153. What Have We Lost? (A Gaming Rant)
In a world where we move constantly from dopamine hit to dopamine hit, do we even know how to live? Here I compare games (and life) from 30 years go to what we have today.
I was born in the 1960s. I was born Age Inappropriate, so I had an adult view on the world as a young child. Thus I remember what life was like in the 1970s at the tail end of the Vietnam war. I remember doing the food shopping for my mother and sister when I was 5 years old and having the young man at the cash register try to overcharge me.
He said “How do you know the charge is wrong?” I replied “Because I added it up in my head before I came to the register.” He was not expecting that. I was able to tell him how much my total should be. He ended up getting in trouble. But back then people actually did their own math. Calculators were very new and primitive. Back then we had to also memorize our phone numbers and a lot of other numbers.
Movies didn’t have complicated special effects. They were not made by computers. Back then they were made by something called a “writer”. This odd thing had to understand human nature well enough to come up with stories that would keep viewers on the edge of their seats. Now as Moon (a YouTube influencer I follow) describes, we just go from special effect to special effect every 30 seconds (or less). There isn’t time to think about if what you are seeing makes sense. That’s intentional, because it doesn’t. It’s not supposed to, it’s just there to keep you visually stimulated. You got your fix and now you forget the entire movie. Because not once did it make you think.
All of life has become like this. We used to have time to consider our lot in life and whether our society and governments and schools were working properly. When I went back to school in 2007 to study economics there were over 200 people in my classes. They were all too busy on their computers to even hear the professor. I would end up answering more than 90% of the questions. I was twice as old as the other students and I knew why I was there. Education was not cheap and I was gambling with my future by even going back to school. I acted every day like my life depended on my performance in school.
In my recent paper on The Sexual Supermarket, I spent half the time writing that paper just trying to decide where to start my story. I went all the way back to Tribal times before any technology other than primitive spears and furs. To many of my readers this may have seemed like an odd choice, especially talking about sex. They wanted to know what hot new insight I had for them. But to understand what we are missing/losing in life today, you have to appreciate what we had before. Also, because evolution takes hundreds of thousands of years, it’s important to realize that we still live in Tribal bodies. They aren’t wired to live in a constant Dopamine bath.
I bought Fantasy General yesterday on Steam, to go back and experience how games used to be. It’s only $2 now on sale. I bought it back when it came out in 1996, it was a fantastic game and one of the first to make good use of the new CD-ROM technology. While playing I kept asking myself, “Are the games we play/make now better?”
FG has a 77 page manual, explaining how to play the game. I actually read it before playing it again. But we don’t do manuals anymore. Manuals don’t provide enough dopamine, and consumers will go into withdrawal before finishing it. Now we play games where we don’t have any idea how this or that is supposed to work, but we are flooded with microtransaction stores for things we don’t even know how to use. It’s like going into a restaurant and ordering a sandwich, and being asked if you want to spend an extra $20 to get Green Goo with your meal.
Except that it’s worse than that. Because the restaurant spent most of the day working on the Green Goo and doesn’t even know how to make a sandwich.
Wait, it’s even worse. In the old days, the sandwich would have been made by one or two people. So they knew if it was made right. Now each part of the sandwich is made by a different person or computer and it is all thrown together semi randomly. No one person in the restaurant knows how to make a sandwich, they only know how to make their one ingredient. So if you said there was something wrong with it, they wouldn’t even understand your complaint.
Grr, I’m still giving developers too much credit. Now if you want to complain you have to go to a forum website and give feedback. If your feedback is negative or critical, the developers will just delete your post. They will delete thousand of posts if necessary before admitting they made a mistake. They may not even know how to admit they made a mistake, because not a single person at the studio knows what their product was supposed to be. It’s like you saying there is a bug in your sandwich and them calling the police on you. Because nothing gives consumers the warm fuzzies more than having the cops called on them.
Oh damn. I’m STILL giving developers too much credit. Now if the developer decides to stop making sandwiches, they will ask for their sandwich back. AFTER YOU ATE IT. Yes that’s right, they will hold you down and pump your stomach to get THEIR sandwich back from you.
As Moon recalls, one of the most mind bending stories of all time, A Space Odyssey: 2001, started with a long scene of apes playing with bones around an Obelisk. That might seem like a VERY odd start to a story that ends up in space and predicts AI almost 60 years ago. In 1968. Why would Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark do that? Perhaps for the contrast. Perhaps because you couldn’t understand the significance of where we were going without knowing where we had been. At least that’s why I did this in my paper on the Sex Supermarket.
While playing FG (again, almost a 30 year old game) I marvelled at how each battle could be done in about 20 minutes or less. There was no ideology. There was no racism, sexism, or classism. I didn’t feel manipulated. I wasn’t constantly on guard against the next upsell. Back in the 20th century when I still had the disk (I probably have it in storage in the USA) I wasn’t worried that someone would take it away from me. Or at least they would have to come to my house to pry the disk from my fingers.
Today we don’t even ask our players what they want, or like/dislike. If they try to tell us, we delete them. We have a separate department that data mines players. Players can lie, but data never lies! [sarcasm warning] The data people, the monetisation people, the gameplay design people, leadership, even the QA people: They don’t know what they are supposed to be building. Why even bother to try since leadership will just make major changes and force revisions anyways because some other game is trending up and we have to copy it.
I will admit that FG could use some modern creature comforts, like an auto save. Back in 1996 computers were slower. Saving wasn’t instant, it took some time. Prior to the CD-ROM, things took a LOT of time. And of course reading the manual took time. But the gameplay was solid. I got the impression that the whole team actually played their game during development. Since the game was explained in the manual, it was clear if there was a bug.
Today everything is hidden. Not because that makes the game better, but because the developers want to be able to change anything on the fly. Maybe they want to fix a bug, or increase the price of something. Maybe they need to censor some artwork because a non-gamer in Australia complained about it. And, since the developer has access to the product you bought from them, they can delete it from your mouth or even stomach as you try to eat it.
You might think that Tribal people were primitive. Short lived. Didn’t understand much. Didn’t take good pictures. But, I bet they were happy. Happier than we are today. Fantasy General is a great example of what we are missing. You paid for a great time, and you got it. Maybe 15-20 hours tops to play through, and with four characters you could quadruple that by playing each. Newer games have to be bigger. More engagement. MORE! Like a Star Wars meme.
I have a confession. I would LOVE to make a huge Fantasy General Game as a Service. My Project Drakara game that I started designing in 2011 was basically that but in space. But I wouldn’t flood the player with monetisation choices. Drakara gives you a chance to spend one of 3 ways, once a week. That’s it. Ordering a sandwich is way more complex. Gameplay isn’t 20 minutes per session, it’s capped at about 5 minutes, and it’s multiplayer. Those other people aren’t strangers you will never see again, those are your friends. They need you.
Don’t add something unless it makes the game better for your players. Make your game fun enough that everyone on the dev team can play it during lunch. And no they won’t have to hit 180 beats per minute on their heart rate. That might kill half your sedentary development team.
Instead of looking at all the new tech and thinking, “how does this help our shareholders?” , think about how this helps our players. Then make that. If you don’t know how to charge for it, ask me or any of the smart monetisation people who follow my substack. Chances are, they read my papers for a reason. They want to make better games. Then release that into the wild, and gamers will reward you. Don’t be afraid to start small, even if your company has a billion dollars. It doesn’t have to be big to be fun. Once players see what you are up to, and start asking for MORE!, then go make that. But don’t ever stop listening to them.
And no, hiring a PR person to convince governments around the world not to ban your company for exploiting gamers, that’s not listening. That’s telling. Wrong approach.