Video gaming has gone mainstream

Recently everyone has noticed how much "easier" and "casual" the game has become, and many people are left wondering...why?

Way back when we first started playing video games (most likely when we were much younger), video gaming was not popular. Most of the time video gamers were classified as "loners" or "losers" while the "cool" kids were playing outside, you were inside playing those iconic games that made you love video games the way you do now.

You played great classic games like Pong, Frogger, Pacmac, followed by blockbusters like Mario, Zelda and Final Fantasy... You maybe even saw those first Blizzard games like Lost Vikings and Blackthorne.... Meanwhile, the vast majority of the world was outside playing hide and go seek with the neighbor kids, playing football at the park, etc...

Video games were designed for video gamers... Many games came in 1 difficulty, and that difficulty was usually extremely difficult (of course there were some stream roll games). I can't remember the name of the game, but there was an NES game that basically had you completely restart should you ever die...

Then the first genre of MMOs came out... text-based, then graphical... I remember some of these MMOs not even having quests, they were merely grinds for hundreds of levels... many of them would require weeks of grinding to gain ONE level, only for you to be about 5 kills away from leveling, to then die and lose ALL the experience... forever.

THEN it happened... video gaming went mainstream... All of a sudden, gaming systems were becoming cheap enough that everyone was getting involved... The internet was seriously booming, everyone was doing stuff like MySpace (then Facebook)... and games were everywhere for free to play, and more and more people started to get involved... Eventually there were tournaments for large sums of money to do nothing but play a video game, and that brought even more people in.

Now, remember that friend of yours who would sit down and play Mario Bros with you and couldn't find the run button? Most of the time he'd try to make a jump and die cause he just couldn't figure out where the jump button was, or grasp the concept of holding it THE ENTIRE GAME.... Well, he only use to play video games cause you were friends, and he was joining in the activities you liked... but now, he too is a "gamer"... but the concept of running while jumping still doesn't make sense to him, because let's face it, video gaming (as it was) really isn't for him....

Now companies are starting to see sales in the "millions" instead of hundreds or thousands... All of a sudden, if you make a game easy enough it will bring in all the "new age" video gamers who didn't struggle with extremely hard games. If you make the game too hard, they usually get extremely upset, and stop buying your product... however, if they steam roll it, then they will stick around longer because they feel they are "good" at the game.

So, basically, people don't have the patience to die because games today enable players to beat them without ever dying. As a result, players don't know the feeling of finally beating that really hard game that made your eyes bleed, or the satisfaction of knowing you beat that game on 'Very Hard' instead of 'Very Easy' or 'Normal'.

All us veteran gamers will have to deal with a world where everyone plays video games, and video games need to be made for everyone. Perhaps we can look forward to a time where there are companies will want to release games for those veteran hardcore gamers, but for now, most games will be made to be extremely casual if they want to have any success with the mass market.

The average person in the world is busy and doesn't have a lot of time to video game... instead of WoW simply not being a game for them anymore, Blizzard wants the game to be for everyone and for everyone to enjoy playing WoW. This means, you must be able to enjoy WoW while only being able to play it for a few hours a week, as a result, you need fast heroics, easy raids and quick PVP battles (timers added to bgs like wsg recently).

What's my point? Nothing... lol, just rambling and thought I would share my 2 cents :P

Source: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1077912-Video-gaming-has-gone-mainstream

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