Friday, September 7, 2012

Are we becoming less smart day by day?

I started to wonder this a few weeks back when I was playing a modern RPG game and realized that, even if my mind was preoccupied with very different matters than the game itself, I was still very successful in slaying the monster and advancing trough the level.

Heck, all I had to do actually was to double click constantly in the left side of the screen or the monsters and from time to time on the bad guys. That if my pet companion didn't manage to take care of them by itself.

I realized the harder decision I had to take in the last hour of playing was if to wear that armor with 15 hp and no spells or the one with 10 hit points and 3 magic proprieties. Difficult choice indeed :)

The rest was just moving on the predefined path the game creator made level by level with the occasional dying and reviving in the same place just to get more items and higher level to allow me to kill more powerful monsters.

Try to remember last time you played something that actually required you to think?

I'm looking at a list of top games from last year and most of them seem to share the same attention to graphics, rendering, shadows, etc, but very few actually have a gameplay that puts player in a decision making role (more than should I kill the dragon first or clear that cave). A lot of them are just moving forward in a predefined path and killing what gets in your way, or moving to predefined locations and, again, killing bad guys there.

I remember my first contact with video games on an old 486 computer in early 90's, back then I spent half a day to figure, together with a colleague of mine, how to pass through some part of a level and find the handle to open the door. To actually finish that game you had to play days and days going back and forward trough the level to open doors, disable traps, get weapons. Even closer to year 2000 I played a lot of games where you really had to think to be able to advance to the next level. There were tens of different corridors and ways to approach a quest. We did not have any map showing us where the next character was. We had to figure this out on our own from the dialogues, or just pure exploration. I admit sometimes it was frustrating, but the joy of finally figuring it out was tremendous.

Then something happened and we started seeing less and less mind puzzling game and more "oh you handsome orc go in that forest and kill 10 goats for me!". Why, maybe because supply is controlled by demand. And probably today the demand is for games that you can play with your mind totally shutdown. Which leads me back to the question in the title of the article? Are we becoming less and less willing to put our mind to use and we do not find the qualities that lead human race where it is now (exploration, curiosity, intelligence) interesting anymore?


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

looking for an awesome game check : http://18eb9cmdk4mkjgrn2dsc8ypvel.hop.clickbank.net/ for the best flight of youre life

Rob said...

I agree entirely. I also can remember back about as far as you to the good old games with those huge manuals (such as Civ 2 or Sim Earth) that took weeks of figuring out, but were usually enjoyable during that entire process. Nowadays it does seem that game designers want to hand-hold their users the entire stretch of the way. How many games are there where you're waiting for the introduction tutorial period to wear off, but in fact the entire game is a string of 'go here, do this, great! ... now do this!'.

As far as how many games I play that don't do these things, yeah, you can count them on two hands. Apart from simulators (reason I found your blog), there's management games such as Football Manager which requires a great amount of forethought in every action (or at least, rewards all the time you put in just thinking about the game - and I've put in thousands on single game saves!), and other management games. I also think that the newer genre of games called MOBAs (such as DOTA 2 and Heroes of Newerth) actually require a vast amount of on-the-fly strategy and thinking even as action is kicking off at a usually relentless, frenetic pace. I am quite excited to see if more developers try to create these kind of games that blend action with tactics to such a degree.

Anyway - thanks for your blog, I arrived here via the article on Autogen, even though AutoTrees isn't working for me in FSX, it has led me in the right direction with the other app mentioned.

Unknown said...

Hey guys! I have recently located a tremendous leap in the flight simulation game industry. The true brilliance of it strikes me as a NEED to buy scenario. I bought this for my son a couple months back and I have never seen a more happy kid then him.
You should check it out!
http://7a8b3q4d3ew61wfsthp880hpem.hop.clickbank.net/

Rich said...

Fab Helicopter Game :) http://playhelicoptergame.org/

Private Jet Charter Rates said...

Technology is playing a vital role in our life and making our most of the job done in short time, which is actually stealing our thinking ability.