Have gamers developed A.D.D?

I'd say a big part of it is the sheer number of games the typical PC gamer has in his library nowadays compared to the 80's-2000's.

With the ease of purchasing titles on Steam and other online distributors the hardcore gamer will have hundreds of games in his library. It's really impossible for the average gamer to complete every game they purchase.

I probably have over 200 games on my hard drive right now. This is a mind blowing number if you think about it. Growing up I probably never had more than a handful of games installed on my computer at a time.
 
spindoctor said:
Two contributing factors.... one is real life and it's responsibilities. I personally had the time to spend 50-100 hours on games 10 years ago, but not anymore. I still do it, once in a while, but I am definitely in a place where I now prefer shorter games over longer ones. My time is a lot more valuable to me now. The other reason I would say is that we are completely spoiled for choice these days. With places like gog.com, Steam sales with insanely discounted games, quick price drops on new releases plus the huge rise in the number of high profile games coming out (especially if you are a multiplatform gamer), it's come to the point where I (along with many others I'm sure) have got unmanageable backlogs. This means that if there is some game that doesn't manage to completely catch my attention, I'll just end up moving on to the next one on my list in the hope of a better experience.
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+1
i def. agree,with the amount of steam sales i find myself purchasing more than i can handle. my ratio of beaten/unplayed is very bad.
 
The multiplayer games are even worse.

There's nothing like Tribes, the Counter-strike deathmatch model has been beaten to death and nowhere near come close to the proper feel/timing (the BF/CoD games are slower and gimmicky), there are very few user mods for most games,

People play safe-ass MMOs.

Games are made for carebears now. Could you imagine handing someone the controls card for Mechwarrior 2 now? They would shit their pants. Modern Warfare players would have an aneurysm. No one will put in any effort because they don't have to and thus they slop from game to game looking for something that provides any kind of engaging gameplay or story.
 
The reason why I tend to not finish the games I buy is that most are not worth finishing. What is a game worth finishing? A game that gets better as it goes along and isn't just the same thing over and over and over.
 
All the people who are saying that games are shit these days need to go back and play these old games that they look at with rose-colored glasses and compare to something modern. I feel that it isn't so much that modern games are shit, but that many modern games use the same gaming formula that has been around for quite a while, and so players are used to them and get bored easily. I think too that it is a generational thing, with kids/20-somethings having grown up with an instant gratification mentality that carries over into their gaming.

Modern shooters are very well made. I think people are forgetting all the crappy clone shooters that were out back in the heyday when FEAR, HL2, DOOM etc were new. There will always be the top games and the crap games. In this day and age there is a lot of money to be made in the video game industry, and more people than ever that are involved in it. This simply causes more games to be made, some are good some not. At least with mega companies like Steam existing, you can get these games for dirt cheap instead of the 50+ you used to pay for these lesser games.

I like that games are shorter these days. Back in the day I used to finish all shooters that I bought, but struggled with RPG type games due to length. For example, the spellforce series. Each campaign boasted over 90 hours of gameplay! I never did nor will I ever have that kind of time to dedicate to a single game. MMOs are not too different, I like them a lot, but tend to play them very casually and sporatically when my friends are playing.

I think it is not so much that games can cause ADD but that ADD has grown as a 'solution' to so many different social and mental issues that one could label it as a cause for damn near anything.
 
This is an Easy one..


We are Spoiled Rotten..


We have so many cheap games of good quality that you can easily build a library of over 20 games in a short amount of time (or more).

I think about spoiled children and its the same..

Get a new toy, its fun for a week.. and then its all about wanting a different toy - who cares about the one they just got..


If you could only have 1 or 2 games in your library for the year, i bet you would play that game to death..

I look at my PC for example and i have a 720Gb HDD dedicated to nothing but game installs and it is full. It makes me sick how spoiled we are :)
 
There have been a lot of good responses to why my 'games are shit' hit home with a lot of gamers. I want to expand on two trends that really bother me with games: lack of end content and the destruction of original titles.

I know every single one of you have played a game in which once you get into the later chapters the game falls apart. Either the content is just thrown together, choices are more limited,character development stops, or just a proper lack of ending. Most recently I felt this way about the witcher 2. The last chapter was terrible. It comes down to a lack of pacing, and lack of proper time devoted by the development team to the latter parts of games.

Another issue I have, and this is being alleviated somewhat by the insurgance of indie developers is lack of solid original IP's. I blame the big game companies buying out the smaller rivals for this: fuck you very much EA. I would love to have proper sequals of dungeon keeper or sacrifice. Most of the titles put out by the large corps are just money grabs or so dumbed down for the console kids that they loose any semblance of what was good about them in the first place.
 
Destruction of original titles is something I've mentioned a few times before, it's something that bothers me.

Taking previously fantastic games/franchises and carrying them on but consolizing them or dumbing them down in general for the casual crowd is a real pet peeve of mine. I'd much prefer they simply leave these old franchises alone either for good, leaving our memories intact, or waiting until someone can do a "proper" remake which doesn't piss all over the IP.
 
InternationalHat said:
The multiplayer games are even worse.
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Bull-fucking-shit. Remember what multiplayer gaming used to be?

Grab another controller and hit start.

There are so many MP options nowadays, it's never been better and it probably hasn't peaked. If I want a MP Shooter? Grab CS 1.6, or maybe CS:S, how about Team Fortress 2 for free? Like fast paced shooting? Go get any of the COD games, or maybe Quake Live for free. Want a Dota style game? Get DoTA! or Maybe LoL or HoN! And soon we'll have Dota 2! Wanna see puppets have sex? Yes there's even a game for that, it's called Second Life.

Multiplayer gaming has NEVER been better. NEVER. And you can still play all those games that you think are better than anything that's out today. Nothing is stopping you.

H-street said:
We are Spoiled Rotten..
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That's it to a T. Gaming has absolutely never ever ever been better. There's something for everyone. There's a freakin system that caters to your grandparents for gods sake. There are even sites that cater on selling classic content to those who can't break out of nostalgia. There are billions of sites for the casual gamers who just want to waste some time at work. Hardcore gamers have it made, there are more titles out there than ever fighting for their dollar and time. More options than ever. And if you can't find something you can enjoy, that's only your fault.

You people are just spoiled.
 
Standpoint said:
All the people who are saying that games are shit these days need to go back and play these old games that they look at with rose-colored glasses and compare to something modern. I feel that it isn't so much that modern games are shit, but that many modern games use the same gaming formula that has been around for quite a while, and so players are used to them and get bored easily.
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I've been playing a few older games and they're still as good as I remember and far better than most of the junk that's released now. Thief and TA may have bad graphics but I still have more fun with them than any recent FPS.

My thoughts:

For FPS:
Many of the games feel far too linear to me. Back in the Doom,Quake,Thief, etc. days you had linear levels but you'd have multiple ways to get through them or to complete your objective. Games like CoD, Portal 2, Crysis 2, etc. pretty much just throw you on a rail for the entire game. Nothing ever really changes so there's little reason to play through them more than once or to even finish them in the first place.

For MMO:
Everything is a WoW clone or has a horrible interface. They're also tailored to Farmville addicts.

For RTS:
Very little has changed in years and most of them feel like rock, paper, scissor simulators. I still think Total Annihilation was the peak of the genre and nothing else has really improved on it. It's the only RTS I still enjoy playing.

For RPG:
They seem to be slanting more towards action and the story is taking a toll on character development. You're basically being told where to go and are shown a cutscene of what your character is doing/thinking so the imagination - a big part of role playing - has been removed.

I think other factors are a lack of challenge, the fact that most developers are killing modding and custom maps, and the fact that if you don't like a game you can pick another one up on Steam for $5. Things like that hurt the community and turn a game into a "throw away" commodity.
 
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We already wasted our money. We don't need to also waste our time when there are other things that are more fun to do/play...
 
I finish the games I buy. I think out of ~200 games, I've only given up on 5% of them.

I also don't get the argument about 40+ hour games. They just take ... more days to beat, it isn't that you have to spend more time each day playing them.

I'd say it's more a case of developers and publishers having ADD. There are quite a few shallow and extremely derivative games out now. I think they are still balanced out by the sheer amount of good games. Keep in mind, there are way, way more games on the market now than ever before. Sometimes you have to dig through the shit to find a gem, but precious stones haven't gone down in number.
 
It seems to me that back in, say, the early 90s, there were more games that were proper events. And not just because of marketing wank like we get today courtesy of CoD etc, but because they genuinely pushed forward the state of gaming. Remember when Doom came out? There had been nothing like it before and it was a big, exciting deal. Compare that with now, when there have been any number of barely-differentiable shooters. We've all been there, done that, many times.

And then there are the gamers, who often can't decide whether they want a game that pushes the envelope, or a game that uses old-style mechanics so that those thousands of hours spent in EverQuest will somehow count towards becoming proficient in the next big MMO. And then when the game turns out to be an EQ clone, the same gamers complain that it's not innovative enough. Developers can't win, just look at the bitching about the Crysis 2 DX11 patch.

I blame internet forums ;)
 
In my case, it's hard to define. Frankly, it's very difficult for me to get into single player games anymore. Once you get hooked on the social aspect of MMOs, it's hard to go back to linear single player games again.
 
Modern games hold your hands too much. I only stick to playing older/indie/and the rarely released good pc games that are actually a challenge and aren't catered to the casual gamer.
 
the old games would never survive today. The only reason they did then was because they were way better than the few other games they would compare against. even so very few had any type of deep market penetration. that comes from consoles.
 
Maybe for some people, but my Empire Total War on Steam is telling me I have spent over 700 hours on it, Borderlands over 200. I don't even want to think about how much time I have spent torturing my sims in Sims 3. I'm a huge RPG fan and have gotten my Disgaea characters to level 873, and lets not evne go into the rest of my RPG collection. I just don't have the free time I would like to have for all the games I enjoy playing.

Then you end up with games like Dragon Age 2, FF12, and FF13 that I just never feel an interest in finishing.

In most cases I feel some games like the most recent FPS games just aren't long enough. I have a lot of reservations about paying $60 dollars for a SP game that will only last me about 4 to 6 hours. If I play MP, then it is a game best built for it like Battlefield 2, Bad Company 2, or Battlefield 3 (can't wait!).

I do have to admit, that my console gaming on my PS3 used to make me wonder why I even bought the consoles. Well, until I got my hands on the Sega Genesis Collection and Shining Force 1 & 2, Shining in the Darkness, and Phantasy Star 2 through 4. I spend all my time on my PC, SNES, and PS2.
 
Actually I completely disagree on the "games are sh&t" these days comments. I would argue that games have gotten so much better and are so much more available that there's no reason to continue playing a sub par game - you can just move on to the next great thing.

How many people here have a backlog of games? I do. I still finish games, but not the bad ones - why waste my time if I'm not having fun anymore? I've got a backlog of good $7 games I picked up on steam sales...

I think of the games I used to play on my NES, and how many hours I put into beating them, and those games were complete garbage. If you played a game like Kid Icarus, or Ghosts and goblins, or battletoads (I beat all of them btw) - you'd turn the game off in 30 seconds and say "wow what a piece of crap" You all just didn't have any other choice 20 years ago because you only had a sega OR a NES, and cartridges were expensive. (yes $49.99 back then was way more money than $60 today - think about it, gas was less than a $1 then...)

So ya - we buy more games, some of them won't be beaten - just the way it's gonna be, and probably nothing to fix...
 
Thanks for the great posts. I too feel the same as many here have posted. I wish we had more engaging games.;)
 
Portal and Amnesia are two of the best games in the last 5 years for me. But I don't think that they can be reproduced in sequals. Part of the excitement was the "new" factor. There was a review recently about portal 2 and the author said while it was good fun and even game of the year quality it still wasn't as good as portal, mostly because the idea of portal will never be "new" again.
 
Im going to tag along with the spoiled gamer line of thought. Gaming hasnever been betterin every aspect of the games themselves. ADD to me is nothing more then when children/adults get used to instant satisfaction and only want that. If instant satisfaction isn't achieved in games these days then the game is failure.

In my honest opinion developers need to come out and support their content more often. Putting ungrateful customers in their place for not receiving some made up expectation they placed on a game needs to be squashed.

I do have to say the gaming community is good for putting developers in their place when they act like assbags like the recent comments made by cryteck.
 
Heavy visual entertainment gets old. Yes you can get bored of video games in general after a while.

Nothing will generally live up to the "awesomeness" of your first action RPG (Diablo 2) or your first mmo (Everquest). Or your first true FPS (Half life + TFC). Or your first epic console adventure (Zelda: Orcania , Super Mario 64).

The first experience with these types of things are generally going to be your best. After a while you realize you're doing the same shit with a slightly different catch.

You don't go watch Avatar, and then watch it at home and expect to get the same experience as you get in the theater, with the first inital experience buzzing the pleasure centers of your brain.

Same as switching from one MMO to another, they all feel the same eventually. It's not wierd, some people just need to move on eventaully to different hobbies until games that revolutionize a genre make you interested again.
 
Because the audience has changed into people who have neither the time nor the desire to finish their games. They don't really care whether they finish them. They are easily dissuaded from difficult games or games that are not the norm. Casual gamers, in short.
 
In my experience, this is what happened:


Younger
1. Save up money from cutting grass all summer, birthday cards, and Christmas cards.
2. Buy console and one game.
3. Play that one game until you can afford another game.
4. Months later, after I've beaten the first game multiple times, buy one new game.
5. Repeat step 4, over and over.

Result: Buy 4-5 games per year, finish them all multiple times.



Now
1. Get job, have much more spending money.
3. Decide I'm going to buy all the games I want.
4. Actually have a choice of more than one or two games to play, so start multiple games.
5. Remember I have a job and much less time to play.
6. Huge pile of unfinished games.

Result: Buy 50+ games per year, beat 15 to 20 of them.
 
I see this as a global societal problem. All people have ADD not just Gamers. Movies, music, books, apps, news, and pretty much everything has been shortened dumbed downed and handed to people in smaller and simpler bites……Because we as a species are becoming less patient and more demanding games become geared towards the instant gratification (ADD people).

Online gaming doesn’t help ADD you pop in and you’re gaming in seconds you don’t have to wait for story line or anything. Also with Online gaming most of them have no finish or no ending so you get used to just popping in and popping out without a clear start or finish.

But there is still an audience and games for people who have yet to follow the societal trends. I finished Etrain Odyssey 3 a while back and it took me 80+ hours.
 
Most people complain that games are getting too short, but I think games are too long. That's why I don't end up finishing games. I kind of lose interest. The only games I've ever finished are No One Lives Forever and Star Wars Republic Commando. Games I haven't finished? Half Life, Half Life 2, FEAR, No One Lives Forever 2, Time Shift, Bioshock, Call of Duty, Bad Company 2, Halo, and a bunch of others.

Some of those games I was on a roll and on my way to finishing and then my computer gets corrupt and I have to do a complete reinstall, losing my saves. That happened to me several times, and then I just don't feel like going all the way back through the levels I've already completed. The other things that make it difficult now are being married, have 2 children, and a job.

It's just easier to jump into an online game, play a while, and then get off.
 
Signal said:
In my experience, this is what happened:


Younger
1. Save up money from cutting grass all summer, birthday cards, and Christmas cards.
2. Buy console and one game.
3. Play that one game until you can afford another game.
4. Months later, after I've beaten the first game multiple times, buy one new game.
5. Repeat step 4, over and over.

Result: Buy 4-5 games per year, finish them all multiple times.



Now
1. Get job, have much more spending money.
3. Decide I'm going to buy all the games I want.
4. Actually have a choice of more than one or two games to play, so start multiple games.
5. Remember I have a job and much less time to play.
6. Huge pile of unfinished games.

Result: Buy 50+ games per year, beat 15 to 20 of them.
Click to expand...

This seriously is my situation. I've got so many games I haven't beat. I wish I had more free time and when I do I just wanna zone out with something that doesn't task me at all (couch , beer and TV).

Next year I'm going to ease back on my purchases and just save for a vacation. Perhaps after I take a nice long break from everything I feel that itch again.
 
All I know is that my hobby interests go in cycles, but I always return with full force.
 
No one will read this but I'ma post it anyway. For me, if I don't finish a game it's due to these reasons:

1. Didn't enjoy the game. Happens a lot. Something disappointed me or I just didn't dig it, I won't finish a game just because I have it, I'll go play something I do like.
2. Repetitive. Go here and stab this guy. Good job, now go here and stab this guy. Great, now go here and stab this guy. Uninstall.
3. Nonadjustable difficulty. Somewhat rare, but if a game is too hard and it takes me 15 tries to get to each milestone, it gets boring and frustrating. Similarly, if there's never any challenge it just feels like I'm mashing buttons and not actually doing anything. The WORST, though, and I find this one a lot... is when the difficulty changes drastically for no reason. Something like la la la I'm pew-pewing baddies in the tutorial level, this is neat. Oh hey, look at those nifty animations. Page up to zoom in, you say? Cool. Alrighty, level 1 here we come, OH LEAPING ODIN'S RAVEN I JUST DESTROYED BY THAT FROG!! I must have missed something in the tutorial about everything suddenly eating my face as soon as the game starts...
4. Linear / lack of story. I need to be immersed to finish a game. I want to dream about killing mutants. I want to go off and explore, find cool things while exploring, and be able to do side-items that have actual rewards. If I go explore and find nothing cool, it sucks (WoW) or if I can't explore at all I will get bored unless the storyline is compelling. Most storylines are stupid. "You are the descendant of SuperPwnMan and awesomeness surges in your veins." Really? That's kinda dumb. I'd rather be a farmer trying to rescue his kidnapped daughter armed with nothing but a brick.
5. No milestones. You are this character. This is your weapon. Get used to it, because that's all you get for the next 40 hours. No new moves or combos, no upgrades, no haircuts, no horse, nothing.
6. Effing puzzles. I hate them. Zelda for NES and SNES was a hack n slash good time. I think N64 was the first one with puzzles and I couldn't stand it. The whole Zelda franchise is dead to me now.
7. Glitches. Small ones are ok, and if the game is truly spectacular I can overlook the errors (ie, Fallout 2 was horribly buggy). However, awful grammar, bad programming, and an error-ridden release are enough to make a mediocre game completely fail. Heroes of Might and Magic (I think #4) was just about the worst game I ever attempted to play because it was written by someone who didn't speak English and wasn't edited by anyone. It might have been an OK game, but the frustration at reading Yoda-esque sentences wasn't worth it.
8. Length. This one is tricky. Shooters tend to be too long where RPG games can be longer without hurting anything. Portal was too short, other than that all the shooters I've played could stand to be cut down by 33%.

Now I'm just rambling.
 
What about the prevalence of the internet and MP gaming? Playing with real live people is so much more immersive (in many cases) than single player. So sure, I may screw around in SP mode for a bit, but it is really all about the MP.

Now I don't have the actual numbers so I don't know if this is the case. But I would be willing to bet that it is a significant contributor to people not finishing SP campaigns. That and what others have mentioned - gaming is becoming a mature industry. No matter what the newest FPS game's "spin" is, it is at its core the same as the hundreds or thousands that came before it. Gaming isn't new anymore thus it will be harder to keep people's interests. I don't see this as some horribly negative societal shift towards nano-second attention spans. What were we talking about again?
 
^ Truth. Dragon Age is one of the best games I've played in a while, but the addition of a co-op mode would have made it one of my top 10 games I think. MP is a must nowdays.
 
Its true, quite a lot of popular modern games aren't even worth the bandwidth to pirate. I will still buy and finish a good game though, in fact I play them to death.
I'm the type of gamer who puts 90% of his gaming time into no more than 2~3 games at a time so I can get really good at them competitively in multiplayer.
 
purefun65 said:
I understand that point. I am 46 and I feel that we aren't

in my sense challenged. It's possible that I feel I am dying breed. Possibly innovation has stagnated.
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Innovation has indeed stagnated. Instead of fresh new concepts and gameplay mechanics, and noticably improved graphics with every GPU generation with many new titles (or at least trying something different or improving the flow/story/atmosphere/etc. of the game) it feels like every third person action game plays the same. Every FPS plays like Halo or CoD it seems. Graphics have stagnated. Game length has noticably become shorter over the years. The majority of titles still run on Windows XP and DX9.0c if they even arrive on Windows to begin with. It's just more of the same and it gets booooring after a while.

What I miss most about the "glory days" was that you always heard about at least one new game coming down the pipe that was truly exciting. Fresh new franchises that didn't always get a sequel 2 or 3 years later. Something new or unique. Now it's rehashes, consolitis, and chronic sequelitis.

Tons of other great points in this thread, which I would like to elaborate or comment on, but I'm far too tired to do that right now.
 
Dirk13 said:
It's because most games these days are shit.
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QFT

Regardless of owning a high end gaming rig, recently I have found myself playing OLD games such as Freelancer, Battlezone 2, Carmageddon, Dungeon Keeper 2, Magic Carpet, Planescape.

Partly because I like the nostalgia, but it's also because many old games simply have better gameplay than most released today. Innovative titles are few and far between, casual gaming market is sky-rocketing... Intelligent PC exclusive titles are now developed entirely by independent studios. The biggest developers and publishers know their cash cow is consoles, unless this changes in some dramatic fashion, dont expect the gaming climate to change all that much except for maybe some prettier graphics when next-gen consoles are released.
 
did you manage to read all of my previous post? if not then id say you have a problem if you did then you have about the expected attention span publishers expect you to have.
 
I don't think people have developed ADD or that gamers are spoiled.

I sat down and played Fallout 3 (modded) for hours at a time for a while. It really held my attention... as did MLB 2k10 on PS3.

There's little incentive to play a game for a long time now. Games are what 4-8 hour affairs most of the time? I don't think there's anything wrong with that given the detail that goes into the environments but many of the deeper game styles are gone.

There's nothing like Homeworld, Sins of a Solar can't compare to MOO2, FPS games/stories have gotten better for the most part but a lot of things are basically remakes (system shock 2 -> bioshock), and RTS games are dying. Supcom2 isn't really an RTS like TA was. Games are a lot more pollish oriented now because the quality of games that come out is so much higher. To compete your game has to look great and I think depth gets sacrificed. I imagine the people who buy tons of games and only play them a bit are more of the target audience than people who want to get sucked into one game for a long time. There's only 1 purchase in the latter group to many in the first.

Deep games just don't get built by mainstream developers. There's not going to be a mechwarrior 2, Fallout, Oblivion, Total Annihilation, etc every year or every few months like we were used to. Unfortunately, most of the deep games that do exist are clones... another FF game, Sim City, Civ, Total War. The depth of gaming market has been split with MMO's too. A lot of gamers who want a lasting experience have gone that route.
 
I used to force myself to complete all games I had, even if they were trash. But I stopped doing that. If I don't enjoy something, I'm not going to give it much time to fix itself.
 
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