Jurassic Park (Arcade)

[bVork]

I think it's equally as fair to say that such gamers don't value any game which demands or encourages the development of skill.

"Games are supposed to be fun, not a job."

2014. Start game > options "easiest" > plow through to credits > post opinion on Twitter > shelve game forever. Eat and excrete.

I don't think that has ever been the mainstream belief, but rather the belief of lazy games journalists that they have tried to and ultimately failed to propagate in order to make their jobs easier. Hard games aren't for everyone, but I don't think the audience for them has gone away. Look at DOTA 2, one of the most popular games on the planet: high learning curve and an equally high skill ceiling. Or look at Dark Souls, for the obvious go-to answer.

This comment, found on Eurogamer's review of Volgarr the Viking, says it better than I can:

It's weird that throughout the '00s this sort of challenge was seen as typical of a Dark Age of gaming, out of which there was widespread relief we had progressed. From same-screen checkpoints to regenerating health, a whole panoply of cures were discovered for the great gaming ailment: frustration.

How frustrating to not instantly get what we wanted! To have to see the same level more than once! Frustration in games is a real thing, I'm not trying to deny it exists, but somehow a whole industry still managed to flourish, rather than spiralling into terminal decline, while we were grimacing our way through the three Ms of gaming difficulty: Megaman, Maximo and.. er.. Mgradius.

Back in the noughties, phrases like 'trial and error' were routinely deployed in op-eds to inveigh against the sorry past; 'quality of life' to depict the Whigsian march towards a better, less frustrating tomorrow. Dara Ó Briain was wheeled out now and then to demand developers provide us with chapter select menus, the better to give us (as consumers with Consumer Rights) access to the content we had paid for; you know, like that other life-enriching, ultra-modern technology, the DVD.

It's funny then that after a scant few years into this great new future of accessible gaming, critics seem to have been afflicted with a terrible ennui. The penny seems to have dropped that games now all but play themselves, and the thrills that most offer come not from the intrinsic satisfaction of having risen to a challenge, but the extrinsic food-pellets of meted-out, sub-Hollywood-quality cutscenery, and a collection of unlockable tchotchkes for their arsenal of murder-rifles.

Ok, so they were a few years behind the rest of us, but it's good to see the press is now recognising the reality of the gaming landscape with the cold sobriety that only a Mountain Dew hangover can provide. Challenge is back in vogue. Dan is right that hard games aren't for everyone, but easy games aren't for everyone either, and for a long while the dominant philosophy demanded everything defer to the lowest common denominator.

Just one request. Please. Stop comparing every and any difficult game to Dark Souls. I know it's a useful short-hand. I know it was the first hard game in a few years to catch the public mood. But it wasn't the first hard game EVER. Difficult as it is to keep track of gaming's labyrinthine web of ancestry and influence, it'll be all but impossible if people start actively re- and overwriting it for the sake of conveniences. And that's a challenge I don't think anybody needs.

[dog$]

There's really no good way for a response and dialog to go forward from that without purely invoking anecdotes. I feel like there's more evidence to support a stance of challenge being eschewed than embraced, but there's no good way to prove it, so that becomes moot.

But I do have to ask how many people to which the label "modern mainstream gamer" apply are active DOTA players.

Meanwhile, there's also the contradiction of what those kind of people say about games not being jobs, in that there's likely a majority of them who do undertake droll job-like grinding in terms of RPG leveling or collecting or loot hunting, as well as those who play any kind of game which is described as a "simulator" of any kind (at least those which are F2P mobile/web based); i.e., tasks whose only challenge is how much time you want to spend doing them. It seems that a job isn't a job if it's easy... which goes back to what I had originally stated.

[YellerDog]

Minecraft is for the career-oriented widget maker.

[dog$]

Five years from now (if not sooner), I'm going to need to have a regiment of eye drops at the ready as I read Top 100 All Time lists put Minecraft in the top 10, ultimately for no other reason than because "you can do whatever the hell you want".

Skill? Challenge? That shit just reeks of effort. Meanwhile, my YT vid of this penis monument I made just hit 100K views. Click on the donate button, please.

[bVork]

You're being Hero. Don't be Hero. The only contradiction is in what YOU believe about other gamers: that you think they all go "Games are supposed to be fun, not a job." As you said yourself, the job-like nature of a lot of games already makes that idea moot.

There are half a million DOTA 2 players. Playing right now. At this very instant. Which is far fewer than the total number of concurrent players, which in turn is a fraction of the total number of players (8 million, from what I can tell), which is a fraction of the playerbase of the similarly skill-based League of Legends (67 million).

Meanwhile, a Creeper just blew up your penis statue and you. Have fun recovering what's left of your base and trying to rebuild the electromechanical shipping mechanism that took you 4 hours to design and 2 hours to create.

[YellerDog]

Except nobody does that because they just turn monsters off.

[Diff-chan]

Minecraft is not really a videogame any more than Legos are.

[YellerDog]

I don't think that disqualifies it from being a video game, though. That just makes it a 'lego type videogame'. (The exploration element is still kinda fun the first time you pick it up.)

[dog$]

You're being Hero. Don't be Hero.

Spit in my face, why don't you.

The only contradiction is in what YOU believe about other gamers

My post was making a broad stroke interpretation of the mentality of the "modern mainstream gamer", which itself is a broad stroke stereotype and a phrase vague enough to potentially mean practically anything - at least anything which doesn't align with a niche opinion. I think it's fair to say that "challenging games are fun" is currently a niche opinion.

Can we agree on this much at least?

Come to think of it, probably not, as then that calls into question what makes something challenging. Hm. Looks like I lose on this one. Damn.

[Mzo]

My feeling is that gaming used to be a niche hobby in general, and seeking it out and making time for it was close to synonymous with being good at it.

Now that it's completely mainstream there are people who own consoles and games but are terrible at the act of playing said video games, unless they are AAA titles designed to funnel them through an experience and pat them on the back when they're done.