Average age of gamers rising. Average complexity of games dropping. huh?

[SammyKhalifa]

I fundamentally disagree on 'complexity is dropping'.

I play a lot of sports sims -- and it's precisely the opposite. The wonder of the old strat-o-matic board games has gone digital --- between OOTP and DMB, it's truly the golden age of sports sim complexity.

While more historical/strategy titles than 4x games - there's also Paradox's stable of games, which get ever more complex.

So far as complexity declining -- I think Civ is the exception, not the rule... more to their discredit, IMO.

People always want to think things were better/more interesting/etc. "back in the day" and "when I was a boy." Romanticizing the past will never go out of style.

This "they don't make them like they used to" thinking is nothing new. I remember by grandfather saying that about cars. Never mind that you had to throw your vehicle away at 50000 miles or that they got 15 mpg or that if you were in accident you would certainly die . . .

 

[Iranon]

Yes, but other people are equally quick to dismiss valid complaints as nostalgia. There may well have been different sins.

E.g, a good 10 years ago many games went 3d before the developers could do this well... they often made horrible gameplay concessions for the switch, looked bad then (at least to me) and haven't aged well at all.

Today, many feature deliberately inelegant and fundamentally flawed gameplay if it's expected that customers will have trouble accepting the real thing - Sid Meier's GDC speech is a good example. They often also take too much care to avoid frustration, at the expense of legitimate challenges and depth.

Yes, niche and independent developers make some wonderful games today, and many look and play better than the oldies... but I think it would be a shame if the mainstream game industry ceased to produce anything but the equivalent of summer blockbusters (while slowly losing ground to mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows and reality tv).