While I disagree with Jim's specific tone of approach in this vid, I agree 1000%(that is not a typo on my part) with the specific message. I'm old-school, and the old-school definition of replay-value is simply "do I want to play the game again purely for the enjoyment of experiencing it again". Extra elements like achievements, medals, trophies, badges, easter eggs, hidden characters, unlock modes, etc. intended to create replay-value, in my opinion, turn out to be nothing but chores, mindless hamster-wheeling, that, in actually, add no real value to the game. The only people I can see enjoying such extras are completionist, but they are doing so only because there is more to be done in the game. If those elements were not there, they would be just as satisfied with having completed whatever content does exist in the game. At the end of the day, they are just meaningless virtual merit badges.
In fact, in agreement with Jim, the effort to create these extra elements is taking too much away from the developer's ability to make a solid, compelling singular experience in the core parts of the game that gamers would willing replay based on its own merits of enjoyability. So, in some indirect sense, these extra elements actually decrease the overall worth of the game because the core of the game has been reduced in enjoyment value.
I'm not going to rant on the attention-span issue that Jim brings up, but I do have to concur that many gamers today seem to suffer from a constant need to be distracted by the next shiny object. Constantly running away from reality is not a healthy activity, in my opinion.
Addendum: Watching the video a second time(yes, I am watching it twice cause I enjoyed the point. Replay-value!), he claims that it is gamers that profess the idea that these extras are necessary for replayability. However, it has been my experience that it has primarily been the recent(last 15 years) gaming press that has been constantly pushing this idea in almost every review of every bloody game. This along with the idea that a game must be longer than some specified number of hours in order to be fun or present a good experience.
I perceive these warped views of fun and the requirements for fun as being derivative of the misguided effort to create precise, objective review scores to every game. As I've written in another post, I feel the precision of current review scores, such as 1 part in 1000, 1 part in 100, and even 1 part in 10, is completely bogus because it is impossible to have such precise judgement of creative works better than roughly 1 part in 5(excellent, good, mediocre/okay, bad, and shitty, and one could argue to separate the "mediocre/okay" qualification into two parts to make a 1 part in 6 precision). Humans can only give, at best, a qualitative assessment of the quality of a creative work because we are often going by mood and feeling. It also doesn't help that the scores are constantly being artificially compressed to the higher ranges(currently in the 70-100% range), causing a lost of meaning for any given assigned score.
Turning gaming reviewing into a mere number-crunching effort(count the number of achievements, modes, etc., count the number of polygons and the resolution of the textures, count the number geek references, and so on) makes assigning a review score much easier and objective, but it does not have any necessary alignment to the true qualities of value in determining the worth of the game to the gamer: did I have fun playing it, and do I want to play it again because I just enjoyed the experience that much? Not also, this worth will be different for different gamers because of different interests, perspectives, and mores; thus, it is simply impossible to assign a completely valid objective measure. Even a 1 part in 5 score precision would still have to be qualified with the type of gamer to which the game is likely to appeal.
