What Stinks about Gaming in 2014?
Some say this is an awesome time to be a gamer. I don't agree: I'd say things are getting worse, not better. Start with the freemium model of game development, to which Henry Dowling says,There's a rancid stench wafting around the gaming industry of late, and it can only be attributed to the advent and subsequent growth of the freemium business model ... Vampiric developers and their publisher overlords sit hunched over analytic spreadsheets, chuckling throatily about nefarious things like coercive monetisation, pay walls and progress gates.Then, there's the endless patching. Think about it: yes, games are more complex these days, but the size of patches being shipped out now surpasses the size of the games themselves back in the day. Erik Fredericksen writes,
This isn't cleaning up code or fixing minor functionality issues, this is modifying massive parts of games. This is delivering the passenger seats a month after I bought the car.And don't even get me started on gaming culture. Wired has just published a highlight on online harassment . For starters, just look at all the abuse one female gamer has collected in a couple years of playing.
It all might just make you nostalgic for 1994 again , when everything was OK and 16 bits were all you needed.
Gaming is not much different than being an alcoholic. I know so many youth now that do nothing but game. They barely pass through school. They have no time to put any thought into a career path. And when they finally graduate they are perfectly happy with working at taco bell (or not working at all) and spending 80% of their time in front of the TV 'gaming'. Finally when they are 30, they realized that they have wasted most of their life. I was in the same boat once, but I managed to give it all up and go back to school for a degree in CS. I have also effectively banned all games from my household, with one exception, you can play the game if you are the one that made it. At least then you will have accomplished something somewhat productive. "Gaming" is a blood sucking time waster.