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Massive, Online, and Divided
System
Member UncommonPosts: 12,599
Massive, Online, and Divided
Red Thomas explores the state of MMOs and the seeming divide between what he likes and what some of the younger gamers seem to like. Are the Millennials ruining our games? Red walks through a few things he’s noticed while online with a few younger gamers and what differences might be there.
Comments
I kind of wish that we could get a modern game that mimics some of the older design with a mix of modern ideas and graphics. Hopefully one of these indie MMOs will be able to fill that void.
I think one difference between young gamers and old(er) ones is that young gamers are less likely to come here. They are off playing whatever, and, like their music, it's often stuff I have never heard about.
We have to be careful we don't forget that this website is a bit of an echo chamber where we oldsters talk amongst ourselves. You never see anyone say "Well I am 12 and me and my friends play _____"
If one of us comes across a game that has an undesirable feature, we come here and discuss it. I think younger gamers are much less wedded to the games they play, and if they encounter some aggravation they just shrug it off or move on.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Millenials = those born between 80 and 1999.
I'm a Millenial because I was born in 80 and came of age just before 2000.
I do realise they are on the slide show as well, but a highlighted colour box or the like would bring more players to the articles that take on MMO issues.
Insightful take on those rose tinted spectacles we are supposed to have but I do not agree with this:
"The good news is that I think this suggests the market will change over the next five to ten years, or so. As these younger gamers grow older and start looking for more complex games, the studios, flush with new talent that’s itching to build the same kinds of games, will shift towards a more balanced approach to development."
The gaming market is teen even pre-teen facing, there are always going to be new pre-teens coming along, so that demographic direction is not going to change. Teens getting older have the disadvantage of not even knowing that games can be harder or more thoughtful. They will expect more of the same, and if they expect something more thoughtful they will be seen as a rump of players which needs expectation management...just like us.
Insane that someone even has to write an article explaining that kids are kids, and they don't always want the same things boomers want. Great read though. Props to some actual writing on the site.
Took some getting used to for me for sure, especially when I was strapped for time but wanted to understand the story.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Regarding voice acting I have a different opinion; I do prefer the voice acting although there are different levels. Having a static screen like GW2 with voice only doesn't add all that much for me. Better is ESO where the character is animated and talking, and you still have the option to read fast and "space bar" through it if you want. The best voiced characters I liked was SWTOR where not only the NPC was voiced but so was my own character and they were BOTH animated in the video sequence which definitely added to my feeling of immersion in the game.
We regularly see news articles about the negative effects of modern technology. Between mobile phones and social media, we seem to be raising a generation of kids with real attention problems and a really warped view of the world. In the gaming world, you only have to look at things like looter shooters to see similar effects going on: games training kids to focus on immediate fulfilment and shallow accomplishments.
I don't know enough (and maybe not enough time has passed) about whether this generation of children will be able to get past that short attention / shallow mentality. Will they get better simply as they get older? Will they just get bored with shallow games and go searching for better games naturally, or will they just quit gaming? Will the warped view of the world remain with them?
I don't have any answers, but my gut feeling is that just waiting for the youth to get older isn't enough. I don't think they will automatically start looking for deeper, more complex forms of gaming or gaming with a more social/community focus. I think devs need to take a leap of faith and start developing those games now, and start "training" the younger generation in the joys of those types of games.
That shallow low cost to produce game model has been very profitable for game companies though so why would they destroy their good situation. It's partially the older gamers fault for crying foul about microtransactions and other monetization that was needed to sustain the MMO genre going into the future. More money was needed and when MMO game companies were experimenting with new models they pushed too far too fast and weren't innovative enough. Many devs like SOE & Trion said "Fk that ya'll paid for all our stuff before we're now gonna offer it for free for a quick buck". They could have handled it better but they were greedy and lazy. Smed & Hartsman should not be allowed within 50 feet of a Gamestop store for all the damage they did. They had gold and turned it into dirt. Older gamer response to microtransactions now still mirrors the responses from back then which makes me think that those two ____ back then caused permanent damage to the psyche of so many that it'll take just the right combination of everything to bring the herd back to pasture. I think Red is 100% right about Crowfall but they have to be smart about the monetization or the back hairs of older gamers will go up again. They should go real lite on rmt at the start then discuss with the community what is ok going forward. I also think Pantheon if ever released has a chance at being great. Those two I think are mmorpg's last hope.
New gamer;s are most certainly a different breed.I remember the days of playing Unreal Tournament and pretty much ev1 despised spammy gaming,the complaints were constant.Now fast forward and the biggest spam filled games...ARPG's are being supported and even often praised.
For myself i do not think it is a matter of old versus new,i try to look at ideals based on common sense and to me gaming is not fun if your playing mindless and taking the player out of the equation.ARPG's for example are all about gem sockets and NOT the player or very little about the player.
A game like the one used in the example Crowfall is about NON immersion,using "seasons"more akin to a TV show/series than immersed in a game world.I have a very strong feeling about what a TYPE of game should entail,example if using the letters RPG i have an idea of what the game should be like and ARPG's and Crowfall do NOT meet the criteria.
The bigger problem i have is that at one time,bad games were simply ignored,now it seems like every crappy game that hits the market can earn some decent sells because there appears to be a lot of addicted spenders.
As to old and new,i do not stand fast on ANY design,if some dev comes along and does a system design better,then GREAT.However all i am seeing is LOTS of worse system designs or in truth LESS systems overall,just very shallow game designs.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I feel that a lot of our differences are so much more pronounced because the way kids these days do things are so different that we also assume they will not enjoy what we did. My son, I tried what my mum did and he actually was reading many novels but that stopped as he grew older. I am very sad to see he does not read so much. He spends a lot of time on visual novels. He plays MMORPGs and he also has a channel where he plays old 2d games and actually has followers watching him play emulated games.
I cannot fathom the younger generation or I should in my case say 'generations'.
Good article and well written. It is a joy to read articles written by people who articulate their views so well.
I believe they read a lot less. I'm also fairly old (55) and devoured books when I was a kid and through most of my adult life. Hell, I was such a weird book nerd I had a brief period where I shoplifted books from stores and stole them from the school library. I still have the Lord of the Rings books I swiped from my high school library.
It was the same with my son, I tried to get him to read but he gravitated towards video games. Of course that was also my focus so it's not too surprising.
Most of the people I work with are younger than me (anywhere from 19 to upper 30's) and none of them read books but two or three like audio books. The two guys that are my age hate computers, which shows the divide that was normal for people of our age.
I have never heard of OSR. I searched and can't find it either. What game is it?
I think the big difference between the young and older people is older people have specific tastes and preferences. When I was a kid I played all types of games, pretty much any game I could get my hands-on. Now if a game doesn't have x, y, and z I am not interested. The same with shows, books, etc.
I don't like the games I like now because some older gamers introduced me. There are no older gamers, or not many. Those games were a natural evolution due to market demand. So you'll end up with the existing market (us) getting larger over time as the Millennials age into it. They may even come faster because we're here to introduce them to the games, and those games already exist where in our case, they had to be created.
Kid games aren't going away. I think things'll just stabilize and you'll have a more consistent spread in the semi-near future.
What most of us fail to realize is that we tend to flock around like-minded folks, so readers will find themselves in clusters of other readers. That gives a false impression of what normal is, and there's a fun intelligence experiment you can run to prove the point.
Think about really really dumb people. Folks that are just so stupid that you're amazed they can even breath. Then think about incredibly intelligent people. The sort who just seem to have an amazing grasp of everything and are just as equally amazing, but along the opposite end of the spectrum, as those amazingly dumb people. Now, do you know more of the dumb people or the smart people. Chances are pretty good that you'll know way more dumb people than you know smart people. That's not because there are more, it's because your sense of middle is wrong. You're above the curve and socialize above the curve, so you've learned that normal is one thing, but in reality, normal is several IQ points lower.
That little experiment seems trivial, but it's incredibly enlightening. Completely changed my outlook on a lot of things.
The last holdouts of hardware that isn't uniformly good enough (at least if you avoid low-end garbage) are CPUs, GPUs, RAM, SSDs, and monitors. And vendors of all of those are terrified of the day that it is good enough that hardly anyone needs to upgrade anymore.
And you could argue that for consumer uses, about the only reasons why today's $100 CPU and 8 GB of RAM probably won't be good enough a decade from now is sloppy developers. Even SATA SSDs are plenty fast enough for consumer use, and it's really just a question of how much it costs for the capacity you need. About the only things that GPUs aren't good enough for are ray-tracing and inefficient code. And other than for VR (which could use considerable further improvements), you can get monitors today that are really nice; most people just don't have them due to the cost.
So for the most part, the hardware is there, and all that's missing is for developers to put it to good use. If you're a fan of VR, ray-tracing, or game streaming, you might argue that the hardware isn't there yet. But everything else except for ray-tracing and everyone having nice monitors is going to be ready to go before we have enough Internet bandwidth for game streaming to be viable outside of some narrow niches, which will make game streaming nearly obsolete before it arrives.
So kids and teens have little reason to want to read and do not associate it with exploring new worlds, fascinating detectives, 'to the wire' thrillers and so on as we do. They associate reading with school and as they enter later life work. So I see little hope for reading in the long run, why am I not speaking this post and hearing the others? Even though reading is quicker in twenty years time I am not sure we will be typing on here.
Let's party like it is 1863!
Q: How many Iron Workers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Four. A young guy with a good back to do the work and three old guys telling him how hard it was back in the day.
I think you can apply that to MMOs as well.
Then come the focus. Take WoW for example. Races used to come with expansion and dailies were optional. Now you are required to grind dailies for character progression and to unlock new races. Say a word about it, and people look at you like you're crazy. Like wasting you life grinding dailies is acceptable.
Then there's political agenda's and activists everywhere, whereas before people would leave that crap out of the games.
Sure, we change as we get older, but the generations truly are just different. I don't think in a good way either, but I'm sure my parents and grandparents would say the same about my generation too. Suffice it to say, my tastes in MMO's hasn't changed much at all. The amount of time I'm willing to dedicate to them has though.