Attention Span Wars and the "Golden Age" of Gaming

[icycalm]

[Due to challenging life circumstances (see my irl blog in the Cult Discord #offline channel) I am unable to properly update the site right now, but I still have things I want to post. So, since I only get a few productive moments per day, I will break down my essays into small forum posts, and when the essay is complete I'll move it to the Art Theory section. -icy]


In the mid-2000s while I lived in Japan I spent a lot of time on niche/2D game forums because I was playing a lot of arcade games and 2D action games that the big sites wouldn't cover, or wouldn't cover well. Those forums were a treasure trove of info and insights into 2D and arcade games, but they were also a treasure trove of stupidity, especially when their 2D games and genres were compared to the 3D ones that at the time dominated the market. So while the focus in that scene was 2D, and most of the content stayed there, there were also the occasional threads and offhand comments lambasting 3D games and making fun of them.

I never really participated in those threads because I didn't see the point of it. Those guys knew what they liked and what they didn't like, and it was clear no one could change their minds. And since I was already getting into regular slagfests with them about 2D games where at least I had a chance at teaching those people a thing or two and making an impact on the scene, I didn't see the point of riling everyone up even further by unfavorably comparing their favorite games and genres to the 3D ones that were the cutting-edge of gaming at the time.

But I did read the threads and endless offhand comments directed against 3D gaming—as they couldn't be avoided, being all over the place—and I therefore learned those people's arguments, such as they were, inside out, the main one being that 3D gaming... takes too long. We're talking about linear action games like Metal Gear Solid, Devil May Cry and Halo that take a mere 10-20 hours to finish—barely more than a weekend, and really a single day if you're a gamer who knows what he's doing and has a day to kill—but for the 2D people this was already "too much"! They lamented that those games couldn't be enjoyed in 10-20-minute bursts like the typical arcade game and 2D action game, and they even bitched about the "complicated" control schemes which they would forget if they didn't touch the game for a while, forcing them to relearn it when they decided to pick the game up again!

By that time Grand Theft Auto III and its first couple of sequels were already out, but the open-world genre hadn't yet begun to dominate the market. A few years later it would, and the bitching by the 2D people would reach new heights, as those games require 50-100 hours to complete, and even a 2-hour session can be wasted without accomplishing anything. So of course the 2D people would bitch. What is noteworthy though is that, by that point, they weren't the only ones, as the 3D linear action people were now bitching alongside them! Yes, a great many fans of games such as Metal Gear Solid, Devil May Cry and Halo were now bitching that modern gaming had gone "off rails" (meaning their linear action rails lol), lost the plot, and was jumping on a bandwagon that was headed straight for a cliff!

Fast-forward a few more years, and now the market was flooded with survival-builders like Rust where a hundred hours don't even suffice to learn the basics, and clans require a minimum of 500, or 1,000, or even 2,500+ hours on your account before they'll even consider accepting YOUR APPLICATION to join them. And now it was the turn of the open-world crowd to join the 2D and linear 3D crowds in trashing those games as taking far too long to play and having too complex mechanics and interfaces to learn and remember, and yadda yadda yadda.

But that wasn't even the end. Not by a long shot. Because a few years later the first-person 4X games like Life is Feudal and Atlas would arrive, and while the survival-builders would wipe on a weekly or monthly basis, the FP4Xes would wipe ANNUALLY, if ever, and no one even talked about playtime anymore since to have any chance at survival in those games let alone success you had to play all day long, every day for weeks if not months. So yes, those games featured the most complex and realistic castles and ships ever, but that meant you had to spend untold amounts of hours digging ditches to build that castle or gathering supplies and outfitting your ship to sail on that expedition, so shut the fuck up and dig and gather if you want to get anything done, and if you get attacked in the meantime, them's the breaks, start over from scratch because life is feudal, peasant.

But even that was not the end, because the end arrived a few more years later with Star Citizen Alpha 3.0 which was the first good metaverse game, and which could for all intents and purposes replace your real life, if you wanted it to, or at least serve as an alternative to it, on a regular basis, forever. And of course it takes "forever" to get anything done in this game, because that's how long it takes in the gobsmackingly complex seamless and sprawling reality it's simulating.

What I am trying to show with the above analysis is that the Attention Span Wars are nothing new. Star Citizen didn't initiate them, they are as old as the hills, and they have been present and decisive in the evolution of videogames since at least the early-2000s when 3D gaming began obliterating the 2D games and genres. In fact the issue may go even further back, before scrolling 2D with stage progression was invented, because there is a small but loud minority of gamers who, to this day, champion single-screen action games like Space Invaders, Pac-Man and the like as the "Golden Age" of gaming, therefore regarding the lack of proper graphics and stages and scrolling as somehow superior to all subsequent developments. Don't ask me what those people's arguments are, if they have any: I don't know because I never frequented their communities. I wouldn't even know where to find them, or even if they exist. Maybe these people are too anti-social to have communities at all. That would track with how stupid they are. However, I HAVE played those games; my first game was Pong after all so I've seen and tried everything since pretty much the invention of the artform. But I was so unimpressed with them that I only played them at friends' homes or in hotels or on ferry rides and so on, never bothering to buy a machine and get into gaming for reals until the so-called "Golden Age" WAS OVER, and the new wave of more complex, more colorful and more sophisticated games with scrolling and stories and so on had arrived. In any case, just keep in mind that even the completely braindead single-screen single-button no-graphics no-story 3-minute-rounds style of gaming has its adherents, and they even have the nerve to call that period THE GOLDEN AGE OF GAMING.


P.S. The above analysis focuses on the evolution of the action genres, because the thinking genres like strategy, tactics, management, adventure and so on had been hitting the 100+ hour mark even in the 2D era with text and graphical adventure games, early CRPGs and games like Sid Meier's Pirates, Civilization and so on, and THOSE people never complained about lengthy playtimes, quite the opposite in fact, because they have much higher IQs, and therefore longer attention spans.

P.P.S. A similar analysis could be performed for ALL artforms, I am sure. It's not an accident that the greatest novel ever is 4,215 pages, and no one that you know has read it.

P.P.P.S. This essay is actually now complete but I don't have the time to post it in the Art Theory section. Will be doing so as soon as I find a moment.