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> I cannot imagine what mechanism would drive, or what evidence would support, the average individual gamer preferring less complex games over time.

What mechanism? Maturity, expansion of interests and hobbies beyond video games, other responsibilities.

When I was a teenager, I was perfectly happy to spend many hours playing absurdly complex war strategy games and epic RPGs. Nowadays, if I'm actually going to play a video game, I better be able to pick it up and play and get some enjoyment out of it immediately without a lot of effort or thought. Dwarf Fortress looks neat and all, but I'd rather just play with my dog than spend any time on DF.

Yes, that's possible. I don't think the evidence supports it, though. I agree that likely on average, as people get older, they have less time per week to devote to gaming. Although it will be interesting to see how the first generation of gamers who retire (if they're able to...) will behave.

But the question of their tastes is separate. It is not necessarily true that less time available => preference for simpler games. You can, after all, just play a complex game over a longer time period if you have less time available.

One could get a rough idea about which hypothesis is true by making a sort of plot of game complexity vs average player age for each game. My impression is that the slope would be positive: complex games like EVE, X-series, DF, etc, do I think have very high average player ages.

Another data point is that if you look at the competitive types of games favored by people in their teens & early 20s, they are FPS games, whereas MOBAs are more popular w/ mid-late 20s people, and I think we can say MOBAs are more complex (not necessarily saying they require more or less skill, though).

I think if the data were examined it would support my thesis, but it is an open question and I was being a little hyperbolic with "I cannot imagine what mechanism..."

> but I cannot imagine what mechanism would drive, or what evidence would support, the average individual gamer preferring less complex games over time.

Lack of time is a strong driver for some gamers opting towards simpler games, or at least games whose complexity does not translate into requiring additional time for mastery/understanding. In my circle of gaming friends, as our available time is under greater pressure we've purposely moved away from games that require significant investment of time to those that perhaps retain some complexity but reward a casual time investment.

Another factor I've seen that affects is the demand of contiguous blocks of time to game properly. Some games do not permit breaking up game sessions arbitrarily, so while one might have ample leisure time, there might be multiple interruptions in between which make playing certain games impossible or a burden.

> In my circle of gaming friends, as our available time is under greater pressure we've purposely moved away from games that require significant investment of time

The last game I seriously played was EVE. I remember I moved to that and stuck with it for a while because I made a decision that I would only play games where I enjoyed playing the game (as opposed to not enjoying play but what the designers rewarded me with as a result).

How do you play eve in a relaxing way without putting much time into learning and developing complex excel sheets?

Exactly my problem. I love complex games, but I have short batches of time, mostly without full energy, and undetermined amounts of breaks between them. A full fortress mode DF is too much for that. Even if the learning itself is considered fun, it's just not possible due to the long breaks between sessions.

And it's not true that it is impossible to deliver content in that way. Even stuff like language learning is possible to put into waiting-5-minutes-for-bus sessions on the mobile phone.

Last but not least, there are games that can deliver on that. CK2 is somewhat playable, droppable, and still fun. You also _can_ choose to put additional hours and energy in it to make it more complex and more fun. But simple is possible as well. E.g., only now, after maybe 4 years of owning the game, and about 116 hours logged in Steam, I _start_ to learn about the Papacy and using religion to my advantage. Until now it was just like a random event, something that happened on the side but I didn't have to bother with too much.

I was thinking that OP is wrong and ignoring the existence of multiple types of gamers, but your analysis is much better thought-out and very insightful.

It can sometimes be difficult to remind that the games market is still strongly growing and that it'll be a generation or two more until it settles into more clear shape.