“Another potential hypothesis is that the increasing negativity, polarization, intrusiveness, and emotional manipulation in social media has created a persistent cognitive overload on the finite cognitive resources we have,” Quantic Foundry said. “Put simply, we may be too worn out by social media to think deeply about things.”
in other words, we’re burnt out and we just want some escapism …
It’s not just that. Many games these days are so detailed, it’s like having a second job that you don’t get paid to do, but instead pay them to be “allowed” to do. No thank you.
Many games these days are so incomplete
throw in having to pay to beta test on top of all the other headaches …
The WoW model.
World of Warcraft is more, I think, that it imposes specific time constraints than that it’s deeply complex.
They have a different category than “Strategy” for “Community” that I’d think would capture something like World of Warcraft.
Right I was mostly referring to the whole “the game is your job and you pay to do it” aspect.
Not sure if this is true. Social media shows a very distorted view on polarization. Past research shows that the vast majority of polarising content (>95%) is generated by a vast minority of users (~6%). It is shown repeatedly that the polarization found in (online) media, differs drastically from every day felt polarization.
Literally “getting off the internet” seems like a valid strategy. I think it is more likely that .odern games hijack native reward systems more than “deep strategy games” do (whatever that means). In fact the gameplay mechanics in most games are still relatively the same, just prettier, faster running. Back in the day we couldn’t have a high FPS shooter with a lot of bang simple because the technology didn’t allow for it. Furthermore games were a niche back then as well. Now games are more mainstream and the relative group is smaller, than the mainstream group.
Are gamers getting older? It would be interesting to see how this breaks down by age.
I’m getting older. I have 3 kids and no time. 10 years ago I had no kids and 3 time. Now when I play, I just put it on the easiest setting and play it like an interactive movie.
Yeah, I’ve played plenty of Civilization over the years, but I’m married now. I have a kid. I keep a note with what I’m doing because it might be a couple months before I play again. I could play more, but I want to spend time with my wife and my kid. Usually when I take time to play I want to play again the next night, but that’s often not feasible, and then it turns into weeks again.
I started playing Morrowind maybe 6 months back, got hours into the game and was having a good time. Then I didn’t get a chance to play for a month, now I haven’t gone back because I have no idea what I was doing since half the stuff doesn’t seem to be written in the journal, and when it is, it assumes I remember who the person is or where I was supposed to be going. So I just haven’t picked it up again.
To be fair, Morrowind is just that kind of game. It’s been many years since I’ve played it, but I remember it being one of the last truly open world experiences I got from playing games. The plot drops you off in the first city and kind of just let’s you go at it. I remember hours of just wandering until I ended up at the city of vivec, which is the mess of floating pyramid temple lookin jobbies out on a lake somewhere. I didn’t know shit about anything but it was awesome and that was enough for me. Elden Ring almost brings this feeling back sometimes.
It was great while I remembered what was happening! But sometimes your only reference to a quest is something that says “Go out the door, take the third left, and look for an orange door” and you just have no idea even what city you were in when you got that note 😆
During the couple of weeks I was playing it, I didn’t actually feel lost at all. But now trying to return to it just feels more like a chore than a good time. I’m playing Baldur’s Gate 3 now instead, I’m back in the era of quest markers!
You can add map markers with custom descriptions in Morrowind. I use them to leave little “what the fuck am I doing” notes for myself before leaving the game if I don’t know I’ll be back on within a couple days
For real though it can be a hard game to jump back into if you’ve had it on pause for a while. I usually just make a new character at that point see where the new adventure goes. There are so many factions and places to explore no one character can experience the game in full anyway
Map markers are one of those things that so many games have, and I never remember to use them!
Jumping into a new game and taking a different direction does sound like a good plan.
My favourite journalistic practice is when outlets lump up everyone playing video games into a single group called “gamers.”
Clearly this study is the result of including mobile gamers in with other groups.
Stares at most PDX games having increasing player counts
How much of this is the lack of people wanting to play strategy games vs the lack of good strategy games
exactly what i was going to ask. Uh, when was the last good strategy game? Looking at my steam library…
I have 2000+ hours in factory games, Factorio, Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere… not really strategy but those are solid thought based games released <10 years ago
Then… Age of Empires 4? Civ 6? Both pale in comparison to their predecessors. Cities Skylines 1… but then there’s the whole thing about 2. Star Trek Infinite was a flop and from what I read was just a horrible bland game. Serious, what has come out by big studios in the last 5 years in terms of strategy? I see more flashy graphics than strategy in these recent games.
Victoria 3 is the only one I can think of, but the reception is lack luster. Maybe I’ll pick it up I’m 5 DLCs
I really like Victoria 3, it has its issues but I don’t mind them that much. I find much of the criticism is from ppl. who played Victoria 2.
In terms of other new games there is humankind which is similar to the Civ series. It has some great new concepts but some weirdness that I for unknown reasons can’t move past.
thanks for the tip, i’ll look into this
Yeah I quite enjoy vicky 3, my main issue with it is that there always seem every play through seems to have a bug pop up and break the immersion
I would bet it’s more like “gaming has expanded to a larger market”. Gamers who were willing to fiddle with computers and online gaming, hell, up till the late 2000s are probably also the same type of people who are willing to be patient and fiddle with a complex game and learn where the fun is. Now playing a game is easy as 1,2,3 no matter where you get it, I’m not talking down on anyone, and I don’t care if that’s where the AAA trend is going, just that when the access gets easier the group expands to more and more casual audiences.
Also, console games have always been way more “casual” as those markets expand gamers kind of defacto have a larger preference for casual games.
I was deep into Strategy and lore – preferring games that ate hundreds of hours. Unfortunately these days my available gaming hours are reduced to a mere handful. It’s difficult to remember everything when I can only play sparingly.
Thus, I’ve resorted to smaller indie games that can be enjoyed in a smaller amount of time, with less of a learning curve. I’m a casual gamer now. What can you do?
Meanwhile I still think there’s that group of folks out there who want to decompile the game looking for lore in the code comments.
There’s a Rat Man den in Portal 2, it’s in a later section of the game after you’ve climbed out of the depths, you can get behind the scenes and there’s a niche with a big fan in it, and Rat Man has built kind of a shrine of coffee mugs. And if you listen, under the harsh electro music and the sound effect of the fan, you can hear a sort of insane jibbering, as if Rat Man is still there raving to himself.
Fans of the game hungry for any more lore or story hints, have put more thought into this sound clip than the folks who made it and put it in the game.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
put more thought into this sound clip
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
As soon as some technology becomes so accessible that anyone can use it, the platform becomes populated by morons and it’s essence is diluted by all sorts of rules put in place so the morons can’t damage each other.
deleted by creator
I have always been the one who goes against the trends, and it looks like I still am. Strategy is one of the very few genres that I like, and if the game has no strategic element to it, I usually don’t enjoy it.
But… I don’t like overwhelming UIs and elements. I like simplicity, few elements and not many options, but a deep strategy.
UI feels like such an art nowadays. With computers being powerful enough to handle more complex simulations, we can potentially have insane amounts of data in a game. And game devs need to figure out how to present that information to the player without overwhelming them.
For example I think Victoria 3 does a pretty poor job of it, while a game like CK2 does an excellent job of it. It can be hard to get right.
Dwarf fortress?
My problem with strategy games is that they’re too hard to get into. I tried to play civ 5, but they are a thousand mechanics and the tutorials are very bad.
The difficulty setting in strategy games shouldn’t be “how smart is the AI?”, it should be “how many mechanics do you want to manage at the same time?”. That way you can start by playing on easy mode, then the next game on normal, then hard. Instead of that there are 10 difficulty levels and half of them are impossible, the other half you can beat by following the exact same strategy every time.
For me it’s:
- Strategy games are extremely meta-focused
- You always feel like you’re playing sub-optimally if you don’t know the exact right move
- They typically require a lot of time and energy that I just don’t have
- They require long, focused sessions that could be better spent doing anything else
- No one I know is playing them so it sucks as a social activity
- They have less “high moments” compared to other games
Could never get into strategy games except for mobile ones that I would play on long road trips or something.
I always preferred Arena style fps games because the varied weapon set means having far greater variety in possible encounters with opponents. Military style shooters feel shallow to me. Skill just means placing shots to the head. There’s no real movement techniques with them
Yep makes sense. I mean it’s clear people hate deep systems when something like Baldur’s Gate 3 becomes the undisputed Game of the Year /s
I don’t disagree with your main point, but D&D 5e is a rather shallow rules system. It’s needlessly complicated (15 strength gives you what bonus? How does readying an action work? Can you smite when unarmed?), but it’s not really deep.
I agree. I played Pathfinder WotR right before BG3 and I was very confused by the lack of class options. It’s pretty simple straight forward stuff.
JRPGs (which came from DnD) can be a lot deeper than BG3.
But across its 1.7 million surveys, Quantic Foundry found that two thirds of strategy fans worldwide (except China, where gamers “have a very different gaming motivation profile”) have lost interest in this element of video games.
So what’s the story with China?
goes looking for the original
https://quanticfoundry.com/2018/11/27/gamers-china-us/#post/0
The Quantic Foundry (QF) data comes (as usual) from the Gamer Motivation Profile, a 5-minute survey that allows gamers to get a personalized report of their gaming motivations, and see how they compare with other gamers. Over 350,000 gamers worldwide have taken this survey. The survey is in English and thus respondents are predominantly from North America and the Western EU.
The Niko Partners (NP) data comes from an online survey (in Simplified Chinese) of 2,000 representative digital gamers in China (from a survey panel provider), balanced across more than 40 cities in tiers 1 through 5.
The Gamer Motivation Profile is benchmarked against QF’s existing data set (based largely on gamers in the West). In the chart below, the 50th%-tile line indicates the perfect average of each motivation in QF’s full data set. This is why the US data (a large portion of QF’s data set) hews closely to the average. The error bars in the chart are based on 95% confidence intervals.
https://i0.wp.com/quanticfoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/01-US-vs-China.png?ssl=1
Let’s take the 75th%-tile that Chinese gamers score on Competition—the appeal of duels, arena matches, and leaderboard rankings. That 75th%-tile means that the average Chinese gamer is more interested in Competition than 75% of gamers in QF’s data. Given that the US data is so close to the average, this also essentially means that the average Chinese gamer cares more about Competition than 75% of US gamers.
Similarly, Chinese gamers are also more interested in Completion—the appeal of collecting points/stars/trophies, completing quests/achievements/tasks. Conversely, Chinese gamers score below average across the Immersion and Creativity motivations (the last 4 motivations in the chart). They are less interested in being immersed in a compelling game world (Fantasy), interacting with an elaborate story and large cast of NPCs (Story), exploration and experimentation (Discovery), and customizing their avatar/town/spaceship (Design) relative to US gamers.
The Competition finding may seem unintuitive because in the US cultural context, we tend to stereotype Asians as being compliant and striving for social harmony. But the data strongly suggests this stereotype doesn’t hold true among Chinese gamers, and the higher interest in Competition can help to partly explain the popularity of games like PUBG in China. After all, Battle Royale is probably the furthest away you can be from “social harmony”.
In previous blog posts (see here and here), we’ve shown how male gamers (in the West) tend to be more driven by Competition, Destruction, and Challenge, whereas female games tend to be more driven by Design, Fantasy, and Completion.
The data from China looks very different. Of the 12 motivations, only 3 cross the threshold for statistical significance (at p < .01)—male gamers in China care more about Destruction, Discovery, and Competition. Of these 3, the differences in Competition and Discovery are substantively small (about 5 percentile points apart). Overall, the only robust difference is that female gamers in China are less interested in guns, explosions, and mayhem than male gamers. In contrast, 9 of the motivations are at least 10 percentile points apart in the US data between male and female gamers.
In the US, there’s a lot of contention around the cause of observed gender proportions in different game titles and genres, specifically as to whether these differences reflect the historical marketing/cultural framing of games for boys or deeply-rooted biological differences between men and women. The data from China suggests that even very large gender differences in gaming motivations can be almost entirely explained by cultural/marketing factors without using gender as an explanatory factor.
Age Differences Are Also Much Smaller in China
In data we’ve previously shared using QF’s full data set, we’ve shown that the appeal of Competition declines dramatically with age, and it’s the motivation that changes the most with age. The appeal of Excitement also declines a lot with age in the US. The table below presents the correlation coefficients between age and each of the 12 motivations, broken down by country.
In China, the age differences are much smaller (similar to what we saw with gender differences). None of the correlations in the China data exceeds 0.10 (what is considered a small effect in psychology research), and only 4 of the coefficients are significant at p < .01. In contrast, 7 of the coefficients exceed 0.10 in the US data, with 2 coefficients exceeding 0.25.
So while the appeal of Competition and Excitement drop rapidly among US gamers as they get older, these effects are much more muted among Chinese gamers.
Motivation Homogeneity and Making Games
When gaming motivations vary a great deal in terms of gender and age (as they do in the US), it means game design and marketing have greater difficulty in being broadly appealing to different gamers, because they will often run into breakpoints in terms of gendered or age-based appeal.
On the other hand, the homogeneity of gaming motivations among Chinese gamers suggests a higher likelihood of cross-cutting appeal of game titles. Put another way, a game designer for the Chinese market likely has to worry less about satisfying orthogonal or opposing interests among different players because most Chinese gamers tend to care about the same things (high Completion and Competition, low Discovery).
Huh.
So, first of all, regarding the Strategy thing that the derived article was talking about, it’s not that Chinese gamers prefer Strategy more. Rather, they prefer it less. But they haven’t seen that decline, and they have both different and much more homogenous preferences.
But the other stuff is curious too.
Used to play strategy games quite a lot 20 or so years ago. AoE, Homeworld, Red Alert. But I never got very deep into them.
The main reason I don’t like strategy games anymore is that most of them simply boil down to micromanagement and actions-per-minute. That is not how my brain works. I hate micromanaging and multitasking. I love planning tactics, doing recon and analyzing the situation (as long as I don’t have to do statistical analysis with spreadsheets for that), setting goals and executing plans.
Best strategy game I’ve ever played? X3: Terran Conflict. Once you set your plans in motion everything works pretty much automatically—you don’t have to order your traders or military forces around constantly or set up product batches in your factories manually. You set up parameters by which your assets work, and aside from occasional tweaking and optimization you leave them to their own devices. Instead you concentrate on the actual grand strategy or a single battle at hand or putting out some random brushfire that needs your attention without the worry about your “villagers” standing around idle because they can’t figure out there’s a fresh patch of fish 100 meters to the left.
Plus you’re there, in situ, as an actual participant in the world, not an abstract godhand hovering over the map. First-person strategy. Commanding two task groups steamrolling through a sector from the bridge of your cruiser, sipping coffee as turrets put on a massive fireworks around you is epic.
That’s only really real time strategy games.
Not true, really. With turn based games it’s the same mechanic it just works slower
Against the Storm is great. Once you have your engine running, you are really just tweaking it as goals and materials allow.
You might like Avorion.
Meanwhile I have 3000+ hours in Civ6…
This why you only play a thousand hours of six different games instead
Strategizing feels dangerously close to work for me.
Games with “deep strategy” are largely not very good.
I still play a bunch of Stellaris and I go back to Age of Wonders 4 pretty frequently. Against the Storm is also addictive as hell. These 3 games have a sense of adventure that keeps them interesting.
I like Solium Infernum - which is pretty new - quite a bit, but it doesn’t have the staying power that those do. On top of that you have misfires like Humankind, Old World, Vicky 3, and the like. “Deep” is one thing, but fiddly and unnecessarily complicated is another… as is being under-developed in important areas like the endgame.
I think gamers are becoming less interested in a genre that has become saturated with dime-a-dozen mediocre cruft.
MOO2 is still one of, if not the, best 4x space games and part of that is how clear cut it is. The systems play together well and it isn’t a bloated mess of complicated mechanics for the sake of being complicated. The depth is very emergent and not artificial feeling which gives it an incredible timelessness
Yeah, there hasn’t been a lot of innovation in the genre and what we have is often a buggy mess - that definitely doesn’t help the adoption of ‘deep strategy’. I love games like what you mentioned but even I get sick of them when I start running into AI or optimization issues, where games devolve into snowballing or boring tedium after the first few hours, when the UI is a frustrating mess that makes me hate every second spent on trying to make it work the way I need it to work.
Or maybe I’m just spoiled by the amount of polish and thought that goes into games like factorio or against the storm.
Someone who isn’t into strategy games will play shallow strategy games like fire emblem because its anime and allows you to date anime girls with big boobs.
