Random musings: are easy games spoiling the next generation?

Call me old fashioned, but when I heard that in the younger levels of soccer we no longer keep score so as to not give the players performance anxiety, it made me skeptical. Isn’t a point of playing sports to learn how to win and lose with grace and dignity? To make our kids understand that losing should be used as a motivation to get better and that success isn’t cheap? Not keeping score still to this day feels wrong to me, because I feel it devalues the experience and misses out on an opportunity to teach an important lesson about competitiveness and success.

It’s pretty much the same thing with gaming. I was having a discussion after class with a few students and I was complaining that games were becoming increasingly easy. It’s an old favorite of mine: when the risk versus reward is skewed towards consumerism and easy payoffs, it spoils the player. If you do it often enough over a long enough period of time, I feel it creates bad habits towards effort and the value of perseverance and, ultimately, success.

Last year I was having a discussion with my 12 year old about a game we both played and I asked him if he enjoyed it. His response was eye opening. He said ‘I finished it, so I enjoyed it’.

On what difficulty setting? ‘The easiest’.

So your enjoyment comes not out of playing the game but of the fact you played through it? ‘Indeed it is’.

So if a game is too hard? ‘I play something else’.

What if you enjoy the story, the play style of the hard game? ‘If I can’t finish the game fast, what’s the point?’

What’s the point? Really?

This is what I call the toaster conundrum: you remember those old toaster that our grandmothers used to have? The ones with two doors where you had to manually flip the bread to get both sides roasted?

Those things last forever! They were made from steel and had as little moving parts as possible, to lessen the possibility of it breaking. Unfortunately, since they lasted so damn long, the company didn’t sell as many as they could have if they broke more often. This planned obsolescence is now a given in the industrial world, and now we make 10$ toasters that are cheaper to buy but last just long enough to get us to our next payday. It’s disgustingly wasteful.

And this is where I see the gaming industry going.

New games, lesser content, cheaper to buy. Buy more often. Rinse and repeat. I can’t blame them. I’m an economist, they’re just supplying a product that consumers want. But it may be having an adverse effect on the people who grow up with those games: it’s making poeple lazy, as players and possibly as human being.

I was at a conference last Friday and one of the presenters, HEC Montréal professor Pierre-Majorique Léger, was talking about cognitive flow. This is a fascinating way to view optimal playing value in games depending on difficulty and experience (a cool article on cognitive flow by Sean Baron: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/166972/cognitive_flow_the_psychology_of_.php) 

Here is the graph that had me thinking:

Figure 1: Flow, boredom, and anxiety as they relate to task difficulty and user skill level. Adapted from Csikszentmihalyi, 1990. (Sean Baron http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/166972/cognitive_flow_the_psychology_of_.php)

The question I asked Professor Léger was: ‘what if the flow part in the above graph, from generation to generation, was slowly inching into the boredom section?’ What would that do, from a gaming industry point of view and, more importantly, socially speaking? What signals are we sending the next generation about overcoming hurdles and valuing success?

No one has an answer. It’s too big. Fun to think about though!

Actually, I might be wrong about the ease of newer generation games. I don’t think I am, but I could. It could actually be interesting to do research on that subject. Hmmm…Maybe go to Metacritic, and analyze the number of times difficulty-related words (hard, easy, frustrating, pleasure, enjoyment, etc.) are used in critics over different games that came out in various years. See if the difficulty of games is more prevalent in reviews 2014 than it was in the 90’s.

Seven hundred words later and all I am is worried. Worried about my clone army (my kids). Worried that they will choose their games not by the awesomeness and the challenge but by the ability to finish it in as few hours as possible.

My wife keeps talking about how sugar is now the number one epidemic in the world, killing more people than any disease ever has: obesity and heart disease and diabetes and sugar addiction and so on.

What if easy games are the brain’s version of sugar?