Modern Video Games Are Less Fun - An Explorational Series

Fair warning - this is very much an "old person yells at cloud" bit of writing. HOWEVER...

When did video games turn into so much dang work? The grinding, the season management, 24/7 persistent worlds, crappy loot boxes, pay-to-win, the ridiculous complexity, etc.; it all detracts from just being able to turn on a game, play for 30-60 minutes either solo or with a friend and turn it off again. To give two non-sports examples: First: The Sims, which upon its release and after spending more hours than I'd care to admit, made me realize it's basically a virtual doll-house for adults with no purpose except avoiding actual life or playing out sadistic scenarios without societal judgment. Second, Guitar Hero (or Rock Band) which, at the advanced/expert levels was so ridiculously hard that I could have used the hours to learn an actual real-life instrument. This is no exaggeration - I actually can play a stringed instrument and was even fairly good at one point. I'm fairly certain it would have taken me as much time to learn some challenging new songs as learning the advanced fake guitar. Not to mention more rewarding. Suffice to say, after a few hours I stopped trying with that one.

So, I'm going to look at a couple different genres that I both used to play and that have evolved considerably over the decades since home consoles became a thing. I'm going to start specifically with football because a) virtually every console going back to Atari 2600 has had one that at least vaguely resembles a real-time game, b) football season is coming up and c) I either own the original consoles or can easily emulate a vast number of the big titles.

My starting thesis is that video games as a mode of escapist, purely fun entertainment peaked somewhere around the Sega Genesis/PS1 era - particularly for sports games - and that while the graphics have improved since that time, the overall "casual fun" factor has actually fallen with the added gameplay complexity and player/team management. As I go through this, we'll see if I still have that opinion by the end or if spending more time with a few modern Madden games softens my heart.

The Metrics: (subject to change - this is the "Unfinished Thoughts" sub after all)

  1. Graphics - Basically, how realistic. Are the characters discernible as uhh... humanoid?

  2. Control Complexity - Atari 2600 one-button all the way up current XBOX schemes

  3. "Learnability" - how easily can a casual console player pick it up and play? There is a sweet spot between rewarding skill and utterly punishing neophytes.

  4. "FUN" - something of a catch-all but if I have to spend 20 minutes drafting players or 5 minutes digging through menus just to play an off-line 1v1 match-up with my friend, that is NOT FUN. Related to "learnability" if a game requires hours and hours to develop even a basic level of skill, that is not fun either.

The idea is to start with the Atari 2600 and go from there. Evidently, some cursory googling tells me that Magnavox Odyssey had a 1972 football game but that it was like a card & dice game that was played on the TV which doesn't really resemble "modern" football games with playcalling even a bit although the random chance bit of picking the right play to defend certainly seems to be there! At any rate, Odyssey - out.

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