An Open Letter to Video-Game Creators: We're Getting Older, But We Still Have Money

[seawasp]

I've been playing videogames of various types since, oh, 1977 or so when I first went to an arcade (the game that I loved most back then was "Space War") and when I played the text-game "Adventure". I played games on my old Atari computers, with notable entries being Dungeon Master and Sundog. As a player of real RPGs for many years (also since '77) I was pretty doubtful of the worth of "console RPGs", but because I did play things like Street Fighter occasionally, we got as a gag wedding gift a Super Nintendo station... and we decided to order this new game, Chrono Trigger, because the art was by Akira Toriyama, the creator of DBZ. After getting it I decided there was no point in having bought the game if I didn't at least TRY it and sat down and turned it on at about 8pm.

Sometime later, I noticed THE SUN WAS COMING UP. And I knew I was hooked.

I've spent quite a bit of money on games in the years since, having upgraded to different systems (the most recent being a PS3 and the Wii) and bought many games for both. As a professional man with a good-sized family, I and my family represent the best kind of market for videogame products.

But.

There's a lot of popular games out that I would really LIKE to play, but I can't. Because I have neither the almost unlimited hours of time to practice from my youth, nor the reflexes and, at times, eyesight. For example, I got the game inFAMOUS as part of the "Welcome Back" freebies for the recent PS Network debacle (and I appreciate the gesture). But I found that the game, which offered an interesting potential plotline, was swiftly becoming unplayable because it required a speed of reaction, nicety of timing, and sometimes quickness of perception that at nearly 50 I no longer HAVE. I can't afford to spend many hours trying to get past an individual jump-and-grab challenge (something that defeated me early on in playing the most recent Tomb Raider. The very interesting and well-done first Spider-Man game (from the first movie) was an excellent game but I got stuck not all that far in -- not because I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do, but because after dozens of tries I still couldn't complete the required sequence of actions.

This is worse, of course, in the FPS's. Partly that's because the younger crowd HAS usually spent those hundreds of hours training, and most of them seem constitutionally UNABLE to give a newcomer a break, so someone like me simply won't play them, but also because even the automated stuff usually assumes that I have about half the reaction time that I do at my age.

There are also elements of some games, both action and RPG, which include puzzle solving that can become very frustrating if you don't "get" the trick. Yes, you can find an online walkthrough, but that rather breaks the flow of the game.

I think it would be well for the companies to think about this. There are numerous ways to add fairly simple options to get around this -- the ability to slow down the action, the ability to say "Assume I solve this Puzzle", and so on. I cannot imagine such things are particularly hard to program, since solving a puzzle has to be essentially setting a flag properly, and the speed of a game is already set and controlled internally. Adding a Geezer Mode or a Story Mode rather than Action Mode would make a lot of games playable (and thus worth buying!) which currently aren't, and wouldn't make the games any less entertaining for those who didn't want to USE those modes.

There are other specific things I'd like to see in video games -- a lot of them, actually, and perhaps I'll write other posts on those. But this is a sort of global issue. The original generations of gamers are aging, but we're still gamers. You still want our money.  We still want to play. We still even want to play fast moving combat games and action-adventures, we're just not QUITE as fast moving as we used to be. Make it possible

Comments

[kengr]

That sort of thing is why I never got into that sort of gaming. I *never* had the reflexes necessary to enjoy them. Nor was I going to spend endless hours trying to acquire them.

And while I enjoyed some of the early adventure games, they got really frustrating too, because they were too rigid. If you didn't happen to "think right" you couldn't get past certain points (I recall one Scott Adams adventure that folks in our house only managed to solve because of a programming error.

At one point there was some lava to deal with and the required command to get past it was "dam lava". The error was that if you tried to curse at something and used "damn" the program responded "don't know how to LAVN".

That had us going "Huh?" and then we went "Wait a sec, do you suppose it's got a keyword of 'dam' for the Lava?". And sure enough, it worked.

Puzzle creators, especially for games that are essentially sequences of puzzles, need to remember that not everyone thinks alike. It may be harder to design, but having multiple routes to any point, with very different sorts of puzzles/challenges would make things playable by more people.

Heck, trying to work the alternate routes later would give extended playability. After all, if you have a *choice* between winning a riddling contest with a boatman to get across a river or timing the swing vines right, then you can try the easier one for the first run thru and try the more difficult one when you have time and are in the mood.

[seawasp]

Alternate routes and other related stuff are a WHOLE 'nother post. I have clear ideas on what should be done in videogames these days, and isn't.

[amberdine.livejournal.com]

I have never had the coordination to be good at twitchy video games... and I lived across the street from an arcade in the 80s! So I've been aware of this issue for quite a few years. The PS3 is particularly bad.

iPad/iPhone games have really come through with the easy fun. Partly because the interface kinda sucks for precise control, and the platform is not that powerful. And the devs understand their audience. I was just stunned the first few times I encountered a "skip this puzzle" button. What? You can just... SKIP IT?? Doesn't that break some cosmic law somewhere? But no, it's brilliant. A game is no fun if you're not playing it anymore.

I think a lot of "unskilled" computer gamer focus has shifted to WoW and the like. Which I have no interest in, so it makes me sad.

Dragon Age is the best modern choice, IMO, for fun gameplay not requiring a lot of coordination. And yeah, they sell a ton of copies. Why don't more companies do this? I suppose making an RPG in this era is a huge investment.

[seawasp]

Dragon Age and Oblivion, yes. Plenty of fun and no need for twitch speed; I had no trouble with Oblivion.

Of course, now they've screwed up Dragon Age II, so hopefully Skyrim won't be messed up, or both of the major good RPGs will be no more. Well, I enjoy the Persona series too, but I don't know when P5 will come out, or what platform it'll be on when it does.

[amberdine.livejournal.com]

Is DA2 that badly ruined? I only started it a week or so ago and the first few hours seemed fine. BioWare is kind of erratic with sequel quality, unfortunately.

I've been thinking about emulators and replaying stuff like Baldur's Gate. I wonder if it would be unbearably archaic...

[seawasp]

From what I understand of it, they took out some of the most important parts of it in terms of replay value: the ability to make your own characters with multiple different backgrounds. Instead they have one background story and one path.

[amberdine.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's true.

Of course, most RPGs have been like that -- same story no matter what your character is. DA2 still has nifty companion interactions, I believe. Hoping it'll still be fun! Man, those origin stories were awesome, though.

[seawasp]

"Of course, most RPGs have been like that -- same story no matter what your character is. "

Yes, well, that's another clumsy failure of modern games on which I could rant at length. There's no real excuse for many of the failings that USED to exist because you had 4 MB of space to put the entire game in, along with all of its music, etc.

[izeinwinter.livejournal.com]

The character interactions are good. Really quite good, actually. Unfortunately, they skimped rather too heavily on about everything else. The map reuse is atrocious, and the plot is quite excessively railroaded, to the extent that no matter what you elect to do, the outcome is mostly the same.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

I mostly suck at the twitch games too; always have. And when I was a teenager, arcades were almost the only venue for video games, and since I didn't have the requisite mounds of quarters to shove into the machines in order to get enough practice time to actually get the skills -- or at least to suck less -- I missed out on some crucial formative reflex-building.

It's one of the reasons I gravitated towards RPGs, once I discovered they existed: for the most part, you just had to figure out what to do, you didn't have to be able to do it in less than a twentieth of a second.

I played a few FPS games on the PC, back in the days of Doom and its ilk. I wasn't good, but I eventually became good enough to be able to play the game, at least. When consoles came out, I mostly switched to console games just because they're so much easier to get up and running; and I would still pick up the occasional FPS or other twitch game -- Halo and its sequels, and a couple of fighting games (at which I suck even more than FPS, so I don't know why I torture myself with them.)

But still I mostly stuck to RPGs. Ironically, playing Mass Effect -- a Bioware RPG with shooter-like combat -- and its sequel multiple times (I really like the ME series) turns out to have greatly improved my FPS skills; I might actually be able to get decently far into Halo now if I tried.

But yeah. On puzzles, I remember that one of the later Infocom games wanted me to solve a Tower of Hanoi -- and it wasn't even disguised as part of a story or anything; it was just a flat-out "Solve this Tower of Hanoi." So I did, at tedious length. And then they wanted me to solve it again, just to make the story advance. That was the point at which I quit that particular game.

[muirecan.livejournal.com]

There is a reason I refuse to play real time strategy games. I suck at them having to make choices in real time as it were. Give me a turn based strategy game and I can own it. ;)

This puts me in mind of Dead Space. I did ok throughout the game right up until the spot you have to defend the @#$@#^!@#$@#@#$ ship by shooting asteroids out of space with a canon as they hurtle towards the ship. I literally had to give up on the game at that point. :p Hated it. Because up until that point dead space had been fun.

Oddly Infamous I did ok with and completed when I played it. But yes it relies a bit much on good hand eye coordination. Some of the optional missions I just sucked at in that one.

::sigh::

[argonel.livejournal.com]

I did pretty well at infamous, but the race to the satellite dishes side missions got skipped after I completed the first one. I loath checkpoint racing vs an unforgiving clock.

[dak180]

Far too many games claiming to be RTSs are actually Real Time Tactical games and never really involve strategic decisions at all.

Which is one of the reasons I still play Warzone 2100 today (it went open source a while back), the other being that I demand an actual story in my games.

As for FPS I had the most fun with the original Rainbow Six which I played with a friend; I did the mission planning and oversight while he played the front man (I am another one who was never very good at the whole fast twitch thing).

I Know That One

[tamahori]

I've only gotten though a few games (like Halo) by playing on the 'I suck' level, and I wanted to see what the full plot-line was.

Other games, like the Tomb Raider series, or Prince of Persia, I've gotten though by shoulder-surfing as a flatmate that does have the skills to play games like that well, ran though them.

Now, Portal, that was a nice game that generally gives you time to think about things, and you don't need good reflexes and perfect coordination to play. I've got rotten reflexes and aim, and managed to get though both of the Portal games, which I think is a mark for them.

There are a bunch of other games out there that I've wanted to play though, but just can't because I'm just got good enough (I had several goes at Price of Persia: Sands of Time, and had to give up in the end).

-- Brett

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

This is, by and large, much of why I've been playing Pokemon lately. Hah-hah. No, seriously.

[melchar.livejournal.com]

Yeah, a story-mode would sell some games more to me. I'm much interested in story - graphics are nice, but I've never been a twitch player. I can fake it if there is a stealth skill that allows attacks - or a good sniper mode - but 'Bioshock' is about as FPS-ish as I get.

I'm glad that games I've really liked [Baldur's Gate, Torment, the various SMT games, Alpha C/Civ, most parts of Final Fantasy games] have a low twitch content. It doesn't matter if I can't manage the button pushes for Auron's overdrive ... tho I can do Tidus - and I can manage timed button pokes sometimes, but it sure helps to have a save point nearby.

A game that treats my lack of twitch skills kindly will be much more likely to end up in my game cabinet than a game - no matter how pretty - which assumes I have reflexes I lack.

[aardy.livejournal.com]

While I generally agree with what you're saying (I hate "logic" puzzles that boil down to "What has it got in its pocketssess?" and have never had adequate twitch reflexes, platform-jumping timing, etc., and generally enjoy games that let me skip past particularly tricky-evil levels), the problem with a true "story mode" for a video game (and the root of a complaint I've heard from some video game reviewers when it comes to lengthy cut scenes that are dripping with plot points) is that what you end up with is really just a $50+ movie (with what amounts to "click X to continue" whenever there'd be any, y'know, actual *game* content) that can't match the quality and enjoyment factor of the equivalent monetary value of theatrical movies that would take up the same time to sit through.

There are certainly ways to work around that problem, but they usually require that a lot of creative effort be put into crafting a story tree, creative effort that usually seems to be spent on the graphics & physics engines these days.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

The odds are that at 50 you have a lot more money than you did at 20, too.

Your ability to tell quality from crap is probably better, making you a tougher sale, but if the game company can win your approval they'll do well.

[kpreid.livejournal.com]

This sounds like a good fit for Nintendo's “Super Guide” concept — an integrated help/walkthrough/skip, roughly. So someone has thought about this market...

[arcadiagt5.livejournal.com]

Like a couple of the other posters I never had the kinesthesia and reflexes needed for many games so this resonates with me as egregiously bad design on the part of many companies.

[chuk-g.livejournal.com]

Witcher 2 is another game that has variable settings -- regular was too hard for me, one step down is easy enough that I can probably finish it unless it gets a lot harder, and there's yet another step under that. It's got a fun story to it, too, although it may be a bit grim if you like your videogames the way you like your fiction.

(Note: I haven't finished the game, so maybe it all ends well, but so far it is not all sunshine and puppydogs.)

Oh, I don't know

[robert rolland (from livejournal.com)]

Some times a nice twitch shooter makes a good relaxing change from the backstabbing, spying, having to make use of encyclopedic knowledge, cutthroat market practices and bitching about clueless fleet commanders of my usual gaming experience.

Re: Oh, I don't know

[seawasp]

What games are you playing that involve all those skills?

Re: Oh, I don't know

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

In case he never answered, that sounds an awful lot like just ne game, EVE Online...

--Dave

[rasmusb.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain.

Although even when I was young -- the bloody stupid drink/eat the fastest by hitting the b button in the Square games (for example: Chrono Trigger in the prehistoric) -- drove me around the bend. Must have genetically slow fingers or something.

[seawasp]

I only beat those by throwing my whole arm into a spasm. I can't do it any more, though.

[muirecan.livejournal.com]

Well I had to pick something to download as one of my free welcome back games. So even though I already own Infamous I went ahead and downloaded it and gave it a try again. I think on reflection that it isn't so much that infamous is a twitch game but that the aiming reticule sucks badly. Just because the @#$@#@% aiming circle is on the target doesn't mean that you can hit the stupid target in that game. I had forgotten all about that annoying aspect of play. Basically it isn't that easy to aim with the game which makes it even worse. And yes it could use an easier mode or at least have a better aiming system.

That said yes there needs to be a way for the less twitchy among us to play these games. ;)

[seawasp]

I'm confused. Why would you download a game you already had?

Yes, the aiming circle sucks to an extent, but some of it's just youth and skill versus old age and treachery. My son's munching his way through inFamous right now, and I've seen him casually take out a dozen foes in the time it would take me to kill one (and then I'd have to find a source of electricity to recharge or die)

He also, on his own, discovered that you can recharge yourself by zapping a metal object and then draining the object. "LIIIIISA! In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!!!"

[muirecan.livejournal.com]

because I didn't like any of the other games they were offering. ::shrug:: Well I did grab little big planet and I'll see if it's anything interesting.

Hmm, I never ever figured out that you can use items you have charged as a source of power. That is clever.