Why modern games can't keep my interest.

 The last days I've been thinking about my aversion towards gaming as of late. I think I have somewhat of an answer to it. Games are just not complicated anymore. They're beautiful and pretty. But not complicated. If games would have names nowadays, they would be called Tyffany. (No ill meant to beautiful, pretty girls named Tiffany that are rocket-scientists.)

Take for instance Skyrim. That game is the ultimate summit of artistry in electronic gaming. It blows your socks off. It's beyond eye-candy. It's eye-porn. But is it hard to grasp or really complicated? No not at all. The difficulty is in recurring and escalating bugs that become crippling as you progress in the game. But the game itself is does not exactly require a high-school education at minimum to play. For people who like to disect the underlying system of the "RPG" that it is supposed to be, Skyrim has precious little to offer.

But the most glaring evidence of games being dumbed down till the only reflex you need to play them is the involuntary reflex to breathe can be found in the offerings of Bioware. Mass Effect required you think about how you would build your Shep. Mass Effect 2 required you to think about how awesome your Shep would look while killing stuff. Dragon Age Origins had me glued to the screen trying to figure out how to match the perks with the character build, Dragon Age II had me thinking about how I could be done as fast as possible with the next map that was exactly the same as the last map, next to trying to have my Hawke look as fine as possible in cut-screens.

That dumbing down now makes sense, seeing as ME3 and the next DA will have multi-player. The more people that are allowed to play the game at once, the dumber the game has to be. Less filler ensures that people can be in the action as soon as possible, with toons that wear awesome armor and tote mindblowing weaponry. Fuck intelligence, it is a known fact that people in crowds become zombies. The game has to be adapted to level of stupidity that four people generate. I can't fault Bioware for that, even I would have advised to go that route had I worked at Bioware at the time of decision making, more or less. What annoys me is that Bioware started to prepare us for 4 person braindead clusterfuckery with ME2 and DA2.

(Even funnier is the assertion made by Bioware that the fans have come around to the idea and rallied behind them. Not a mention of the fact that everybody who said so much as "Poop Bioware" was banned from Bioware Social. For life.)

I want choice, decision making that means something. Allthough the choice between cooking a cake or selling the ingredients to a produce-peddler in a viking-village may seem like choice to you, it's not the kind of choice I'm looking for. Give me charts, numbers, anything. Give me depth! Fallout 3 was deep. Skyrim isn't. If Bethesda is on the same trail as Bioware, then I wouldn't be surprised if TES6 is multiplayer.

Todays games are shallow. Shiny and pretty. Popcorn-movie style. We might as well demand multiplayer Barbie Horse Adventures. We play anything that can loosely be called a game anyway.