Tales of an Aging Gamer: We keep getting older, the games stay the same

I think that's as much because most of those games contain tons of what I'd call cynical time and money sinks. Loot boxes, RNG designed to keep you playing "enough" so force you to farm. Building weapons and armour, delays or maps, even the whole gameplay around those $$ related additions. I don't like open world games that are so tightly on rails it's almost like playing an old laserdisc game like Dragon's Lair. The first couple of Call of Duty games were very much this. So dull.

We mostly play indie titles and can spend as much time as we ever did. We spend time because it's fun. If it's designed to take time, I'll try something else. Sometimes, they'll take far more hours than the alleged AAA titles. Factorio, Shenzen or some of the recent (and very welcome) resurrection of turn based RPGs like Divinity and Pillars of Eternity have all felt far more substantial than any major titles.

Of the majors I can think of Civ and Skyrim, and if Paradox count as a major Europa Universalis. That really is about it. Of the rest, I couldn't care less. I'd prefer Skyrim to be, or at least feel, more like the depth and complexity of Morrowind.

I think we both tend to play in shorter spurts - real life shows up that bit more.

How much of that is me aging, and how much the arrival of the ability to milk revenue from every game? :)

Part of it is that games no longer challenge me like they once did. I played through Breath of the Wild and of the 100 or so puzzle shrines, only a few took more than 5 seconds to figure out their gimmick. However my girlfriend played it and would routinely get stuck for multiple hours. She is smart, but did not grow up playing games like I did. Her play style reminds me of how I played through them as a child. I have just learned all the tricks, the little hints that game developers put in to guide the player. BOTW is a well designed game, but that means it uses standard patterns to teach the player, and I am more attuned to those patterns than she is.

The other side of challenge in games is just grinding skill. Like learning all the characters in Smash Brothers and how to counter them, or improving my aim in Counter Strike. At the end of the day that is a more muscle memory based skill, and I am just not interested in sinking the time into it.

Rogue likes are the closest to the challenge I’m looking for. But even those eventually reduce to memorizing all the random events and forming a plan based on possible future events.

But then the bubble bursts. It turns out that not only am I not that competent in reality, I'm not even competent at the game that just made me feel competent. Five minutes on Twitch proves that.

So beyond a certain point it feels like a bad habit, and keeping it below that point is about as easy as eating one Dorito.

2018 - Subnautica, God of War

2017 - Horizon Zero Dawn, Prey, Sundered

2016 - Hitman 2016, Life is Strange

2015 - MGS 5, Invisible Inc

2014 - The Long Dark, Factorio

I feel like there's quite a bit of variety out there (these days more then ever), and while I've gradually dropped various genres from my list of "things I'm willing to play", there's still enough to keep it as one of my primary sources of entertainment. Roguelikes/roguelites, especially, have done well the past few years (Slay the Spire, Dead Cells, FTL, Risk of Rain, Darkest Dungeon, etc.) and provide high quality, no filler gameplay at low cost, and often in convenient time increments.

I have always loved games and been an enthusiastic gamer, but there was precious little fun to be had. My keyboard wary hands went through the motions, and I sat on my arse.

I sold off all my systems and found my mind open wide for reading again. Now, I have since discovered gog.com and it seems to be a splendourous portal for gamers of age. Casual, strategic, relaxing... It is much more my speed.

For me, I am a gamer — but my tastes rapidly and deeply changed with time. Smaller doses, more puzzling puzzles, and less comrades.

What all those games have in common is that I know them very well, it's easy to save at any point and come back later, and I can play them from my archive without looking for a physical disc.

I must have hit the jackpot then, because in my 40s, games absolutely feel to me now like they used to. They continue to excite me and some of them even still take over all my free time for a while, pushing out all my other hobbies and what little social life I have.

Do all of them? Nope, but they didn't all hit me like that back in my teens, either. Some of them are just astounding, though, and after playing one of those games I actually get a little sad that no other game is there to take me up to that same level of fun.

The most recent game for me like that was Ni No Kuno 2, which turned out to be a lot better than I expected. (I hated the combat in NNK 1 and didn't complete it, and wasn't expecting much from NNK 2.) So glad to be proven wrong there.

Other games like Uru, Fallout New Vegas, and The Witness have done the same in the past, and there's usually at least 1 each year that does it for me, if not more.

Many of the games that don't hit that level of obsession still are a ton of fun, too.

As a single data point to add to the discussion, while Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is available for sale, I chose to purchase Modern Warfare 2 instead, for me, my wife, and a few friends for below the cost of a single license for the former game. The graphics and gameplay are considerably richer, in my opinion, than PUBG and Fortnite. The graphics are comparable.

This is a staggering revelation to me. To get something dramatically better in terms of visual fidelity, I would have to purchase a game like Battlefield V. But the cost is unappealing in a global market with several industries increasing prices across the board.

I'm searching for better values in a world with increasing costs, and finding that many people are still playing these older games, in part because they're not much different than new blockbusters.

Additionally, I'd rather not pay 60 USD for what has been called at times a "beta." I'm good.

Is the study longitudinal, ie does it follow gamers as they get older?

You want to do that, because you don't want to confuse the issue of what cohort the gamer belongs to. You want to differentiate between "people like games less as they age" and "people who were born in 1980 like games less than people born in 1990".

In my own experience, once you have kids, that's it. You can't invest in any game that takes time to learn. Before kids, you could have a 2nd job healing or tanking for 3-8 hours every evening after your real life job. Or working on your shooting skills. Or watching RTS videos.

Now I can do casual gaming, which works when you're commuting, but it's not nearly the same commitment.

For christmas, I bought my kids a Switch, and I've definitely been playing it way more than them. Just finished Mario Odyssey, and it was a lot of fun, and I think I may be addicted. Getting the new Zelda later today...

I think my brain just needed the right game and some time off. 20 years did the trick.

* Arma 3 because its a sandbox and I can script my own missions etc.

* Doom reboot, purely for the nostalgia

For older games from my childhood like Half Life, Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon and Command and Conquer. I might dust them out for an hour or two but the novelty goes away quickly, maybe its because of ageing graphics or I don't remember them as I used to.

Another factor is that working on a PC all day makes its less desirable for me to then come home and sit on my home PC and play games.

The reboot situation is interesting as it gives companies a chance to make money out of an old IP and the fanbase can rekindle some of their younger days playing those games.

As an adult, I have social circles both within and outside of my job, a relationship (though she likes playing video games too), I have new hobbies, and hobbies that I can't do at work. I also have time and money to be able to go out and do new things that I couldn't do when I was younger.

As a result, when I do play, usually it is in 30 to 45 minute spurts, usually the weekend. Even then, it is usually a social thing. My siblings and I have Switches, and we have been bonding over playing online with each other (we don't live near each other), or I will play with my significant other.

The competitive one is an interesting thing. I have never been a competitive person, but I think the competitiveness drops off because off bad experiences. I completely stopped playing Magic the Gathering because of dealing with toxic players, and I played online with strangers for exactly one session, and that was soured by toxic gamers. I imagine a lot of others have had similar experiences, and that sours that sort of competition for the majority of people.

EDIT: I forgot to add, being on a computer for 8 hours a day at work also really kills my desire to stare at another screen for even more time.

- Monument Valley

- A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build

- Mini Metro

- Braid

- The Witness

- Snakebird

- Gunpoint

Meanwhile, JRPGs are there for me as the shooter market has been swallowed up by the battle royale genre and Overwatch. If anything, I'm enjoying JRPGs more now than I did when I was younger. Indie (FTL, Immortal Redneck) and Doujin (Momodora, 100% Orange Juice) games have also been coming along in a big way as well. Age of Empires 2 is there for me in the modern day on modern systems with the HD release and the expansion packs, but it and Brood War Remastered seem to be the exceptions for RTS rather than the norm. I also picked up Smash Brothers for the first time in give-or-take 15 years, and I'm having a blast. There's so much work being put in to making these games fun.

I wish shooters were as interesting as they used to be. Even relatively new stuff like Tribes Ascend was a blast; easy enough to get into, but with enough of a skill ceiling to really sink your teeth into it. If anything, getting older has just left me for a want for something other than CounterStrike and far better than battle royales and Overwatch.

I would argue that games have not stayed the same. Video games have become aggressively monetized at the expense of the consumer. Companies are now looking to exploit a small percentage of core users, "whales", hoping to get them to spend hundreds of dollars on microtransactions.

There is also a focus on "live services". Basically releasing the game as a poorly constructed product, and then slowly updating it over years and years while charging for the updates along the way. Look at the most played games right now, and you will notice very few of them are from 2018, but rather are older games that have been continually updated.

Some examples:

1. The other day I logged back into my Destiny 2 account after lapsing over the holiday seasons, and to my dismay I discover that I am now expected to pay an additional $20 on top of the $80 I have already paid total for the game.

2. So, I decide to log into a game that had launched around a year ago but was not in a state I considered acceptable, Battletech. I figured more time in the oven would make it better. BOOM. $20 season pass, otherwise I am locked out of new parts of the game.

3. So I switch over to Call of Duty Black Ops: 4, a game I had not played in a few months but thought was fun enough when I started playing. In the time between they added gameplay affecting micro-transactions AND a $20 "expansion pack" that consisted of a few levels.

4. Last year's Star Wars BattleFront 2 was LAMBASTED due to being a full-priced $60 product which monetized all progression with an absurdly expensive loot-box scheme. After people did the math they realized it could cost hundreds of dollars to acquire some of the characters in the game, and that the drops from the loot boxes heavily influenced gameplay.

Video games have become excessively monetized. Companies have realized they can make more money by making the same games over and over again. Gone is the risky, interesting "AA" games of the last generation. Now the only games are being made are extremely expensive to produce and obnoxiously monetized "AAA" games. Now that these companies have gotten a taste of the loot-box whale money, they do not want to go without it.

Take a look at the work done by Jim Sterling for a more detailed analysis.

edit, adding more thoughts:

Another thing is that they are all the same games. Low TTK shooters turned into team shooters transformed into Battle Royale games.

There is nothing like Unreal Tournament or Quake anymore. Games with interesting movement mechanics. It is all low TTK tactical shooters. Low TTK is an equalizer between low-skill and high-skill players. Even a very bad player can get a point if they sneak up on a good player.

The thing is, the mobile game industry is RAKING IN CASH and the AAA game industry wants a piece of that action. It is becoming hard to justify creating Call of Duty 5 if you can make a lame gatcha mobile game and make more money. Investors want that mobile game money so the big game companies are getting desperate chasing that dragon.

I play videogames, but I can't call myself a gamer. Maybe I was back when I had free time to practice fighting games, and played competitively. Maybe I was a gamer when I played a bunch of niche titles, regardless of genre. Maybe I was a gamer when I collected rare games and hardware. I'm certainly not a gamer now though.

I think about the decline of time I spend on gaming. A lot of it comes down to not having enough time (with a full time job and other interests I didn't have when I was younger), but I'll make time for the right game. I think the article jives with this, but I'm not sure if this is specific to gaming. It reminds me of a similar article I read on here a few years ago that talked about how after a certain age, people stop seeking out new music as well.

Then again, I've gotten deeply in chess lately...

* Shooters are more multiplayer focused now by a large margin

* Ubisoft style open world games have become a huge trend

* The RTS genre rarely sees entries anymore

* Space Fighter games are less common these days by a lot as well

EDIT: this is a response to the comments here, not the article.

But then they swapped it out for another mode yesterday and I got pissed off by the hitscan and sniper weapons(which of course are the preference of cheaters). It was a much less satisfying experience.

I've heard this about marketing other media: that it's hard to target older audiences because their tastes diverge more. Teenagers remain teenagers each year, and will reliably fall for the same scenarios and stories with a fresh coat of paint. And I don't think games are any different, in that games where you shoot things, go on a quest or adventure, solve puzzles, gain power and wealth, and compete against others have all been reliably popular in every era, in a multitude of permutations. A popular, accessible video game has to have an appropriate mix of fantasy (what you imagine you do) and reality (the actions you actually perform which should cohere with the stated fantasy). A mismatch of the two makes for incoherent gobbledegook.

So the challenge game developers face(and aren't fully aware of, since most folks trying their hand at it are still young game fans themselves) is in doing something that's actually differentiated while maintaining a compelling marketing message. If it leans too much on the usual tropes, any kind of underlying design wizardry is obscured. If it looks too "weird", it becomes hard to engage with on the level of fantasy.

After getting annoyed with Fortnite last night, I sampled a few other recent games. First I tried free-to-play "Dreadnought", in which you control a giant spaceship in slow-paced team battles. I got annoyed immediately by the opacity of the strategy: it threw a bunch of different classes of ships at me and told me to pick one and not worry, basically. The game was bulked up with systems upon systems that were clearly intended to hold my attention for the long term, but without knowing what to focus on, and not really feeling the core fantasy in what I had right in front of me, I just played it like it was homework and then stopped after about an hour. This is a very typical reaction I have to AAA experiences: they're overconfident in their ability to stall me by leaning on levels and unlocks and item loadouts and so forth, instead of communicating something about how I should start appreciating the game.

Then I went on itch.io and after browsing tried "Skitopia", a ski resort management sim. Even though it's an indie project at a proof-of-concept level of development, has almost no features and started experiencing GC thrashing after about 50 guests, I was having a good time building chairlifts and ski runs.

Indie games would be amazing if they could all just hit the mark like that, but that's the exception, of course. Most of them lose their way in trying to be mini-AAA experiences, so they both communicate nothing and do it poorly.

---------- 1. Gaming is an escapism.

That's why many people hesitate to call themselves gamers or even admit it in certain (more conservative) social settings. Thinking back, gaming was a chill activity for me only a single-digit percent of the time and now at 38 y/o I am ashamed that I didn't admit that to myself earlier. And yes, many people still view "gamers" and teenagers with no cares at all. They haven't noticed that the world changed and these teenagers now play together with their kids. And that even company CEOs have admitted to be gaming.

---------- 2. Games aren't increasing in diversity or quality.

Quite the contrary, even the big AAA studios drop the ball and start milking nostalgia -- recent releases like Fallout 76 and WoW's latest expansion Battle for Azeroth are a prime example. Them not being quality games is not an universal truth of course but if you visit any gaming forum outlet you'll quickly discover they are a very divisive topic. This wasn't true even as back as 2-3 years ago for many games (the above two included).

---------- 3. I'm glad the article debunked that your abilities start to deteriorate at your 30s.

At 38 I can still pop in a random Quake3 server and absolutely dominate the others there. Many times they teamed up 5v1 against me and still lost on total score. As you get "older" (if 30s are "being old") your abilities can even self-perfect -- my wife several times noted that when I played a game for a week and quit it and then got back to it 6 months later I was suddenly extremely good at it and better than her who played it casually for those 6 months. It's as if your brain has been periodically replaying your experience with the game and gradually perfected the schemata that makes you much more efficient at the game. Probably while you slept.

---------- 4. Aggressive monetization.

As the stable income from selling games dwindles, many businessmen imagine that they are forced to introduce microtransactions or release half-finished games and then basically make you pay for a DLC that costs as much as the original game itself for you to get the "full" game -- this isn't an undeniable fact but many feel that way about a lot of EA / Ubisoft games.

Whatever the reason, microtransactions are killing the desire of many to play. We the humans get emotionally invested in everything we do. The fact that the businesses want to prey on the sunk cost fallacy, or nostalgia, or bait-and-switch tactics, is something that even people at 20 years old now reliably detect and try to stay away from.

The customers are getting smarter and the business makes less and less effort to market / advertise their games in an appealing way. Cleavage shots or shiny costumes and mounts don't seem to be cutting it anymore -- or at least not so well as the businesses would like.

---------- 5. Our priorities change, yes.

I ain't gonna bore anyone with sob stories but I had a pretty awful life and learned helplessness is something I have to fight my every waking second (people keep telling me I do an awesome job and I honestly can't believe it and that's not a fake modesty, I really can't; many other examples abound). At certain point you just sit down and start thinking what you are doing with your life -- and time, and energy. That the popular breeds of gaming lost most of its appeal is indeed a gradual process as the article assesses it to be.

And I indeed don't care about competition, like at all. Nobody can tempt me with "you're just afraid I am gonna beat you". I just shrug and say "you're a champion, are we done with this discussion?".

Me and my wife recently chatted at length about our diminished pleasure in games and concluded that we are gonna buy a PS4 Pro and a very comfy couch and probably won't touch a multiplayer game more than a few times a year. It's just how it is. She gets a lot of calming influence from just trying to figure out the next Lara Croft puzzle or a movement sequence so the character cat get somewhere important. And watching her play sometimes, I get the same vibes.

That, and some casual and non-engaging games like Smash Bros. You can just hop in, play a bit, get out. Which brings me to my last point...

---------- 6. Games try very hard to pull you in, addict you and make you feel like they are your life.

There are plenty of gullible human beings that fall for that and they are probably the reason why many modern games even survive.

As an "older" gamer I miss the experience of starting a game, typing a nickname somewhere, joining a server, playing for how much you want, and then getting out. No central servers, no character progression, no worries that somebody paid their way to them dominating you.

Games like Half Life, Quake 2 and 3, Re-Volt and Star Wars Episode 1 Racer (two of the best racing games I ever played!), and the fighting games like Mortal Kombat were perfect for this. They had a compelling gameplay but didn't try to tie you to anything. If you wanted to play, you came back. There were no psychological tactics to make you come back for more. They already sold you the game -- whether you are gonna play 1 hour in total or waste your life in it doesn't bother them.

----------

I believe for many mature games this is the strongest factor. Stop trying to make us believe your game is our life. Make a good game. Make paying only for cosmetics or minor quality-of-life improvements. Put in good net code.

Gamers will come. You won't have to do absurd marketing campaigns all over YouTube. People will come to you by word of mouth if your game is not scummy.

But IMO gaming will have to almost die until it gets back to what made it popular and awesome in the first place.