Basically
By seeing this funny picture on the internet I couldn’t help but think about something Roberta Williams said more than 10 years ago:
Back when I got started, which sounds like ancient history, back then the demographics of people who were into computer games, was totally different, in my opinion, than they are today. Back then, computers were more expensive, which made them more exclusive to people who were maybe at a certain income level, or education level. So the people that played computer games 15 years ago were that type of person. They probably didn’t watch television as much, and the instant gratification era hadn’t quite grown the way it has lately. I think in the last 5 or 6 years, the demographics have really changed, now this is my opinion, because computers are less expensive so more people can afford them. More "average" people now feel they should own one.
Which is a good thing. For some people it might feel like a loss of power but technology needs to spread out over the world to really make a difference and spread the computer entertainment as another source of joy along with music movies books and tv.
The problem was not about more people accessing computers and consoles. The problem was that for economical and technology reasons since the 90s, the game industry suffered extreme genre-ification. Which was also ok on the social aspect of games because people love to put things in boxes (think music styles). The genre-ification pushed certain game design rules that are always the same since then, just getting better at maintaining the player in the game. The graphic sausage fest did the rest to keep eyes off the fact that we can do something more compelling than just a dumb car simulator or a dumb war simulator. For the 1000th time.
Interestingly though, since more than ten years consumers, gamers are getting more and more confident with interfaces, menus and interactiveness: WoW, Internet, Facebook, Nintendo DS, smartphones, you name it.
So saying that people need simplicity because the majority of them are dumb and bored people with boring jobs is not only disrespectful, it’s simply not true. People are getting better at everything, all the time.
People like to learn, it’s a core part of the brain, it’s the natural high we experiment since we’re starting to not poop in our pants and feeling good about it. Games are about learning, that’s where everything is going on. In the 80s early 90s games were awesome because of that, there was a huge variety of games and you had to spend some time to understand and enjoy them, would it be an adventure game on PC or a shoot’em up on console or MechWarrior II. You had to learn how it works and enjoy it. The time to learn didn’t matter, it could be fast with an arcade game or awfully long with a flight simulator but you were always learning something on your own. The only problem with these games was that penalties were usually not cool (die all the time). But that’s not why we were playing these games over and over, trying new things, experimenting. It was because they were open to you to express your smart ass on how to solve this problem in the game would it be a puzzle a boss battle etc
Today’s big games don’t want you to learn. They want you to “have fun” and control it tightly (linearity and achievements). But having fun is after the learning part, it’s when you feel that you groked enough to be able to look back and think “yeah, this is fun” right? It means you understood. For me that’s why so many games feel shallow. You don’t learn on your own you’re now at school, waiting for grades and told that you cannot run in the hallway. How lame.
I regret that you can’t learn to get better at a game by understanding concepts or paradigms by simply entering a new world after launching it. These days, it’s so rare.
It works, it worked. But also I’m sure it would work because people are not stupid. More in the next post.