Dumbing Up Gaming. Please digg!

[cliffski]

An article by little old me:

http://www.bit-tech.net/columns/2008/05/29/dumbing-up-gaming/1

http://digg.com/gaming_news/Bit_Tech_Dumbing_Up_Gaming

[defanual]

Agreed and Dugged! Nice1 cliffski :)

[Christian]

Thanks, your are right on that article, it made my change my views, now i wont be so insecure when i try to make an intellectually challenging game.

Great article.

[WaveRider]

Personally, I like games assuming that I'm an idiot. My feeble grey matter gets enough of a beating from work. By the time I'm done coding for the day I'm ready to shut my brain off, I don't need a game trying to turn it back on again.
There was a time when I used games as an intellectual personal trainer. My favorite games growing up were of the Maniac Mansion variety.
But in these advancing years I've begun to see games as more of an end-of-day mental masseuse.

[Gary Preston]

Great idea, but do we have to assume the game needs to be massively simple in order to catch on? I'm sure a lot of biochemists play computer games, why must we assume they are incapable of learning a complex game?

On one hand dumbing down might help reach a wider audience which would be a good thing for a number crunching application/game.

But on the other side, keeping players hooked and playing for longer/more often would be pretty important if you're wanting to crunch as much data as possible over a long period of time. So in that regard, having more in-depth game play that players can learn and take advantage of would imo be more appealing.

Personally I prefer games that are easy to get into, but provide a very deep and rich experience if you look for it.

People like to be intellectually challenged. Not all of them, but unless you are Nintendo or Sony you don't have to please absolutely everyone.

I think that's pretty much spot on.

I'm a fan of flight sim games and the more involved they are, the more enjoyment I get from it. I remember it taking a few weeks of playing Falcon4:AF before I even bothered to fire a shot, all the time prior to that had been spent learning the cockpit, how to use the radar, experimenting with the flight model, recovering from deep stalls...

The game struck a good balance between accessible and in-depth. Although as a sim style game, accessible isn't exactly left mouse button only game-play ;) But you can get an arcade like experience with unlimited ammo and easy avionics/flight model.

There was a game called Hacker when I was a kid, that my dad was into. I always remember him telling me with great excitement that when you got to a certain part of the game, in France, the game spoke to you in French.

I had that game as a kid, although I never got all that far into it, I do remember enjoying playing it.

[Bad Sector]

Very good article :-). So good in fact that i got bothered to restore my account (forgot password, username, etc :-P) in order to digg it.

[AnthemAudio]

Thanks for writing this Cliff!

I wish Nintendo would stop "broadening" the entry into their games. It feels as if all my favorite games are being dumbed down so everybody and their grandma can play Mario Kart. Don't they know I'm going to hesitate before I buy another one of their games now?

[Raptisoft]

But what about those of us who want to sit down and play a quick game between tasks during the workday?

[papillon]

Proper 'broadening' should mean that there's room for all kinds. I love Mario Kart (on my DS, I don't have a Wii), I don't care if it's overly simple. It makes a great game to play against friends because we don't take it too seriously. I don't want to play RTSes.

But that doesn't mean nobody should play RTSes, or that they shouldn't make them, or that they should try to make all RTSes non-threatening enough that I will play them. Not all games have to be for me!


(I don't do competitive well. Especially when certain people nag at me that if I'm consistently losing a strategy game, it means I'm either stupid or not trying. Argh.)

[Reactor]

That was a good reminder, cliffski. I liked the part about reading french ;) I used to have experiences like that.