Video Games Are Boring

I certainly agree that we should be trying new things. Only good things can come of that.

But I think it's very important to acknowledge that these "problems" with games are not born out of laziness, lack of creativity, or an inability to see outside the cultural in-group. Games boil everything down to easily countable abstractions, because games are, at their heart, nothing but systems of rules. Your health meter is an abstracted version of your physical well-being. Objectives are abstracted goal setting and cause-and-effect. Even if the game doesn't show you these numbers, it is still using them under the hood. What's the alternative? A deep, nuanced simulation? That'd be great, but it's well beyond the scope and means of the vast majority of developers.

Why do so many games include death? Because it's the only universally accepted fail state. It is simply impossible for 99% of games to provide anything more meaningful than that, because doing so involves exponentially more complexity, storytelling, and asset development. The best most can do is just cover the death up with new coat of paint (a la Braid).

Why have a fail state at all? Because the interactive nature of the medium loses a lot of its weight when your choices/actions don't seem to matter, and simulating anything other than simple failure is, once again, exponentially more difficult and expensive.

It is tragic that there is a certain vocal group that rejects alternative types of games like Dear Esther. I won't apologize for them. However, the games that are "mainstream"—and the games that are not—are not selected by some game industry cabal. The easily consumed, easily understood games sell so much more than the niche stuff precisely because more people are interested in that kind of thing.

Although the point of the article is that we need to think of different audiences (which is hard to disagree with), my main takeaway was that society is full of judgmental elitists who love to denigrate things they don't understand. In particular, the author's cousin seems like a very unpleasant person. Although the story of her encounter with Lydia is superficially touching, it's hardly a revelation, and we've all heard these stories before: friend/relative hates video games, finally plays one, is brought to emotional tears, yadda yadda. Finding a good game is roughly as difficult as finding a good book; the culture is not to blame for people's ignorance.

(As an aside, the true tragedy is that the cousin's experience had a lot more to do with her ignorance than with Skyrim its. Avoiding video games for your entire life practically guarantees that you'll be blown away the first time you find one you like, because the game is still "magic" to you. The magic wears off very quickly, however, and after that the meaningful experiences are much more rare. If you continue playing games, you find yourself wanting more than just some scripted dialogue, and that's why games so frequently feature the challenges and spectacles that the author says turn the non-gamers away.)

I believe it is an artistic mistake to target an audience in the way the author is intending with her studio. She mentions, "women aren't too unpredictable to study" and "what women like", as though what she learned from the "white male" centric industry is how to pander to a market for profit.

You're only making my point further by assuming "diversity" must imply a 50/50 gender distribution in the players.

Diversity implies differences in class, age, origin, occupation, and so on, and this is definitely the case in the consumer demographics. The fact that some games appeal more to men and others more to women is unsurprising, and irrelevant.

In fact, that you're seeing numbers such as 60/40 despite the game makers themselves being far more male-dominated suggests those men are doing a pretty decent job in appealing to people not like them.

I know that is what you intended to talk about, but I'm pointing out that it's not what your sources are talking about. They are about who buys games, about who identifies as gamer (i.e. is more susceptible to marketing)

> You're only making my point further by assuming "diversity" must imply a 50/50 gender distribution in the players. Diversity implies differences in class, age, origin, occupation, and so on

Sorry, but that's wrong. This is a common statistics mistake, let me try to help you.

You're conflating diversity of selection with diversity of demographics. There is one, and only one, way to demonstrate that something is "demographically blind".

The definition of "demographically blind" is when the number of people in each category playing games occurs in the same ratio as the number of people in that category in the general population. For example, for games to be demographically blind, there would need to be 3 men for every 2 women in the general population. The fact that men and women occur close to 50/50 in the population, and that men and women play games in a 3:2 ratio literally proves that games are not demographically blind.

Again I ask for some data. Have you worked in games? I have. Have you talked to publishers about cultural sexism? I have. Do you have any evidence for your claim that games are demographically blind? I provided some. Logic doesn't work, but feel free to prove me wrong with some data.