Are today's gamers, on average, dumber?

[kasperbbs]

Am i dumb because i have never played any of these old games? I dont think so.. And your comparison is a load of crap, why did you only mention shooters? There are plenty of more complex games that require thinking, i might as well put a screenshot of civilization and the first super mario, how would that look?

 

[Ironic Pirate]

Nice OP there.

"Here's some in-depth strategy games from a few years ago, as compared to some first person shooters from today. Clearly, this selection of games from wildly different genres demonstrates games are dumber"

Post some screens of Doom as compared to Tropico and we'll talk.

 

[ImprovizoR]

Yahtzee said in one of his EP articles that too many people play games these days for that label to be applicable. In a case like this, I agree with him. People play games and most people on this planet are stupid. GAMERS used to be a term for people who spend the majority of their free time playing video games, know everything about video games and follow news about video games. Like everything else in the world, the term "gamer" has changed. So are most gamers nowadays stupid? Not if you apply the old definition of a gamer. Yes, if you apply it to everyone who play video games, because smart people will always be a minority, and because most people have better things to do with their time ("better things" being a relative term for every individual). People like that don't want anything complicated where they have to think. They just want to sit back and relax. Gaming is to them the same as movies, music, sport on TV etc. And these are the people most developers are targeting these days. You can thank this generation of consoles for that.

 

[k-ossuburb]

Well, bullshit. Every game genre has their pros and cons and NONE are dumber than the other.

I've seen live casts of Starcraft II Masters games and, even though I don't play the game myself, I still find it fascinating. The level of complexity involved in playing a good game of SC2 blows my mind with the amount of crap you have to cope with. There's the build orders, there's the knowledge of which units counter what, there's resource management, there's APM, there's getting the attacks in at the exact right moment, there's keeping your macro up, there's keeping your micro up, there's cheeses, counter cheeses and a whole load of other crap that I'm still hearing about.

As for shooters, sure as far as gameplay goes it's pretty much "shoot thing with other thing". But how about Bioshock? Yeah, you're shooting things, but that's not the point, the point is to draw you into the politics behind it and try to get an understanding of the world. Granted you can get through it without knowing these things, but then you'll be missing out on a huge chunk of the experience.

Another genre people have overlooked. Fighting games. Do you have any idea how much skill it takes to play a side-scrolling fighter against another person? There's a hell of a lot of effort required if you want to master Blazblue, Street Fighter or Marvel VS Capcom. You don't just need to be smart to play them well (learning the combos, counters, behaviors of various characters on the roster, exploits, etc.) but you've also got to be able to form a strategy before the fight based on who you're up against (the character and the player, if the online mode gives you their stats or you've met them before) and you also need to be able to form an organic strategy on the fly with incredible speed. Most of the stuff in fighters can be so fast that you practically need to learn this stuff as second nature to remove the thinking time required to implement the strategies required to keep you at an advantage.

Intelligence isn't just about numbers. You could be intelligent in regards to appreciating narrative, sociology and culture, you could be intelligent in regards to being highly skillful or you could have decent spatial awareness.

Sim and RTS players can be intelligent and complete dumbasses (see WCF on LAG TV for the real dumbasses). But they cannot compare to the different kinds of intelligence required to play other genres.

 

[Ziggy the wolf]

honestly games used what they could and they only had so much so they had to fall back on puzzle and logic. now for fall out...its a good story wrapped around a top down shooter. gamers arent dumber they know who has the most money and what sells and the group that has money is the Madden crowd, the one who will buy a game with the same name and not much different. yes i like shooters but i also like rpgs and sidescrollers which while taking skill doesnt require the brain power of braniac

 

[Eternal_Lament]

The over-saturation of FPS's doesn't represent dumber gamers, as both FPS's and SIMS require alot of mental input, almost the same. Think about it, unless you're playing easy mode where you just spray and pray (TBF easy mode in SIMS are rather menial and not engaging as well), you always have to think about the descisions you're going to make in a shooter (should I go for strength or speed, do I use a grenade now or wait for others to gather together, do I set up a stronghold here or go for run-and-gun tactics, do I use the last of my ammo and hope they have a good gun or do I wait for a chance to melee/knife them, etc.) FPS' can be just as mentally challanging, it's just a different way of mentally challanging the player.

Further it is important to note that regardless of whether or not gamers value "intelligence" in a game, the one thing that will trump that that gamers value is enjoyment. Is this to say that SIMS can't be enjoyable, of course not, they can be fun, but it is mportant to note that they are called niche titles for a reason, because frankly not everyone wants to sit around waiting for their actions to have consequences.

 

[PurplePlatypus]

If anything we are having a little boom of strategy and more tactical games right now, it?s nothing compared the popularity that shooters have at this moment (but then shooters usually do pretty well) but it?s fairly respectable.

 

[Sjakie]

The number of gamers used to be a smaller group consisting of Nerds living in basements.
Nowadays everybody and their Mom plays games. So yeah, it's safe to say that the average gamer-IQ has dropped a few points.

 

[Aurora Firestorm]

Take off the nostalgia glasses. Games aren't just for the two nerds sitting in the corner. Now you have Grandma playing Wii Sports, little Junior playing Kirby on his DS, Tommy the college student playing everything, Tina the otherwise non-gamer sister playing The Sims...switch up the roles, but however you allocate them, everyone is a gamer these days, even if it's only Wii Tennis. Gamers are not dumber; you're just seeing more of the average population, rather than the very smart right side of the bell curve, playing games. You're also claiming, as far as I can tell, that some genres are "dumber" than others, when in fact there are some pretty deep and intense FPS games and some really stupid puzzlers. You can't judge a game by its genre, and Sim City was not the Holy Grail of video games, no matter what your rosy spectacles want to tell you.

On the glut of FPSes...go watch Extra Credits' first mailbag session. FPSes are numerous because people like them and they're easy to make via some widespread pre-made engines. Sooner or later, something else will take its place. Meh.

Here's one more thing to increase your faith in gamers' willingness to put forth mental effort and not just throw blood around. One of the most popular games ever is a puzzle game where you never fire a single bullet: Portal.

 

[puffy786]

1. The FPS games are just getting the most attention.
2. Stragedy and Simulation games are still out there.
3. The games are dumbed down to plain shooting just to apply to a larger audience. A market sim may seem complicated to new players, but everyone understand action.

 

[Stall]

It's simply that the market has widened, thus publishers and developers have to appeal to the lowest common denominator in order to maximize their profits. Even further, this fact is amplified by the huge budget of modern games. So, not only must developers and publishers appeal to a wider demographic than ever before, but the money they must spend to produce a game is simply massive, meaning the room for game makers to take risks and experiments decreases more and more with every passing game generation, so they have to go with something "safe" that will sell. "Safe," more often or not, has a lot to do with being simpler.

This is just a thing: it's not a bad thing or a good thing.

 

[Manji187]

Games are getting dumbed down for mass appeal (accessibility). It doesn't mean that ALL the players who play them are dumb though (some of em might be). Let's not be making sweeping generalizations.

Problem is, if we gamers really want more from games/ developers we need to organize ourselves to wield any kind of power. Right now, we've got purchasing power....which is only persuasive (capable of affecting developers) in big numbers. Big numbers are hard to organize + not every single gamer will have the same level of commitment.

Basically, on aggregate level we are a disorganized, non-committed group of people that therefore has no determinative power on the developers.

Make no mistake...this isn't some fancy restaurant where everyone gets to place an order. We just eat what we are served.

 

[SamBargeron]

wow... first I'll comment on what I thought this was going to be about. Once upon a time, the only people playing games were software engineers and their friends. So I would say gamers were smarter exclusively during that time. Once games became available to a paying audience, average intelligence became a symptom of society and is ultimately unlikely to change.

You are trying to make a claim that because you took selective screenshots of two complicated old school games and a few modern games that are more approachable, that modern games are less sophisticated? That they take less thought?

If you want a game with many options and buttons, they still make those. They will always make those. You wanna talk about a simple game that takes very little thought to understand? How about Tetris? Mario Brothers? Should we compare a modern flight simulator to Qbert as proof that we're smarter than the gamers of old?

 

[PunkRex]

Theres definatly MORE people playing games. More people mean the groups within gaming grow. Theres also alot more smarter people playing games these days.

So I would say that there are more dumber people playing games (im not exactly the sharpest shruiken in the ninja bag) but I wouldnt say their dumber on average although they might be... AAAHHH MATHS, BLARGGGGH.

 

[Dogstile]

Gaming Elitists are dumber for actually believing all this.

Oh, mind elaborating on your position? Because simply throwing an ad hominem while the other side is presenting and supporting arguments makes you the one who looks dumber.

Quite simple really. There is a greater amount of people playing games. The wider the appeal to the casual audience, the lower the average intelligence will get as current developers are trying to appeal to them as intelligence is rarer.

However, the OP is intentionally picking the most complex old games and the least complex new ones. Games nowadays are still pretty complex if you look in the right place, but if you stare at the triple A games industry you will always feel like games are getting dumber, because they're appealing to the working class right now.

So gaming elitists would make themselves out to be dumb, as instead of focusing on the entire games industry in general, they choose to focus on the dumbest part and proclaim that the entire industry is like that.

Which, hilariously, is the same thing that racists do when they see a black person. Same logic, different subject. And I think we'd all agree that racists are stupid.

(By racists i meant people who are actually racist, not people who will make the odd racist joke. I don't regard that as true racism as you can joke about something without believing in it)

 

[ShadowsofHope]

I don't know about you, but if I want to go hours upon hours of number crunching to achieve something, I'll take a fucking Math semester.

Otherwise, I'll be over here stabbing things with swords, shooting aliens and creating legends in my own personal fantasy experiences, thank you.

 

[eggy32]

So because games these days are simpler and easier to play, the people who play them are dumb?
That makes little sense to me. Game have been made more accessible. Except FPSs, they've been made more compelx.

CoD and Battlefield are much mroe complex than Doom or Wolfenstein.
Looking at the OP, all you've showin is that older strategy games had a lot more micromanaging than modern shooters. It was very dumb of you to compare games of completely different genres. Strategy games will always be more complex than FPS games.

And strategy games with micromanaging do still exist. Simcity still exists, RPGs still exist.

So no, gamers haven't become dumber, you've just chosen (in a rather dumb manner) to focus on the best selling games while somehow forgetting that more than 4 games have been released this generation.

EDIT: I'm currently resisting the urge to make a topic entitled "Are today's gamers, on average, smarter?" and comparing E.T. on the Atari To Dragon Age Origins.

 

[thejackyl]

No, not really.

Old games were never as complex as people like to think. They just had really shitty GUIs and an over-reliance on number crunching.

This: I had a demo of X-Com, and for the life of me couldn't figure out what anything did. Since tutorials didn't exist, and this was a demo, I didn't have the manual either.

However, I watched a Let's Play of it (a couple missions), and suddenly I could play it an I actually understood everything.

Also, I bigger reason games seem easier than they were 20 years ago, is because, back than maybe 10 people made an entire game. Now we have 100s to 1000s of people working on a single game. Bugs, control difficulties, and other things like that can be worked out much easier when people who aren't working on the controls play test.

 

[Ickorus]

HCI is fun, you make a slick interface and remove irrelevant components (Be it statistics, controls of a host of other possiblities) and people instantly denounce you for 'dumbing it down' when all you've done is made it easier to get to the actual game instead of wading through spreadsheets for several hours before initiating a fight.

Also OP, not a fair fight putting up a bunch of shooters against Sims, and RTS games; try The Witcher or perhaps even Cities XL.

 

[Blackpapa]

EDIT: I'm currently resisting the urge to make a topic entitled "Are today's gamers, on average, smarter?" and comparing E.T. on the Atari To Dragon Age Origins.

I'm resisting the urge to go out and map the various genres on a chart based on release date and platform.

For ‼SCIENCE‼.