Video Games Are Boring

This is failed design. I eventually gave up on Call of Duty because while the control and bite-sized (multiplayer) games were great, there were such fundamental flaws in skill matching and team-work that it was un-enjoyable once the novelty was gone.

I compare this to Overwatch and hope games will continue in this direction. Matchmaking is much more balanced and team-work is far more important. It still has a long way to go, especially in rooting out toxic players and making it easier to spontaneously group with players you like -- but its an improvement and hopefully a trend that will continue.

And also, we need to move away from the idea that some games or genres are objectively better or more interesting than others. It's all relative to the audience - some people have a stronger reaction to some experiences than to others, and will seek out different things.

Nick Yee has been doing excellent, data driven research on the interaction between player preferences, game types, and personality types - there's some intro material from his gdc talk on their web site: http://quanticfoundry.com/gdc/

It's important to be clear whether one is describing gaming as a whole, or "mainstream" gaming. Many criticisms of mainstream gaming don't apply to "gaming" as a whole, which includes things like a visual novel community, hidden object games, and the "walking simulators" that have almost no presence in the mainstream but definitely exist. They have almost no discoverability, being buried under games with advertising budgets an order of magnitude larger than what those games will make in revenue (let alone profit), but they exist.

So when you say something like "we need to step out of what we consider games and try to think of a different audience who wants a new kind of experience with attributes, such as depth or relatability", it's easy for those who already have to perceive that as a bit of an insult. "We" may not be as encompassing as you or the original author think it is, and some people may resent being categorized into that "we".

That’s an interesting thought that I can’t disagree with.

Myself and many people in my circle, including clients, have had played games in the past, probably to the point of unhealthy obsession when we were kids and getting an education.

But all of us became less enchanted by the medium as we became more successful (success in terms of increasing our financial wealth, control of time and ability to experience or get what we desire in life). We just couldn’t justify the time to play the games that were coming out, which we believed were not sparking the same fire in us that games we played years ago had (possibly due to rose-tinted glasses).

According to the article I guess I now seek games with more depth. Games that can impart some useful knowledge and help me reframe things in life, like a good book can. To use BioWare as an example, I believe their older RPGs like Jade Empire did this well, that struck a balance of philosophy, problem solving and interesting narrative. But this went away when they dove more into RPGs that dived deeper into the power fantasies that most consumers want.