Is There Not Enough of a Player's Imagination Involved in Games Today?

[Nz17]

I was watching the reactions of some local "kids" (teens and twenty-somethings) to the games at the arcade which recently opened in town. With one person being the sole exception, they had very little interest in what was there - and there was a good selection! Most of the young'uns preferred to just play billiards or darts. Nobody was playing Ms. Pac-Man, no one wanted to play Asteroids nor Centipede, not even just out of a, "Sure, I'll give it a shot," kind of an interest. They all had this, I don't know, mildly repelled expression on their faces.

But it wasn't just those games, it was things like Skee Ball and air hockey and foosball. "Nobody" wanted to play Dance Dance Revolution, and the small group which I saw try to play it walked away after completing only two tracks out of their three-track music set. They didn't want to learn how to play. No one was playing the FPS, the light gun games, NFL Blitz, the racing games, NBA Jam, the ticket redemption games, nothing expect Mortal Kombat II. Most people just took a "keep your distance and watch; don't try it" approach.

When I talked to some of them about the new arcade and the recently opened sports center (which has similar games), they were all nonplussed. It seemed none of them had fun nor intended to return. I was baffled. How could you not like arcade games?

Then it hit me. Modern games don't want players to "try hard," and they don't want players to fail. The arcade mentality was completely foreign to these young players. The idea that a game would want you to fail after a few minutes was something they weren't used to and didn't like. The idea that you had to practice and get good at a game to get more minutes of playtime per credit seemed to be completely without value to them. (They probably would have preferred to take the in-app-purchase approach to make the games easier by inserting more money.) There was no concept of "you had to beat the game at its own game" in their minds. And the concept of playing a game with "bad graphics and sound" where you needed to use your imagination to fill in the gaps seemed to be an insult to their expectations.

They weren't interested in setting high scores nor facing challenges. They only wanted the arcade games to behave like their home games where you get hours of non-challenging playtime regardless of your skill. That sort of gaming is busy work in my opinion - it's free of challenge, and just something to keep you occupied. And as the games weren't providing it, they saw no reason to play them. They just preferred to return home to their Xbox Ones and their PlayStation 4's or "buy a game" on their cell phones for 99 cents instead of playing a game for 50 cents. I can understand wanting to play an easy game like that to veg out to right before going to sleep, but not during the middle of the afternoon!

There was only one kid there who was interested in games from the mid-90's and earlier, particularly the Nintendo ones. Everyone else looked like they didn't know why they were there. I'm kind of concerned about the future of these game centers.

[Koa Zo]

Then it hit me. Modern games don't want players to "try hard," and they don't want players to fail. The arcade mentality was completely foreign to these young players. The idea that a game would want you to fail after a few minutes was something they weren't used to and didn't like.

Precisely.

I can't speak to the broader subject of imagination, but I think you're on to something.

My only experience with modern games and youth are the instances of an old friend and his children and then my sister's son. These kids certainly can't handle a mental challenge. Not in the least. They quit, give up, and/or throw a fit if told to persevere.

The following example is one I've looked to bring up on a gaming forum but just haven't seen the appropriate thread ,and didn't want to start my own since I don't have much background or experience to speak knowledgeably about the subject (both in terms of what modern games are like, and what modern children are like)
Anyhow, this past xmas my nephew (7 years old) got Donkey Kong Country Returns as a gift. As he tried to play it he would just make the same mistakes over and over with no realization of what he was doing wrong. But really he wasn't even concerned with giving it a chance, as after he dies two or three times he just selected the "auto-level-complete" option which does a computer controlled run through the level. So ultimately this wasn't about playing a videogame, it was about watching a videogame.
When I tried to interest him in learning to improve his skill and actually play the game he would be defensive and claim that he did beat the levels.
What a pathetic dumbing down of the youth. Lowest common denominator sells products, that's what it's all about.

[Slate]

We do have concerns but let's not sound like a bunch of "old farts" here, as well as we can. Though that's at least part in the minds of the younger kids, isn't it? if they don't know what we're talking about, that is.

I see what you mean, it does sound like they don't know what to do and imagination didn't build in them because they had no challenge. I had a nightmare like this when I was ten or eleven, I didn't really want to grow up and goofed around with a few other kids in a jacket in a Walmart; then I was ridiculed by a lot of people including my Mom (I was laughed at...) and the scene changed; I was then only packaging candy in a rather saddened state which I commented about with the other two kids.

... What does that have to do with this... Well, it's a scene of refusing to grow up.

- Austin

[Tanooki]

Modern games, many/most but not all at some form will coddle, overly train, and hand you a near penalty experience, even on harder modes such as a Call of Duty where you just even on veteran will respawn nearly where you ate it, and of course there's no armor/health, it's a pressure bar of overall damage before you keel over.

A lot of people aren't used to the less forgiving stuff from the games you said from DDR or skee ball. Even I've noticed at Chuck E Cheese which I took my kid too a week ago or two for her first time, they moved up the baskeball hoops by half the distance and did the same on the skee ball lanes to win easier, and they spit out tickets like candy for little effort compared to the 80s with CEC or Showbiz Pizzatime Theater. The arcade games aren't really about just racking points, 3 hits and you're dead stuff other than maybe a few gun titles. Racing games aren't nearly as sadist on failure.

Another thing to consider is that the stuff now in video games if it's not some hipster retro style thing, the industry shoots to try and approach that wall of realism, too much really. When you leave little left for the mind to create, it's more like an interactive movie, book, or something of similar association you're guiding with sticks and buttons. There's no imagination in it unless you're a fanboy so much you love to get into the art and fan fiction aspect of things, or even cosplay.

Take Mario circa 1986 vs circa 2016. Huge difference, which one is more likely to inspire you to imagine things, create things with your minds, associate stuff and so on...older one, the limitations forced you to think and imagine to get more sucked into the experience.

[Gameguy]

We do have concerns but let's not sound like a bunch of "old farts" here, as well as we can.

Too late, that's basically how I found the old man style rant in the beginning of the thread.

I'm kind of concerned about the future of these game centers.

Well as most of them went bankrupt and closed down about 25-30 years ago you're a bit too late, they're all dying or barely holding on. Opening a new dedicated arcade today isn't really viable. Arcades went out of style when consoles like the NES or newer came out. The only ones I really know of that still survive are part of another business like a movie theater. Here's also something else to think about, most kids who loved arcade games just forgot about them when they grew up. Video games didn't become so mainstream with adults until people thought back to NES or newer consoles that they've played as a kid.


Personally while I like plenty of arcade games and appreciate what they've accomplished, I rarely like playing them in an actual arcade setting. I don't like having to keep paying to play each time, they're just designed to suck quarters and not really to beat. I never got into DDR type games either, looking like a spaz in front of a group of strangers never appealed to me. I don't like crowds much either. I'll play arcade compilations on consoles or the PC, they're still fun but each game is maybe fun for just 10 minutes at a time. I used to play Asteroids and Battlezone all the time on my PC, but that was about 15 years ago. If I come across an arcade set to free play I'll spend some time there but I won't pay per play anymore. As for comparing modern games to classic, home computer games were always different than arcade games even back in the 70's. With text adventures or graphic adventures, or early RPGs, computer games were aimed at an older audience from the start. I'd rather play an adventure game at a leisurely pace than an arcade game, there's just not enough in most arcade games to keep me interested anymore.

[Nz17]

You all make some good points, and I thank you for the insight which your anecdote provides, Koa Zo. However I should have elaborated more about what I meant by a lack of imagination on behalf of the players of today, as I kinda got sidetracked in my first post.

So what do I mean by lack of imagination?

Take, for example, text adventure games, or as they are now known, "interactive fiction." I really liked Zork, and one of the best parts of it was the imagination you used to immerse yourself into its world. It was like an interactive book filled with action and puzzles! Yes, you are told you are outside of a white house with a picket fence and that a mailbox stands nearby, but your mind fills in all the gaps. In the power of your mind's eye, you see what the house looks like, and what the fence, the mailbox, the grass, the hills, the stream, the fields, the underground, the ravine, and more look like.

But today's gamers, they wouldn't want to play these text adventures because... they wouldn't even think of them as being video games. "Where are the graphics? Am I reading a book? Where's the action? How do I shoot things? Is this all you do?" And today's readers, like yesteryear's readers, don't have the patience for "books that you can die in" and find text adventures frustrating instead of relaxing or fun.

Or let's even jump ahead slightly to early graphical adventure games. They still had text-parser interfaces, but they began to have graphics. Things like Mystery House, and later on, King's Quest. They gave you even more of a skeleton to hang your imagination on and build out what was happening in the world and to figure out what things are, because while they had graphics, they were simple graphics due to the low processing power of the computers of then. This is where your mind filled in the gaps around that basic framework to grow the graphics into a transportative experience and grow the game itself into a grandiose adventure!

But I guarantee you, today's gamers would have a hard time trying to interpret a lot of the graphics or they'd laugh at them. They would be startled by and cringe at the sound of the music and sound effects through the PC speaker. They'd show no patience for having to figure out what to do or where to go. "Where's the tutorial? Where do I go next? How do I get there? How do I walk? How do I stop? I just died, now what? The game didn't auto-save?! Where was the last checkpoint? There's no checkpoints?!" The idea of actually needing to read the instruction manual to get the story of the game and to learn how to play it and the need to manually save are bizarre and outlandish to them. To them, when an instruction manual is provided anymore, it is only more paper in the box to ignore.

For my final point about imagination, consider the effect of the box art, manual art, or cabinet art for a game on your younger mind. Sure, the graphics within the game might be simple little things, and not even in color in the case of Asteroids or Pong, but if you look at that sweet hand-drawn and inked artwork of the impressive star ship blasting the asteroids, your mind adds up the graphics on the screen and the artwork on the cabinet, and "2 + 2 = 4 !": as you are playing, you are imagining your little triangle is a powerful star ship with cannons blasting not at polygons which have only a few sides, but at large, dangerous asteroids. Or you read the manual and looked at the artwork for Centipede and knew that you weren't just a funny shape at the bottom of the screen, you were a cape-wearing elf wielding a magic wand to protect yourself and your people from the dangerous, "gigantic" (to a small elf) spiders and centipedes living in the mushroom forest which you called your home.

Today's gamers, however, consider anything but ultra-realism to be crud. It is like the art world of centuries past which was all caught up in realism until photography emerged. But sadly, it is even worse than that, as it is that mindset combined with the mentality and impatience of a child or teenager. So I'm afraid that games will forever be caught up in the pursuit of ultra-realism even to their own peril and downfall. It is an unwinnable arms race of diminishing returns. After all, it is better to spend a crazy amount of money to craft realistic graphics instead of losing sales over having "inferior" graphics or frustrating or exhausting players by making their minds do the work and requiring patience and perseverance.

[kupomogli]

Then it hit me. Modern games don't want players to "try hard,"

Games have been like this since the beginning of last gen with the introduction of auto save two steps away at the last checkpoint.

It doesn't help that when there are games that are even the slightest bit difficult, people who are more of your mainstream gamer reads review like this garbage. Where the sh*t that the journalist is spewing is written in a way to sound like they're a fan, but it's just a way for them to connect with the reader, which then they proceed to bash the hell out of the game because the journalist is a terrible gamer and should be in a different business. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/ca...onicles-review

Anyways, between cell phone games and the gaming media having the real pull, gamers have been weened into instant gratification. It's not about the gameplay anymore, it's about getting a pat on the back for completing the story and now spend $45 for the season pass which includes 1/10th or less of the content that you've played through.

[Gameguy]

But today's gamers, they wouldn't want to play these text adventures because... they wouldn't even think of them as being video games.

I'm a bit confused by the point you're trying to make. Are you complaining about current modern games themselves, or are you complaining about the gamers of today? If you're complaining about the gamers, I don't think your examples make sense as text adventures fell out of favour with most gamers by the late 1980's, it's at least 25 years ago.

Or let's even jump ahead slightly to early graphical adventure games. They still had text-parser interfaces, but they began to have graphics. Things like Mystery House, and later on, King's Quest. They gave you even more of a skeleton to hang your imagination on and build out what was happening in the world and to figure out what things are, because while they had graphics, they were simple graphics due to the low processing power of the computers of then. This is where your mind filled in the gaps around that basic framework to grow the graphics into a transportative experience and grow the game itself into a grandiose adventure!

Again, you're focusing on events from over 25 years ago. People continued to focus on graphical advancement and just looked to the most recent games for the most impressive experience possible at the time. Very few people looked back longing for a simpler experience, nostalgia hadn't taken hold of very many people at that time. Basically, most gamers of that time period have the same mentality as gamers today. Of collectors who I've heard talk about games being better when they were more basic and relied more on imagination, they were talking about the Atari 2600 and early arcade or computer games, complaining about games NES era and newer. This is a different issue than just why most recent and current generation games are lousy. Personally I feel games reached their peak of excellence during the mid 80's through late 90's.

Seeing a single group of twenty-somethings prefer to play billiards or darts as a social activity among friends, and then jumping to the conclusion that it's because "modern gamers" don't like arcade games as a whole seems a bit out of touch. It couldn't possibly be that these people weren't into video games and were just trying to find something to do as a group social activity, one that was boring as a group experience.

There's a difference between a serious enthusiast and a general consumer, the people you're describing are general consumers. They're acting the same way as they've always been, and they're the ones we've been buying games from at yard sales for the last few decades.

[Nz17]

I'm a bit confused by the point you're trying to make.

I'm saying it's sad that most of the gamers of today don't want to play the games of yesterday, and I'm hypothesizing that this is due, at least in part, to the lack of needing much imagination to play modern games as well as not needing much in the way of honed skills to last long in modern games.

Seeing a single group of twenty-somethings prefer to play billiards or darts as a social activity among friends, and then jumping to the conclusion that it's because "modern gamers" don't like arcade games as a whole seems a bit out of touch. It couldn't possibly be that these people weren't into video games and were just trying to find something to do as a group social activity, one that was boring as a group experience.

The people that were there fell into two categories: one such as you described, and one composed of employees from the local GameStop who buy all of the latest video game releases for PS4 and XBone.