Adapting Games for the Aging Gamer
As I get older — and I know I’m not very old yet — my personal preferences, as well as my gaming capabilities, have changed. I have less time to play games now that I’m married, and even if I had the time, I’d be less likely to spend the endless hours playing them that I used to. It can be tempting to hope that games will adapt with me, or that my favorite MMO will adapt with me; unfortunately, it’s not the games that need to adapt, it’s me.
I’ve learned this fact over the past year or two, and I’ve been seeing that same complaint more frequently as MMO players mature — particularly, those like me who were teens when the genre was born and immediately adopted it. One of the best comments on this subject came from R.A. Salvatore in reference to his books, though it applies quite well to games:
Salvatore explained that he often gets emails, letters, or comments in person from people asking him to change his writing style to fit his now-older audience. People who read his books when they were in their teens are now in their twenties or thirties, and some of them need something more sophisticated or mature to satisfy them.
But, why would he change his preferred style of writing — not to mention the style of writing that made him famous — just to gratify those few aging readers, especially when there’s a whole new audience right around the corner ready to explore Icewind Dale or to immerse themselves in the DemonWars saga.
He’s not the one who needs to evolve his style in an attempt to keep the same people as his audience. I’d argue that he has the perfect writing style — not juvenile, but intentionally lacking in unnecessarily polysyllabic words or overcomplicated sentence structure — despite his aging readers desiring something more complex.
(Tangent: I have long postulated that neither convolution nor verbosity is conducive to readability or perspicacity. In other words, complexity and wordiness are harmful to readability and comprehension.)
Anyway, Salvatore isn’t the one who needs to change his writing style; the readers need to either continue to enjoy his books, or to seek out something a little “older” (in theme or writing style) like novels from George R.R. Martin or Michael Moorcock.
The point is, a game shouldn’t evolve its mechanics to serve its audience just because the original players have aged. It should evolve to keep up with the times, but never fundamentally change the gameplay, or the existing audience will be lost. The changes aren’t about adapting to an aging audience, they are about adapting to survive in the current market.
So, for people like me who are getting older and are acquiring new preferences and responsibilities, we need to look for other games for satisfaction; we don’t need to gripe about the games we’re playing and hope that they change for us.
Further Reading: Grimwell wrote a nice long post on the same subject, which was spawned by a comment I made on his blog. The comment I made spawned my post and was spawned by yet another post on his blog. Make sense? Doesn’t have to. Read Understanding Demographics.
I always want a game that can continue in some way while I’m not online and playing it. By continue I mean i can set up a construct of some kind (script, store, puzzle) and then log off. A day or two later I can log in and see how it’s going.
You get a bit of this in ATITD I think. To paraphrase from the ATITD wiki, in order to pass the initiation into art, you must build a sculpture and collect 21 “interesting” votes of appreciation. The sculpture requires a number of materials that take game time to create, as does creating the sculpture. Then, you can basically log off and come back in a few days to see if you’re getting the “interesting” votes you need. In other words, you don’t need to be online to make the next step happen.
That same idea would apply if you could script behaviors of NPCs or pets and robots. Give them a task, log off, come back later and see if they succeed. Imagine a mining robot that can get 1 “unit” of mineral an hour, whereas you yourself can get 10 units in an hour, but have to be logged in. Robots have a 10 hour battery life, so if you want, you can just start it up and log off and come back later. The robot can’t have a lot of impact on the game because it is so weak compared to a real player.
……mmmmmMMMMMM Mulitverse MMO, the world is just not ready.
I completely agree! The writer should keep his style, not change it for his aging audience. Thanks!
I found in recent years that the secret to gaming and remaining married is two fold (to ignore the bulk of your actual post…).
Thing 1:
Do stuff around the house without being asked. Or in my case prodded with great force.
Thing 2:
Sleep less. If you cut down to 5 hours you can add two gaming hours to the beginning or end of your day. Your millage may vary.
JP
I thought Salvatore’s trend of increasing the amounts of inner dialogue focused on morality every book was an attempt to appeal to older readers.
Anyways gamers are growing older and I think MMO’s will need to adapt to this fact and not the other way around. Age of Conan is probably the first MMO that I know about that purposely sought a M rating and I think a lot of people will be watching to see if it becomes popular. The average gamer is over 20 and yet most of us are playing MMOs that would be rated PG if they were movies. Eventually developers will realized that gamers over 25 isn’t a niche but actually the base of the market. We already have some MMOs that seem to attract and retain older gamers. The majority of people I know who play EQ2 seem to be middle age and appreciate the more complex game compared to LOTR or WOW .
[...] Byte: Ryan Shwayder tackles the problem of mature gamers and readers seeking heavier fare. He suggests that games aren’t going to [...]
Now that I’m 35, married, and have a job in that God awful arena of politics…I’m almost embarrassed to say that I played MMOs seven days a week since I could remember. But I think that as an adult, you just have to be more adult about your game play. I agree a lot with what you are saying, Ryan.
In the early days of my career, when I was in news, I always said I would never schedule my life around the game/s I was playing at the time. Being all growded up and stuff, now I play games like an adult. I work gaming into my schedule along with everything else. And I talk to my wife about it. I just tell her that the guild is getting together on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday morning this week. I never get grief because she knows I stick to my schedule on off nights. My friends appreciate the heads up on my schedule so they can plan, too.
The aging gamer definitely has to adapt to the games.
Those of you who might happen to read my blog may already know that I am an older gamer. You also may notice from my writing style that I am developing adult-onset ADHD or something equally as hideous. This past weekend, I had a milestone birthday (yeah, I’m 50 now) that I’m sure only serves to heighten my awareness of the issue.
I’m finding that it’s getting more and more difficult for me to concentrate while playing an MMO for long periods of time if I’m not doing something that is highly directed (i.e. a raid or something of that ilk.) If I’m just out and about duoing with Tarkheena, I can tell she gets a little frustrated with me as my mind tends to wander and I can almost get us killed.
I’m definitely changing the way I play to avoid frustrating either Tark or myself during our regular play times. I’m finding that if I’m questing I’m more engaged than if I’m just out trying to slaughter mobs.
I’ll keep you all posted as my dementia matures.
Hopefully there will be new games coming along to appeal to the aging gamer segment. I understand that the existing game[s] shouldn’t adapt to me but the door swings both ways…I’m not going to waste time and money on games that don’t serve my needs.
Bill the Quill, Dickens, Plath - name your favourite…. They have been consistently studied at school for a very long time.
Bob’s work will survive hopefully as long as The Famous Five, or Nancy Drew etc. As in that it will always satisfy a certain readership age, will go in and out of fashion, but will remain there past all our lifetimes. Genuine classics.
But MMO’s, or EEO’s, or whatever are not classics, at least not yet. My kids may laugh hilariously when i put my ColecoVision on, or my Atari and try and make my old TV play Pong or Asteroids. Those are classics from the 70’s and 80’s.
I don’t even know if it is possible to make a ‘classic’ game these days. Is it possible to update Pong, Asteroids, Elite, EQ1 to the rank of a new classic? At the moment, I doubt it.
The books of RAS will likely become classics - Drizzt will live on forever. Me, you, and the author will not though, just like computer games of this decade.
I wrapped around this point earlier this week but was not nearly as succinct so I’m not going try to paste it all into the comments run. I blame Ryan for the entire entry though…
Ryan,
I’m glad the original developers of UO, EQ, etc. did not see this post! We have the MMO genre thanks to those who thought that RPG’s should be adapted to better fit the changing lifestyle of its fans. I think you are right though, if you want to make just another MMO, you won’t have to change anything.
Kevin,
MMOs were not created to serve older gamers, they were created to serve (and create) a different market. I’m also talking more about changing an existing MMO rather than creating an entirely new one — adapting it to the market is a good idea, changing it because those who initially played your game are now X years older is not.
It’s also a bad idea to fundamentally change the gameplay of a game for pretty much any reason. Again, I’m talking about existing MMOs. World of Warcraft did a good job of changing existing MMOs into something new, but I would never convert, say, EverQuest or Ultima Online to be just like WoW because you’re just going to lose everyone who still loves your game (while continuing to fail to appeal to people who play WoW).
In a far more succinct statement, “stick to your guns.”
I always preferred “dance with the date who brung you”.
[...] Ryan Shwayder and Grimwell both recently posted about if an aging demographic should affect a game in production and future game design, and there has been much recent discussion about change in WoW by Heartless, Foton and others. [...]