Video Games Are Boring

Most of the time, games are structured by people whose viewpoint and incentives are radically different from the players. In the short term, the industry doesn't "care" if you play because you're bored and there's no real choice (for AAA levels of production effort) and because that's what your friends are doing, and there's a little variable schedule of reward that's gotten its hooks into you.

The most memorable times I had in Eve Online were entirely through emergent gameplay. I and my fellow alliance players in 0.0 security space couldn't give a rat's ass about anything the content team generated -- except as a source of resources in our own player-generated drama of building a player owned station. The emergent stuff is what really engages the mind. That's the real "play" that's going on in games -- not the publishing company's interest in keeping us paying a subscription. That stuff was 100X more engaging than anything some content team could dream up.

I find there's a whole subset of gamers today who remind me of the college students who would come up to you at the beginning of a course, and ask if you'd play their "college game" with them -- You tell them exactly what to spit back out during exams, they memorize that list, they get their grades, they satisfy their requirement, and no one has to actually care or be engaged or actually learn anything. Those students remind me of a lot of gamers. It's not about finding fun, genuinely engaging, unexpected gameplay. It's about getting expectations met, and getting the stuff they're entitled to.

I got fed up, and I've decided to do something about it. I'm self-funding and making my own MMO, and I'm going to do my best to have it be about emergent play. I'm very far from being able to tackle those issues, but I have a server cluster that can spawn any of the 2^87 star systems, and support 70 players in the same multiplayer battle. All but one of those 2^87 star systems are identical at this point, however. But that's the next thing on my list. No RPG progression yet, but we'll get there. I want to make an MMO that's specifically built for smart people, where no one gets nerfed, no one grinds, and devs never give any sympathy to forum whiners.

http://www.emergencevector.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3DPalL7p5w&list=PLnAL8xf0QQ...

(I'm planning a game that you'd have to spend hours and hours on, overall, but I'm going to try and structure it so you can play in half-hour, hour, or two hour sessions.)

In the end, playing games labeled with either "theme park" or "sandbox" doesn't change the fact that you are still playing within the confines of someone else's world; I can't create a functional X-Wing in Minecraft and fly to Tattoine, no matter what blocks I put together.

The parent was enjoying driving a car around through a fictional (and populated) setting, so pointing them towards a "build your own adventure" game is probably not going to tickle their fancy nearly as much.

Have you looked at Terraria? Also, you mentioned Freespace 2. I'm doing a self-funded project where I'm building an MMO space game aimed at deeply emergent gameplay.

http://www.emergencevector.com

Thanks!

> I Google searched for all of 5 seconds just to have some links to back up what I already knew from 15 years working in games and films

That is precisely the problem. You already knew what you wanted to find, so even though we are looking at the same data, we are interpreting it differently based on our different experiences.

>You realize that complaining about feminist schtick is a sexist male chauvanist thing to do, right?

By saying things like that you reinforce @tnones point. I disagree with him but your dismissive attitude is not proving him wrong.

> Why would there be huge a gender difference in purchasing patterns, and not in playing patterns

That's what the data you found says, so don't dismiss it just because you can't easily explain it. The explanation I can come up with is that games are expensive and wealthy people buy more of them. Straight-white-male-privilege correlates to wealth.

EDIT: I think your mistake could be that you believe people who can't afford games don't play them. As a person with 25 years of experience in being poor, I can assure you that is not the case.

> Not helpful at all is denying that it exists like @tnones.

If @tnones is right then complaining about sexism is a waste of time and effort that detracts from the effort we should be applying to the "real issue", whatever it is. Like you say, the problem seems to be going away on its own (just like the gender wealth gap, further supporting my theory that we are looking at wealth correlates).

I don't think discussion about the "real cause" of the problem or even about whether the problem exists at all is unhelpful, as long as it is kept civil and does not detract from the real work of people like the author.

EDIT: Forgot you asked me about quotes! Just search for the words white and male in the article. Almost every time she mentions those it's to put forward a stereotype.