Comment by ebrenes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ebrenes | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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.

> 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?

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