It seems to me the author of this article is just speculating on what goes through people's minds without actually having asked any real gamers. Personally, the thing I find lacking in most games today is good gameplay. Developers are so caught up with putting in fancy graphics and realistic physics and all this other dumb useless shit, when all that really matters is the gameplay. I can list dozens upon dozens of games from the NES/SNES era that I love and re-visit from time to time because they were truly fun to play, but nowadays it seems eye candy is the main focus with the gameplay being a distant afterthought.

There are still some good games being released these days, but it's honestly hard to find many titles I am willing to spend money on. Most companies don't do anything original anymore because they are scared to lose money, but playing the same, slightly different game for the thousandth time gets stale. The author seems to discredit people's complaints simply because "EVERYTHING IS AWESOME IN GAMING RIGHT NOW OMG", which is just sad. Everything is NOT awesome in gaming right now; there are many reasons to be dissatisfied with the overall state of the industry, particularly big-budget titles.

I am honestly more interested in indie titles right now, simply because of the risks they can afford to take. There are a lot of platforms for indie games at the moment and practically anyone can get in on it; the entry barrier is relatively low. Granted, there is a lot of crap there too, but the one thing you will see more of is innovation, which to me is what its all about.

Every game is too short, although we never finish the games we play.

I always finish games that are worth playing. If it's not worth my time, why the hell would I bother wasting more of my time just to finish it? A good game is like a good book, it draws you in and you find yourself having trouble putting it down every night even though you need to go to bed and wake up early in the morning.

Every game is too expensive, although we demand ever-increasing levels of interaction, graphical fidelity, and length.

Some things are not difficult to implement, but developers seem to waste a lot of time on useless bullshit. Old PC FPS's (DooM, Duke3D, Blood) had endless replayability simply because they shipped with or otherwise offered free level editors and the community was usually very lively, meaning you could go online and download thousands and thousands of user-made maps, thus extending the length of the game. I suppose there will always be those people who cry about graphics in games, but honestly developers should just stop worrying about them so much. If the graphics aren't realistic enough for you, GO OUTSIDE. The rest of us want to play a game that is FUN, not some artist's wet-dream imagining of a virtual world. The graphics should be just good enough to convey the information needed by the player to play the game (mood may be important as well, but you don't need a multimillion dollar budget to accomplish that!) Interaction is easy to implement, even Duke3D had a lot of it! You have a 'use' key, usually, so just add different actions for different objects in the game! This is not rocket science!

I think it's safe to say most developers have lost sight of what game development should be about. The big companies are at odds with themselves; you just can't have that many people working on a game without a myriad of conflicting interests and ideas, but ultimately it is going to boil down to money and what some bean counter has convinced the higher-ups of being most profitable for the game. Thus, they reallocate their resources and you get what we have today -- a bunch of overpriced crap and some idiot writing an article about how people should stop complaining because gaming is SO AWESOME today. Barf!

AAA games are too long? My experience with the latest so-called AAA games is that they are too short. It looks like the developers spend most of their time crafting magnificent graphics and then the rest of the game is an after-thought that you can finish in 10 hours or less. There are so many different things you can do to a game to add replay value, why on earth would you want to shorten a game people are shelling out $50 or $60 for?

Maybe I'm spoiled, but all of the old games I used to play I could play for weeks, maybe months, and still come back a year or two later and pick it back up. I am skeptical of the "gamers are losing patience" line; casual gamers, by their very nature, never had the patience to begin with and you can't really lump them in with the rest of us. Figure out your target market and make your game based on that, don't try to shoehorn your game into a market that doesn't want it.

Personally I look at it as survival mode... I've learned to be much more cautious while venturing into the depths and it would not be as fun without the threat of death; it's sort of like Nethack in that regard. Still, there should be a point to all the mining, maybe something like you need to collect enough of a specific ore so that you can build something to get off the planet, or you're trying to unearth some type of artifacts. The game still is technically in Beta though and I can't really knock it for being incomplete, but it is still a game in my eyes.

Dying in Minecraft when you are exploring a naturally-generated cave far away from your camp and are near the bottom of the world is frustrating, much more so than a "minor annoyance", especially if your diamond tools and armor end up landing in some lava. Why such hate for Minecraft? Go make your own game if you are so enlightened with what constitutes a game, I'm sure it would be the best thing since sliced bread.

...and making it popular isn't a significant achievement? I rest my case.

Thank you! More people need to get over the whole "democrat/republican" thing because it distracts them from looking at issues that truly matter. As far as I'm concerned, there is too much money in this country and the politicians would rather obey the commands of those with money than of those from the general public. Our whole system is inherently flawed and littered with excess waste; we should just uproot the damn thing and start over!

Diablo added almost nothing to the gaming world? Wow, really? Thousands of people still play Diablo 2 to this very day and since it came out we have seen many new games referred to as "Diablo clones". If a game that has other developers trying to imitate it isn't precedent-setting, I don't know what is.

Don't forget Good Old Games: http://www.gog.com/en/frontpage/! They have a great collection of old PC classics and I'm pretty sure the older titles are updated to work on newer OS's. There are plenty of games on here that work with Linux, as well. Also, everything is pretty damn cheap, so you don't have to spend a lot of money to legally own these classics.

Actually you can buy the original game with the first two expansions for only $20 right now. Add that to the $40 Cataclysm and you're only looking at $60 for the original game and all the expansions, including a free month of game time. They also provide free trials for the game which last for 10 days I believe.

Guitar Hero and Rock Band are vastly different from Dance Central. My guess is strumming or drumming along to a track is much more preferable to a likely out-of-shape hardcore gamer than is copying an on-screen avatar's dance moves without any tactile feedback whatsoever. I still seriously doubt you'll see hardcore gamers picking this up. Maybe the casual crowd will take a liking to it, but as I already said before, that crowd has a Wii and I doubt they'll be shelling out $300 or whatever it is for a 360 and Kinect.

You are dealing with people that mostly wouldn't remember what an "ion" is. When you say "smashing iron", they think of banging two iron bars together.

Those are the kind of people we don't want coming to Slashdot anymore.

Yes, since millions of self-proclaimed "hardcore" gamers with an XBox are going to be frothing at the mouth for Dance Central. Give me a fucking break. I bet the thing flops because developers will almost exclusively target the casual audience, which the Wii already has under lock, and the casual audience by definition isn't going to care to replace their casual gaming system with another. Don't get me wrong, I think the technology is interesting (albeit without tactile feedback), but it's clear they are trying to copy-cat Nintendo's motion-gaming success.

Spectator mode helps a lot. Generally just start with one thing (i.e. try not to die) and then move your way up. Once you feel comfortable with the controls and weapons, start spectating the players that are handing your ass to you. Try to figure out what things they are doing that give them an edge over you and then practice doing those things on your own. I don't know if the game you're talking about has spectator mode, but Quake II had it and it was incredibly useful. Also, creativity pays off pretty well in these kinds of games if you can trap people or something similar.

When the graphics and characters are less realistic you don't expect the same level of human.. ness.

I have to disagree. Even a book, which has no graphics, can make you feel attached to its characters. The trick is capturing the character's essence with words and reflecting that in the graphics. I always feel that a character is more real when the story is well written, not because she may have big hooters or cool-looking equipment.

Nobody ever slapped kids around when I was in marching band. We got yelled at and directors threw shit around, sometimes they made us run if we hadn't been practicing or whatever, but nobody was ever physically injured. Thanks for assuming people were being physically hurt, though. Anyway, all I was saying with my previous post is that parents shouldn't freak out when their kid gets disciplined. Almost every kid needs a good spanking every now and then. Or in the case of teenagers, maybe a few laps around the school.