I suppose what I'm most interested in is just this simple question. But I think that more than this, what I want to know is why you feel that they're boring, or why you feel that they're more exciting now than they have been in the past.
I've been a gamer for decades now and I must say that few games really get me interested anymore. It's because of a variety of things, but I somehow feel that primarily what is missing from games is the sort of childish soul that many games have lost in the new move towards what I like to call "nitty gritty" realism and has since been replaced with something that feels objectively shallow. It's like somehow game creators have lost sight of what makes games interesting, which essentially comes along with the next point, challenge and perspective. I think for any game to really be good as a game it has to be challenging and there has to be a point where it gives you perspective about your challenge. Even when playing an old shooter, the more you played it the more you tended to think in this sort of whir of bullets (and it gave you perspective about your reactions and judgment). The problem to me then is that the whir that games once had has been replaced by a sort of silent roar, where problems tend to simply leap upon you and there's much less build-up in games than there has really ever been (assuming a discussion of progressive rather than emergent gameplay). I would say games like Fallout 3 or the recent Final Fantasies are fairly indicative of this. One might argue that these games are purely build-up and that the ultimate goal is a culmination of all your actions in these games, but it's not that you don't establish a link with that character or with that story or even with that strategy (if it's a top-down shooter or an RTS maybe), it's that the link doesn't seem as real because the obstacles feel paper thin. I think games need to be challenging in order to be enjoyable.
This is more of a personal thought, but this applies to old as well as new games. The entire good and evil divide has become a bit of a tired idea (or rather, was a tired idea from the start), yet it seems to be the idea that games are enthralled with almost preeminently. Essentially the entire idea of good and evil tends to create what I would term a non-solution, in that winning involves the failure of someone else. Yet we know that there are many games that can easily make this process or idea fuzzy. Victory in general is a fuzzy idea, as MMOs so generously show us with their "neverending" war scenarios. If stories are to progress further than they have in the past, starting someplace other than a battlefield might be a good way to go. At least, establishing motivation might be more understandable if we could get a character that actually responds to their past in some sense, instead of seemingly coming out of their situation with no real physical or emotional reaction at all.
Is all of this known already? Yeah, I would say it's pretty likely, but I'm curious as to other thoughts on this argument.
I've been a gamer for decades now and I must say that few games really get me interested anymore. It's because of a variety of things, but I somehow feel that primarily what is missing from games is the sort of childish soul that many games have lost in the new move towards what I like to call "nitty gritty" realism and has since been replaced with something that feels objectively shallow. It's like somehow game creators have lost sight of what makes games interesting, which essentially comes along with the next point, challenge and perspective. I think for any game to really be good as a game it has to be challenging and there has to be a point where it gives you perspective about your challenge. Even when playing an old shooter, the more you played it the more you tended to think in this sort of whir of bullets (and it gave you perspective about your reactions and judgment). The problem to me then is that the whir that games once had has been replaced by a sort of silent roar, where problems tend to simply leap upon you and there's much less build-up in games than there has really ever been (assuming a discussion of progressive rather than emergent gameplay). I would say games like Fallout 3 or the recent Final Fantasies are fairly indicative of this. One might argue that these games are purely build-up and that the ultimate goal is a culmination of all your actions in these games, but it's not that you don't establish a link with that character or with that story or even with that strategy (if it's a top-down shooter or an RTS maybe), it's that the link doesn't seem as real because the obstacles feel paper thin. I think games need to be challenging in order to be enjoyable.
This is more of a personal thought, but this applies to old as well as new games. The entire good and evil divide has become a bit of a tired idea (or rather, was a tired idea from the start), yet it seems to be the idea that games are enthralled with almost preeminently. Essentially the entire idea of good and evil tends to create what I would term a non-solution, in that winning involves the failure of someone else. Yet we know that there are many games that can easily make this process or idea fuzzy. Victory in general is a fuzzy idea, as MMOs so generously show us with their "neverending" war scenarios. If stories are to progress further than they have in the past, starting someplace other than a battlefield might be a good way to go. At least, establishing motivation might be more understandable if we could get a character that actually responds to their past in some sense, instead of seemingly coming out of their situation with no real physical or emotional reaction at all.
Is all of this known already? Yeah, I would say it's pretty likely, but I'm curious as to other thoughts on this argument.
