As Attention Spans get shorter… [snip]
I remember when MTV first launched it was blamed for destroying a generation’s attention span – the 3-minute music video was said to be about the only dramatic length the youth of the day could cope with. The same criticism has been made of the editing in modern reality shows, that turn the opening of an envelope into a swishly put-together action-movie scene with thumping music and vibrant camerawork. TV has a lot to answer for apparently.
I wonder if a similar attention-span effect has occurred in modern gaming.
I find that my patience wears extremely thin very quickly with games these days. In Prince Of Persia you cannot die, yet I find myself getting incredibly frustrated with having to retry short 60-second sections of obstacles until I can pass them. In Deadspace last night I got annoyed with having to retry one section of combat four of five times. I gave up on the very last mission (I presume) of GTA4 simply because I got bored of replaying it. The same with the last mission of Crackdown.
It wasn’t always this way, Games used to be proper hard, and the penalties for one mistake were often fatal, and the hour of your life you’d spent getting there you wouldn’t get back! Most scrolling shooters from the 80s basically offer you one life – the moment you die your power-ups are lost and it’s unlikely any extra lives will rectify the problem. Die at the end of a level and you would be frequently thrown right back to the start – that was the norm, and nobody complained about it at the time.
Go back far enough and there were no save-games, so the very idea of picking up where you left off is still a distinctly modern phenomena. The moment you switch off the machine your game was gone forever – games had to be completed in one sitting. I remember when you would load up an RPG and be perfectly comfortable with the idea that you would be starting again each time you play. I suppose the norm was set by the arcade games – the idea that once your virtual coin was in the machine, you were paying for a set challenge that would only last as long as you could survive. Failing at the final hurdle in a long game would be a deep shock to the system.
These days, any real penalty for death grates. The impressive demo of Red Faction: Guerilla is spoilt by the way you are thrown back to the start of the action on death. There were lots of complaints about GTA4 throwing the player back to the start of the mission. The lack of an option to immediately retry a race in Burnout: Paradise was constantly criticised, and has now been added.
I remember when death was death – when humans only had one life, and if they messed it up that was it. Not like these days where people have multiple lives – if you threw yourself off a cliff in my day, that was that.
I would like to know how and when our attitudes to these games changed. I’m wondering if there is some connection to the hub systems in games, pioneered by Super Mario 64 for example – the idea that there is a homebase in games, a fall-back if all else fails. I also think that at some point games became ‘immersive’ in a way much more directly comparable to films – Half-Life for example is a cinematic experience, that relies on a full story being told in order, with a filmic three-act structure and twists and turns.
But there’s also been a gradual compression of time in games. Compare the turn-based vintage strategy games with the action-oriented real-time strategy counterparts – suddenly bases sprout in a few seconds, battles are fought in minutes, a living breathing city can flourish within an hour.
The bottom line is that games are getting better, and as they do our demands on them increase. Because if they don’t cut it, there are plenty of alternatives for us to turn to. The idea of two levels in a game being essentially the same is virtually dead now – each new turn needs a new emphasis, a new backdrop, some change in the gameplay, some variety to keep us engaged. Games have to work much harder, basically.
So maybe it isn’t so much that our attention spans have shortened – maybe it’s more that as our attitude towards games have matured, the idea of spending time on something intrinsically fruitless seems pointless to us. And rightly so. Perhaps the novelty of early videogames has worn off – the idea that a game actually works and that the controls are responsive used to be enough, whereas now it’s a basic expectation. We’ve moved on.
