"What's been you doing lately, and are you playing games again?"
"No, no, the game is not interesting, it has not been played for a long time."
The above conversation took place in a recent chat between the author and friend A. As a four-person dormitory with six people living at Northern University, the strange man can squeeze out a space to arrange a set of main equipment, and in the eyes of the author, he has always been a person who has a great passion for the game. Today's ability to say that the game is "not interesting" is completely beyond my expectations.
But on second thought, everything is not so incredible. As one of the earliest buyers of the PS5 of the National Bank of China, the last second was still in the circle of friends happily serialized their own unboxing experience, shortly after receiving the goods, his feedback to me was, "In all the next-generation games, the most interesting is the "Cosmic Robot Wireless Controller User Guide".
Leaving aside the "a thousand readers have a thousand Hamlets", the discussion of games not being fun has indeed always existed in the gamer base, but in the past we can find ourselves reasons such as "machine performance is not allowed", of course, the author also admits that this is indeed part of the factors that affect the development of games and the landing of ideas.
But in recent years, the topic of "game fun" has been more widely discussed in hardware upgrades, especially after the release of next-generation game equipment, and the "picture quality of xxx games" is getting higher and higher, why is it getting less and less fun? Such questions and speeches are even more endless on the Internet.
Of course, the most classic is still to compare with their own early or childhood game experience, expressing frustration with the current game experience.
A recent one titled "The picture quality of the game is getting higher and higher, and the gameplay is getting richer, but why don't you feel like when you were a child?" The question also landed on the hot list of Zhihu, the subject said in the question, "In the past, playing Soul Douluo with friends can be happy all day, and now open today's AAA masterpiece, but lack of motivation to play, basically after buying it, it will eat ashes soon."
Judging from the answers, the feelings of this veteran player are obviously not unique. Obviously, the game industry has been improving, so why can products that represent the advanced production level of the "Ninth Art" only eat ashes in the player's game library?
From nothing to everything
Some of them naturally analyze the problem from the perspective of the market, and even in the eyes of some netizens, there was nothing at that time, but it became one of the important reasons for the fun of the game.
Knowing that the netizen "Buyeo City Little Old Two" used the FC era to give an example, he believes that in that era of game cassettes, on the one hand, the high price of game cassettes, pirated cards in the 80s can even be sold to 150 yuan a plate (ordinary people's two or three months' wages), on the other hand, the limited functionality leads to the inability to support too good screen and music performance, under the contradiction, the gameplay has become one of the core selling points of the game.
As we all know, gaming is a fairly volume industry. But when everyone has only one direction to roll, game companies will naturally produce the best results in the competition. Not to mention that in that era, there was also a big brother who took the lead, that is, Nintendo.
People who have a certain understanding of the history of game development may know that after the collapse of Atari, Nintendo dominated the American video game market with the arcade game "Donkey Kong" released in the early years, and later "Super Mario Brothers", occupying 95% of the market share at that time, and single-handedly pulling back the depressed video game market at that time.
As a market hegemon, Nintendo launched the royalty system in 1984, although this system was controversial because of its "royalty" of 2,000 yen per cassette at that time (the genuine price was about 5,000 yen at that time), and the draw of major channels today is quite controversial, but at the same time, Nintendo's control over the output and content of the game company also ensured the excellent quality of FC games at that time to a certain extent.
On the one hand, in order to ensure that the game content has a qualified quality, so as not to repeat the mistakes of "E.T.", Nintendo will censor the content produced by game companies under the royalty system, on the other hand, Nintendo will also strictly limit the number of products that each company can list every year, that is, if the best content is not provided to players, then the game company is likely to lose money and fall into a bad reputation, affecting the sales of later games.
From a technical point of view, the lack of shocking images and music naturally forces game companies to invest resources in gameplay; from the perspective of channels, most game companies also lack channels to display and sell their own products for a long time, so it is natural to use good content to seize every opportunity.
On the contrary, there is now everything. Technology, channels needless to say, even the gameplay, most of them have been over the decades of iteration and polishing of countless products, with a law for reference. This is naturally a good thing for business, representing a more mature model, but it does not bode well for a creative industry.
This is also why under this question, more than once someone mentioned a similar view to Tencent Games' senior technical art engineer "YivanLee", that is, "For so many years, the game industry's picture quality, hardware, and algorithms have made great progress." But the pace of evolution of gameplay, design, etc. is very slow, and it can even be said that there is no change. ”
However, in addition to various reasons and excuses, there is also a most practical problem is that the gameplay experience of many so-called AAA games is indeed not good, and the phenomenon of using gold as a garbage can exists in all walks of life, and games are naturally no exception.
It is not the wind that moves, but the benevolent heart
Of course, in addition to various analyses of the past and present game industry, there are also a considerable number of people who believe that it is not that the game has changed, or that the quality of the game is not as good as before, but that the game player has changed.
Netizen "Magic Mirror", as a father of two children, used his own personal experience to record the growth of a player very well. From the year of graduation, magic mirror bought himself a gba-sp with the year-end bonus, and then immersed himself in games such as star kirby and reverse referee, as a newcomer to the campus, magic mirror said that this was its only entertainment activity that year.
Subsequently, after having a social circle, online games with social nature such as Warcraft naturally became a new hobby in the new stage of magic mirrors, and then after starting a family, fragmented mobile games became a choice without choice. In the words of "Magic Mirror", it is "game or game, but I am not who I was then".
Of course, some netizens are more direct, for the gamers to lose interest, "no longer the feeling of the previous childhood", bluntly said:
Your heart is dead.jpg Source: Zhihu @Travis L
However, in addition to this social identity and psychological change, once this problem of comparison with memory is involved, there will naturally be a "childhood filter". Knowing that netizens "driving the wind" have used their personal experience to prove that the FC and GBA eras that many people recall are actually not so beautiful now.
"When I went to college and remembered to revisit the game "Dragon Ball Z Saiyan Extinction Plan 2" on the FC simulator, I found that I couldn't even hold on for a few minutes", "When I completed the original version of Resident Evil 2 no less than 20 times, I fell asleep less than half an hour when I began to play through the remake version with great interest! ”
In fact, just like many OW players will say about the summer of 2016, as a person who experienced that summer, in addition to the memories of fighting side by side with friends, back to the game itself, the more significant experience of that summer was actually rare heroes, locked brothers, and various blood pressure spikes with teammates.
And whether it is a childhood filter or a memory filter, what really makes a particular time irreplaceable in anyone's past is often not a medium of games or various entertainment, often people, this person can be a parent who needs to fight wits, of course, can also be a good friend who fights and fights.
As "GIN" said, "For me to play games with my friends, not to mention games, even going to the road to pick up stones is more interesting than playing 3a masterpieces alone." ”
Growing pains
Of course, in addition to the above various discussions, some netizens said that "the rules of the old game are very simple, and the burden of playing is low", "Not only is the game not fun, movies and novels are not good." Because content creation has changed from developer-oriented to market-oriented. And so on.
But the core of the regression problem is actually the difference between the two main bodies of the game and the player in the direction of growth. Unlike ten years ago, twenty years ago, the game industry now has enough history that it, like movies, reading and other entertainment methods, has accompanied countless people from childhood to confusion, but it is different from video and text, today's creative threshold has been low to near nothing, and games are still an industry where a few people master creation.
This naturally determines that the game can only meet the needs of most people, even indie games with a personal style. However, the content and spiritual needs of people at all stages will not follow the flow, when the game cannot meet this demand, or the player's field of vision can not find a product that can meet their current spiritual needs, in the face of the exquisite picture, everything is still like chicken ribs tasteless and abandoned.
As players, we naturally can't hope that game companies can customize game products according to their own needs, but if you really love games, instead of lamenting the regrets brought by time and indulging in them, it is better to use your own abilities and resources to find a new life and new games that suit you.
No matter what cultural and social attributes the game has, its essence is still an entertainment product, and the effect that should be achieved is to bring fun to life, if you can't grasp the fun in the game, then at least grasp life.
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