Are Modern Games Designed to Waste Our Lives?

so I'm sitting there playing the new vampire Dungeon Crawler crafting game V rising and I want to build a fortress so I'm gathering wood a lot of wood but as I sit there I start to get this feeling in the pit of my stomach this creeping existential dread that threatens my entire world view as a gamer is this game wasting my life there are a few ways to answer this question and the first one is basically copium but it's also true nothing you enjoy is a waste of time and even if playing games isn't productive the fun and social aspects alone are enough to justify having them around so that's it video over right not exactly now I've doubted my enjoyment of games a few times over the years but I've noticed it's been happening a lot more frequently lately but if my Play Habits haven't changed and my overall outlook on games hasn't changed then there's something else going on here that's causing it and I think I know exactly where to start the problem isn't video games the medium but something going on in the video games themselves which brings us back to the rising you see V Rising is a game where you gather and you craft and you do some combat but mostly you punch rocks and trees and then you use those materials for items and upgrades all of these things take forever and for some reason you gotta sit there for so long hitting rocks and trees to collect all the resources and then to make stuff with them you need to process them in say a sawmill for wood that works in real time so if you want to make 25 planks you have to put in 500 logs then wait for seven real human minutes until they're done 25 planks is not a lot of planks in this game and like why I guess since it can be played online it needs to include time constraints for balance purposes maybe those timers are a way to encourage players to engage with the other systems whatever the rationale it still feels bad I mean I have a full-time job I don't need my games to feel like another one now I don't know if you've noticed but a lot of today's games revolve around this type of gameplay I mean just take a look at where the games industry has gone over the past decade or so video games don't want to be just video games anymore they want to be platforms they want you to spend dozens or hundreds of hours in their world so that you can dedicate your microtransaction budget to that world now I don't want to vilify these practices at a base level I've had a few games become my platform games over the years and they were probably some of the best gaming experiences of my life the problem is when developers try to graft these monetization driven design approaches onto every game they possibly can every time we see a new fatigue system or battle pass system her daily Quest system or login bonus system we can practically rest assured that they'll affect our other games in some way even player games like trials Rising have a weird amount of currencies for some reason now we need to talk to Jake from State Farm in NBA 2k's career mode like a good neighbor State Farm is there I was waiting for you to say it man but this brings us back again to the Curious specimen of V Rising as it currently stands V Rising has no in-game micro transactions except for a single cosmetic DLC pack so why does it take design cues from games that have microtransactions now we could assume that the developer intends to add microtransactions at a later date and there's probably some truth to that but I think it's also missing the larger point which is that whether we like it or not even our most sacred traditional video games are starting to take influence from micro transaction mechanics in Mobile and free to play games even in the absence of the microtransactions themselves but let's unpack that a bit in Candy Crush when you run out of lives the game gives you a timer and makes you wait until it gives you another life you literally cannot play the game during this time period unless you pay money in which case you can buy more lives and start playing again instantly now let's say we were to remove the ability to buy more lives but kept that in-game timer that timer would still do its job it'd still give players an incentive to keep coming back for more see what I'm getting at even though the timers are a lot shorter in V Rising they still keep us in the game they give us incentive to engage with the other loops and revisit them later only to put more logs in the machine and start the whole process over this lifting of mobile and free-to-play game mechanics as a way to hook players is not a one-off thing just look at the upgrade trees and currencies of Rogue Legacy 2 which look like something out of Path of Exile or the slow-moving Loop hero which drags down its masterful pixel art with gameplay that for some reason feels like a less active more randomized version of an idle clicker game Xenoblade Chronicles 2 despite offering no in-game purchases featured party members that you acquired at random in a way that's clearly influenced by gotcha games like epic 7 and gentian impact in their goal of getting players to look at ads and buy in-game items mobile and free-to-play games have come up with new mechanics that tap into our deepest desires as players keeping us playing games for longer even as the rewards become more abstract and even if these mechanics grew out of a desire to drive microtransactions they've stuck around because they keep people playing something every profit-driven developer wants but is this really something that just the developers want or does it maybe reflect on us the players as well I can't speak for you all but my threshold for time waster games is several notches higher than I prefer it to be as I write this video I am playing the hot new roguelike crafting game Cult of the lamb and enjoying it despite how similar it is to V Rising the irony here is not lost on me but can you really blame me games are so expensive and 60 bucks can get you anything from a 15-hour shooter to a hundred hour generation defining masterpiece like Elden ring heck you could spend zero dollars on a game like fortnite and still play it for a thousand hours subscription services like Xbox game pass and PlayStation Plus make the value question even more complicated for the average middle class player a very reasonable response to all this choice is to skim through your options instead of trying to get to every last game and so you end up flattening your game evaluations into one single base metric for the price I paid does this game grab my attention and hold it I honestly hate that this is the way that I've come to start thinking about games but with so many games on the backlog and so many good games coming out month after month this is kind of just the reality of playing video games in 2022. now imagine being a developer in this environment how do you get your game to survive despite this frankly unreasonable demand a novel art style good writing an interesting looking Central mechanic it may draw attention but it won't get you all the way there you need to go back to what works and now a decade out from early mobile games that means that even if you don't use microtransactions especially if you don't use microtransactions you need to have an addictive hook to keep people playing and to spread the word about your game some time gated progress systems here a Sprinkle of gotcha there maybe a heavily obscured currency or complex progress system to round it all out these are all just normal game mechanics now but Decay happens bit by bit not all at once and I can't help feeling that there are signs of it here there's this moment from Gamescom a few years back that I'll never forget a fan of the popular MMO Final Fantasy 14 asked game director naoki Yoshida how they could motivate themselves to play during the off time between expansions Yoshida replied it's all right to not play it every day since it's just a game you can stop forcing yourself if it's hard on you to keep that up rather it'll just pile up unnecessary stress if you limit yourself to playing just that one game since there are so many other games out there this should be common sense and yet it's almost hard to believe not just because this is a Square Enix exact telling people to log off from a game he makes but because it's something that usually goes unspoken a rare candid statement of human care in a marketing driven space that usually obscures these ideas to protect profits course you should log off every once in a while of course it may not be healthy to make a single game your whole life now I've never been one to deny myself the pleasure of a good brain off game and I'm not saying that any of the developers who Implement any of these mechanics that I've called quote time wasters are bad or evil in fact I've enjoyed a lot of these mechanics myself in the past but isn't it also wrong to go along with our media just because it's there don't we deserve games that at least act like they care about our time this isn't a call to ditch every game that asks you to grind it's about understanding what's really happening so that we can make better decisions about what we do give our time to this is gonna differ wildly based on the person but to my point video games are personal experiences I can't tell you how to consume them just like I can't tell you what music to listen to or what food to eat like cheap delicious high calorie fast food not all games that give us momentary enjoyment are actually fulfilling or healthy but games don't have nutrition facts labels that tell us whether they're part of a balanced diet in fact it's getting harder every day to tell when a game is exploiting your time for its benefit we have to figure all that stuff out for ourselves which honestly kind of sucks and is something that nobody teaches you I for one am tired of experiencing video games like this tired of being sucked in by epic opening cut scenes only to lose the next 10 hours of my life punching trees I'm tired of questioning whether I've outgrown games only to realize I simply need to look harder to find the good ones but most of all I'm tired of the thought that every game is trying to trick me in some way to give it my money to give it my time to give it my endorsement okay maybe a video game development model that asked for our 60 bucks and gave us everything we wanted in return was never a sustainable one but there is still something innately sad about its passing there is no longer consensus between developer and player about what a video game owes us in exchange for a set amount of money we don't have any plans at the moment to do a PC that line has always of course been blurry but it can hardly even be considered a line now it's more like a dense wall of mist one through which we must wander aimlessly as part of every video game related transaction we make and I have to pay a micro transaction to unlock that's so stupid we are no longer players and creators driven by our mutual love for a hobby we are buyers and sellers trying to squeeze the most value out of one another in a market whose currency goes beyond dollars and cents to ads viewed hundreds of hours spent this is extremely depressing and for now the best I can hope is that games that don't rely on these techniques like Elden ring continue to exist even as hungry megacorps look to acquire their creators or that player engagement practices evolve to become less artistically intrusive and if none of these things come to pass I can at least hope we all become a little better at telling when we're falling into that useless tree puncher zone so that we never have to find ourselves wondering whether we're wasting our lives playing a video game again thanks so much for watching to the end of the video if you liked what you saw give us a like And subscribe and uh check us out at the links below

Channel: SUPERCULTURE

Views: 355,610

Keywords: v rising, gaming, microtransaction, videogame industry, games industry, cult of the lamb, pc gaming

Id: atKasdCFF5w

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 20 2022