift their focus to something else. I've always thought of ADHD as attention-deficit which makes me erroneously think ADHD means the sufferer can't focus. Truth is, persons with ADHD can focus, but can't as easily change their attention as normal people can and what they give attention to can be wildly unimportant.

I'll take back any arguments I used involving ADHD. Evenso, do you really think the games produced in the 1980's required focus? They might have required reflexes which in turn require some focus, but does a shooter or platformer action game really require more focus than Chess or Othello, both of which are easily played in old age? That was my point: Focus is not limited to twitchy action games. And ti's the twitchy action games which were so tremendously common in the 1980's and early 90's.

I, for example, only played my first strategy game when I was about 18, and that was on the PC. And yet it was a military simulation game too. I really had a lot of fun with military sims during that time. And yet I went through a lot of games on several different consoles as I was growing up and virtually all of them were of the twitchy genus. While the slower paced more thoughtful games - more reminiscent of Chess - weren't and probably still aren't nearly as popular on consoles.

I think I'd say the "focus" in those twitchy games is more of the impulsive/reactive sort. The kind of focus you need to win in a strategy or Chess game requires more forethought before one proceeds with action.

I want to summarize the OP below:
1. Games early on were produced for the youth demographic (predominately male boys) and games produced for them strongly considered these things: focus, reflex, lots of free time to waste.
2. Newer games have increased the size of the demographic to include both genders and all ages
3. Future games will have some of the traits of older games and yet will be playable by all ages

Where I disagree or a opinion I have:
1. Focus is not especially higher in youth (or young boys)
2. Future games mustn't only appeal to all demographics
3. If a game is made to appeal to all demographics it'll only include elemtns from old games which all can enjoy

I also stated I felt exporation in old games is not tied to the youth demographic but has instead steadily improved with each iteration, so that now we have exploration elements much better than in past games.

 

The earliest video games* were designed and oriented around families. A number of them, like Warlords (Atari 2600) were even 4-player, thus oriented around the concept of filling the same spot as the family board game. So, too, did pnp rpgs first begin. D&D was oriented and marketed as a family and social game, where you might even invite the neighbors over for a multi-family D&D party. These things quickly became "nerd hobbies", like in less than half a decade, and all of that stopped. And this is a result likely accelerated in the case of electronic games by the video game collapse. Later, during the return of consoles, the hobby was treated as more of a boys club, and video games were largely targeting boys. An idea not helped by a culture where it was not okay for a girl to be a nerd.

Computer games were a different story. In the olden days, there were a lot of garage designers, and thus computer games started out as a nerd hobby, in part because of the "difficulty" of using computers. Me da was a hobbiest programmer/rpg player (later full-time programmer) during this era of early 80s. Unlike video games, these garage-based computer game makers didn't have marketing departments prepping them and defining what they did and how they would advertise themselves. Instead, these "companies" were just people in the garage doing what they wanted to do as best they could.

The fore-runners of the Action RPG (Adventure - Atari 2600) were really short. The fore-runners of the Classic RPG (Temple of Apshai) were long. These are games with two different audiences, with some cross-over. But the trick of it all is: with a few tweaks Adventure can be sold to casuals. Temple of Apshai cannot be sold to a casual without making it into something different. So, what's a marketing department to do after its company acquires a bunch of crpg companies in the late 90s? How do you sell these crpg IPs to more and more people to get the required 6% annual growth for the investors when only nerds want to play them, and nerds are a finite quantity.

Well, you take Adventure, and you take the grindy bits of Temple of Apshai, and you make an awful frankenstein monster called the Casual Game. A game that can be marketed to "consumers" who can play it at any time, anywhere. On the train, in the bath, while they're screaming at the kids. Doesn't matter. These games don't require any real attention. Unlike the old crpgs (or many of the old strategy board games), you don't have to sit down and devote an hour or two to really get into it. 5 minutes is fine. So, you can sell this Casual Game to people whose main hobby is watching football, or skiing, or whatever, and who aren't really going to devote any real attention to it. They may end up devoting 100s of hours to it, in the end, but not not in any concrete, devoted, or interested way.

Thus, it's not the lack of time that the companies are really marketing to, no matter their excuses. Plenty of people, like me da, played long games back in the day while having jobs and raising families. Rather, it's the idea of marketing to people who don't have games as their hobby. Instead, they are marketing to those who use games as a time-filler, in order to fill the space where in earlier times they would have gossipped or would look at magazines (since they don't read books).


* ie not computer games

 

I agree with this. Its not a lack of time. That excuse is used to make the target audience feel important instead of stupid and shallow. These people will spend hundreds of hours launching birds at pigs and blocks, but don't want to spend 30 seconds reading a manual or needing to learn the incredibly complicated art of dual classing etc... the 'lack of time' reason is an excuse used so they don't have to call these people idiots in their advertising campaigns..

 

That's a lot of good points you raise but I don't fully understand your dislike for time-filler. It's a market and people are satisfying it's demand. There isn't anything innately wrong with casual gaming and I understand it's appeal. My time filler game was Dota for a time and I raked up more hours in it than most RPGs I've played by just playing a match a day and that game isn't in anyway considered casual.

Now I fully agree that sometimes games are being dumbed down to appeal to more people and sometimes they are rightfully modernized (Not every game design decision made in the 80' and 90' is the golden standard by which the rest of games should be judged forever and ever).

Also I don't think it's as bad as some people think. I mean the ratio is kind of the same as in movies. How many movie-goers have seen the latest superhero movies and how many of them also saw the latest film by Lars von Trier or Kim Ki-duk?

 

There is nothing wrong with dumb games, as long as they are honest about it and write it on the box that the game is dumb.

 

My issues with Casual Games are large, and thus would derail this thread. In short, though, let's just say a casual game is a particular kind of simple game that sucks out all of the fun of a real game and replaces it with ego-stroking, no-fail gameplay, and pay walls.

Anyhoo, confining my issues to just the issue of time.

Using a game to fill some time and having a game that is designed to fill time is an important distinction. As is the distinction between simple games and casual games. To illustrate, let us take two platformers, Superior Mario Brothers and Vector. Both of these games are simple and can be played well by little kids. Cool so far.

However, an issue arises in the difference in the way that each is designed. To really get into Super Mario Brothers, one must sit down for a bit and really play it. The way the levels flow into each other, the lives, the size, and everything is built such that one must actually play for awhile to have any meaningful progress. Not so with Vector. Vector is designed to be casual. There are no fail states. Each level is only a couple of minutes long. Progress after a level is finished is saved and permanent. There are very few jumps on any level. All of the jumps (except secrets) are clearly marked, and special jumps are all marked with an icon. So, not really great gameplay to begin with. It's a particular kind of simplicity that I like to call brain-dead simplicity, since it's so easy that you can almost complete the game even if you're in a coma.

But that's not the end of it. Then comes the casual gateways. Special moves are unlocked with in-game money. To "complete" a level and get lots of in-game money, you need to unlock all of the special moves for a level before playing, so that the move can be performed at the designated time to get the money drop. Otherwise, if the required move isn't unlocked, a normal move is done in its place and there is no extra money for it. As one gets further along in the game, the special moves require more and more in-game money to unlock, and then even later you begin to need to unlock more than one new move for each level. If you don't unlock the moves, then you can't get much in-game money for doing that level. Plus, special extra levels are unlocked with in-game money. And special character add-ons are also unlocked with in-game money.

Thus setting up the grind. A grind that can be alleviated by spending real money to gain in-game money. So, spending real money gives you instant access to the special moves to clear levels without playing the game, as well as special add-ons to make the game easier, and so on and so forth. That way, a casual can spend money to have instant - though unearned - progress*, and thus can casually complete the game without having to casually play the game. Or they can grind away doing the same levels over and over to get the in-game money the long way. Either way they choose to progress, though, they're just filling time with a game designed to barely need their attention at all. Vector is built not to be a game, but simply to fill time (and extract money). It's cotton candy entertainment, not a game.

Now, if that's the kind of thing you're into, I'm not going to stop you from playing Vector and enjoying your entertainment. But when the mentality that made Vector leaks out of its i-phone niche zone and into RPGs and other games, then you and I have got a problem.


*Okay, some of my other bias leaked in.

 

Pifffffft. There is no way I can answer this without driving this thread off a cliff. To be as brief as possible:

-You mixed Casual Game Design, Monetization models and Grinding into the same pool of ideas. Each of these can have their own threads to properly argue about. While they do intersect at points this is not rule. Tribes Ascend had a bad monetization model but was in no way a casual game and there are a metric ton of Asian games that are grindcore and as far away from casual as possible.

Beyond it's abstract value, art also has a societal role. The reason art exists from the perspective of society is for experiencing different emotions. A person pays a sum of money to the artist and in return he expects a mood change. Some people are very specific about the emotion they want to experience (I want to see a comedy movie because I want to laugh today) while others want to be surprised (I want to play the latest game by X designer because I know that he can be very interesting). My point is that satisfying a "time-filler" demand in gaming is more of a quality debate rather than an ontological one. (Nobody is arguing that Michael Bay or Judd Apatow haven't made movies....they argue about the quality of said movies).