I've been working in the game business for 2 years now as an Animator and I understand what your saying but I think the way I enjoy games is just evolving. I see them differently than your average gamer off the street.

It was the same when I started taking film classes back in school. When I went to the movies I could appreciate a film in what I felt was a deeper way than when I didn't know anything about story arcs or shot-flow or editing. Now I know I can understand why I do or don't like a film in detail.

It's the same with games, now I can pick apart why a game is fun or why I get bored after an hour or so. Being an animator I naturally focus more on the movement I see and I often can't stand to keep playing a badly animated game. But would I have be doing myself any favors to keep playing if I was ignorant of what makes good animation?

I know a few older game developers, and they don’t play games anymore, and I think it has everything to do with seeing the man behind the controls for Oz; once you know how it’s done, the magic starts to wane.

While not a developer or programmer, I am a Great Old One of video games (approaching 30 years' worth of playing) and I have the same feelings - the only twist is that for me, the lethargy and weary contempt come from the length and scope of exposure.

Like a once-favorite style of music that you now can barely stand to hear.

A doctor friend on mine once told me that boredom is biologically-based. Re-experiencing the same thing over and over again 'wears down' the neurological sequences to a point where your brain prods you to try something new...

i am gearing myself up for a career in game development (once i finish college next year), and this post troubles me.

before i entered college, i had to make a decision about whether i wanted to major in computer science or in music. i have always had a great passion for programming and playing piano. i decided on majoring in programming and shooting for making video games because of long discussions i had with older people who either play music for a living or majored in music in college. it seemed to me that, while they still had great appreciation for music, they had effectively taken their passion and turned it into work. no longer was it their joyous hobby; they seemed to be sort of worn down by years of practise and composition.

i decided to go for CS because i was afraid that i would lose my passion for playing music if it became work. now i wonder if the same will happen to me with regard to programming and video games. or maybe it wouldn't have happened if i had chosen to direct my life towards music rather than video games? maybe it's always better to turn your passion into your living?

this is difficult...

-titus

Titus: I think you made the right choice. I was going to either do code-slinging or art when I went away to college, and because I loved art more, I majored in it. Today I kind of wish that I had gone into programming, and kept art as just my personal hobby. Now when I draw or paint, I feel that I *must* meet a certain watermark or I'm not using my education to its fullest. I'm a professional, so any art I do should reflect that. That sucks.

It's a tough decision to make, but a). You're going to have an easier time making a living at programming, and b). You still can play piano at home after work to wind down and relax. You'll love doing that the rest of your life. It will never become tiresome. There won't ever even be a rare moment where it will be "just your job."

Brain: that's some good advice on the changing-things-up front. This is why I now play golf. When it's not winter.

Zaius: Where you animating at?

This comment seems a bit of a tangent, but definitely relates to the comments above. I work in advertising (yes, I know. EVIL) Anyway... My hobby, however, is in sleight-of-hand magic. I perform all the time for friends, family, and the like. After all of my performances, people invariably ask me: "so, why don't you quit your job and do magic for a living?"

Well, the simple reason and fear of what has been stated above. I don't want to make my performance magic "work." I want to enjoy it as it is -- not as a vehicle to earn a living by. So, I understand everyone's frustration and definitely relate to what this discussion has been about.

w00master

bowler: i think you're right. i was just thinking - if i had done it the other way around and tried to make a living with music (would would be incredibly more difficult than making a living with programming, i agree) i wouldn't be able to come home and code in order to wind down. programming is awesome, but it's definently not something to do to relax.

I hear you :)

I worked in the game industry for five years, and have credit on two titles. Mainly, I did network programming and 3D effects engines (particle and special effects).

Knowing what goes on under the hood does affect the way you look at games!

Instead of finding a quirk, and either glossing it over or ignoring it, it now rubs me the wrong way. Why? Because if I saw it, the folks who made the game saw it. And that means that the game was somewhat rushed to market (as most games are due to economic issues). This leads quickly to the thought "How good would this game have been had they been given the time they needed?"

By that time, my immersion is toast, and I'm usually disgusted. I find that pretending I didn't see the flaw helps a bit, sometimes.

On a lighter note: because I know what goes into making a game, I especially enjoy those with both a maximum of depth and a minimum of flaws. Those are few and far between, but they're golden when I find them!

Bored with canned / quirky AI in games? Play an MMORPG. At least then you'll be so busy talking to friends as you burn down your opponents' town, you won't have time to notice polygonal tears and misapplied textures :)

D

I am also a game industry programmer, with credit on seven titles.

I also notice flaws and inconsistencies in games all the time. However, this doesn't (usually) ruin the experience for me. If the flaw is a technical flaw (like buggy AI or a stupid collision system), I often wonder (like Doccus) what the game would be like if those corners were not cut. If the flaw is with the art, I typically try to ignore it and move on. I actually enjoy finding design flaws, because I think that game design is by far the most difficult part of game development to get right. In fact, over the last couple of years I've gotten into the habit of playing terrible games just to learn what the developer did wrong.

I went into game development because I really enjoyed picking games apart when I was a kid. Now I put games together for a living, but picking the competition apart can still be fun. However, I very rarely contemplate games as they apply to my job. That is, I spend my time looking at design flaws and ignoring the code flaws, because I don't think there is much I can learn from looking at other people's bugs. This is different than having an immersive game experience (which is still possible, with a very highly polished game), but it is entertaining nonetheless.

My suggestion to you: since you are an artist, try thinking about the games you are playing in terms other than those you are used to (like code or design). I think that if you concentrate on things that are not your expertise, you'll quickly forget about the animation or art flaws and settle down into the game.

waka

I've been a pro game programmer for about six years now. My affection for games (and the development thereof) is cyclical. Every few months I will get completely revolted and fantasize about farming, or some such thing. My wife rolls her eyes, and the mood breaks eventually.

I generally find it hard to muster enthusiasm for whatever game I'm currently working on, but I still enjoy playing other people's games. Maybe there's a difference between how artists see games and how programmers see them, though.

As a counterpoint to some of the previous posts, I still play quite a few games. Most of the veteran game developers I've worked with were avid gamers: video games, board games, D&D, Nerf guns, Bop-It... probably even hopscotch.

There is talk all over about how games are losing their edge. The high-profile games are going the way of Hollywood blockbusters -- most of them are simply not that different from one another.

Games are such a weird thing. They have an identity problem. As long as the trend towards interactive movies keeps up, and the content of story-like games sticks to action/adventure/combat, how much variety is possible? I cannot remember the last time I saw a good action movie.

The only way to add more depth and freshness to games that stick to the story path is to allow for more role playing possibilities, but that is severly constrained from both ends: technology is insufficient to provide NPCs that can role play, and the work involved (not to mention the social stigma) of role playing in detail keeps the audience very very small.

Let's face it, (single-player) games are, ultimately, about you interfacing with a machine. The story part of it is just at odds with this fact, unless you treat the characters as machines, meaning they are either utilities or obstacles. Not much room for variety or depth or surprise in a story like that.

I think games need to get back to their roots a bit, and acknowledge, once again, that you are dealing with a machine. The game is a system of rules and other parts and the point of playing it is to master, or anyways improve, at playing. The only way to make new games interesting is to change the nature of the system -- to change the rules, radically. For good or bad, though, that probably means dropping the story elements.

Personally I think that the future of gaming, for the hard core (or should I say, sophisticated), is some new kind of multi-player. Once you've out-grown single player (fiddling with the machine), you just have to go to co-operative/competitive play. The trick is to come up with another level of multi-player gameplay and to add formality and a more mature social context to multiplayer gaming, so the whole "ghey/noob/camper" thing can be dealth with. And its got to be something better than Counter-Strike or its clones.

Or you could go play some computer chess.

I'm not in the game industry, but I do a lot of urban simulation and animation in my line of work. I have gotten used to different engines, animation quirks and the like. While it has taken away from how I appreciate games in some ways, it has opened the doors to other areas that I rarely noticed before. I really appreciate good textures and models in a way I didn't before. I wonder how certain things were accomplished and how difficult it would be to replicate.

I also have noticed that I appreciate the artwork a bit more and the style of games instead of the technology. To me, the technology is old hat, the artistry can never get old. Ico and Zelda: The Wind Waker are good examples of this.

Above all else, I still find a fun game to be a fun game. (But I did get nothing out of Ratchet and Clank for the record)

I think my experiences have been different from what most of you have been saying. I'm an artist/programmer/musician and I've done all 3 "professionally" at one point or another.

I got into programming when I was 7, music when I was 10, and art when I was about 11 or 12. And I didn't treat them as hobbies. I always took them more seriously than school. So maybe I didn't have much of that "blissful ignorance" stage or something. I've leaned towards saying "Maybe it's me" whenever I feel jaded by my interests, but I always snap out of that. If you feel like nobody is doing things the way you want and it really bothers you, I believe that's a natural force to push you towards filling a void.

I've felt/feel jaded towards music/games, but I just use that to push me towards finding what I'm looking for and supporting it or getting off my ass and doing it myself.

btw, whenever I feel jaded by my interests, it helps to get stimulation from alternate sources. Do something out of your ordinary routine on a quest to find something to rejuvenate you. Do something you would normally never do. For some reason, that works for me sometimes unless it's just a bad case of depression.

I really have to agree with Draigon's opinion. You probably need a little change of pace or a new source of input/simulation.

I think that if you apply yourself to a particular task for an extended amount of time, you will go through that particular phase of boredom. I believe, however, that it's a particularly cyclic sort of thing. Eventually you will come around full circle and be able to look at the same thing with new eyes.

When humans start a new experience or task, they generally seem to have endless bounds of enthusiasm for whatever it is that they are doing. As time goes on, only those things that are truely important to you remain interesting.

I don't think that it applies only to the field of gaming. I think that this idea of "loosing the magic" happens for anything that you do for a long period of time. Unfortunately our society as a whole does not reenforce the idea of perserverence. We all like quick, easy, simple, small to digest bits of experience rather than long-term committed developement.

I've been a martial arts instructor for 15 or so years, and I have gone through many ups and downs of not wanting to step into the gym to train or look at another uncoordinated person, but what keeps me coming back is the personal interaction between the people in the class and an unexplainable desire to just not quit.

I'm also wondering if it's time that you create a game. :) If you can see these flaws, maybe there is some new twist that you would be able to create that would be fulfilling.

Finally, I think that it's important to try and maintain a child-like attitude towards these long-term experiences. Kids always seem to enjoy endless repeat behaviors: the re-reading and re-reading of a favority book. The constant repeating of a question or a song. They have no preconceived experiences so everything is always new and refreshing. Having that sort of attitude is very difficult to maintain... Human's cannot maintain a state of alertness for a prolonged period of time.

I guess everything seems to lose it's magic after a while, but those things that are important to our core are worth rekindling that child-like attitude...

I've been in the visual effects industry for the past 4 years or so, and for the first little while going to watch films in a theatre became an excercise in reverse-engineering. It was such an immersion-destroying phenomenon to have a behind-the-scenes intimacy to a film that for a while I couldn't bring myself to watch an action/sci-fi flick.

After some time spent watching indi movies and experimenting with some genres of film I wouldn't have normally been interested in (I discovered a passion for hokey westerns!) I managed to re-discover my love of film, especially -really terrible- film.

I'd like to think that these days I can "turn off" the CG artist and just sit back and enjoy the experience. It's taken quite a bit of work though. I quite liked the Hulk in all his plasticy green glory. :)

Perhaps the key to rediscovering your love of games is to immerse yourself in the truly awful and most off-the-wall games you can find for a while, until you develop an affection for bad work. I strongly recommend any 1980's arcade classic based on a movie or comic book license. :)

-Jay Cobill

What a great thread. A lot of insightful comments!

I think it's true that the things you do the most you eventually grow tired of - and if you're working on games all day, every day, it's hard to imagine any other outcome than that you would get a little bored with them. (I've often said the same thing about relationships...;) )

But what I'd like to suggest is that this is a plateau in your interest, not a valley - and whether you go to another hobby for awhile or soldier on through your frustration, what will happen is that eventually you'll find yourself noticing things about games that you didn't before, and your interest will be rekindled.

I've been in the industry for ten years, and programmed a handful of games, but mostly I've examined and played perhaps a thousand games and game concepts while working for two of the console manufacturers. I've definitely been where you are, and revisit it frequently. That doesn't change. But trust in yourself that you haven't killed your passion - it will respark on its own.

For me, what rekindles my interest is just that little something that shows passion for an idea. It could be a unique game design concept, like for Mr. Mosquito, Parappa, Rez, Space Channel 5, Rez, Ico, Sly Cooper, or BG&E. Or an incredible technical achievement like the movie-to-real-time camera for LOTR:TT. Or amazing production values like for True Crime. Or even simply an extraordinary strength of will to create a great product, which causes the developers to go to amazing lengths, like for Enter the Matrix (cost) or Republic (time).

Your hobby hasn't died - there is no death of such things. Like the flowers which bloom each spring, your passion for games will return when the circumstances are right. It may not feel exactly the same, but then, you won't be the same person when this passion returns, so why would you want it to be exactly the same?

i think mebbe another thing that may be affectin you that you might not realize is that prolly all of us have been told throughout our lives that games and gaming aren't very valuable to society. i think here in america at least, it takes a lot to keep on with the hobby in spite of people saying thats its a waste of time. i'm basin this from personal experience tho, so if you don't feel that people treat it that way then nevermind. but basically what i mean is that its pretty hard to keep up interest with something, whatever yer passion for it is, if you've repeatedly been told that it doesn't really have any worth. personally i think games are central to a peoples culture, and that if a culture has no games, its not a real culture. so i place games up there with painting and music. i think a lotta people do internally at least, but maybe don't acknowledge it. i liked what draigon said, about how if you don't like whats out there, you should try to put something out there that you do like. thats really how good art is made. by seeing that something is missing from the world and makin it. i know thats prolly bad advice, especially for video game design, on account of the costs involved, but i think it could be good advice too. theres no reason you cant make a game thats better than all of the other ones out there. its true for all other forms of art, so why shouldn't it be tru for games as well.
i really think it comes down to the worth issue, cause after years and years of painting, i still remember that what im doing is art, and therefore of worth to society at large, but for some reason i still have a hard time explainin to my friends why its all right that i can play video games for 10 hour long stretches at a time. i paint for that long, should it be unnatural that i play for that long too?

I've been into game programming for a few years, and in the beginning it really took out of my enjoyment of games, but my passion for gaming came back. From time to time i lose my passion for small amounts of time, luckily i have other hobbies (and game programming is one of my hobbies, in addition to gaming, free diving and snowboarding). So if i get bored with one of them, i just do one of the other until the interest comes back.

Bowler,

It may not be you. It may just be the games. Go get Mario & Luigi for your GBA. Play that. Then tell me if you've killed your last hobby.

This sounds like the programmer's mantra:

"All software sucks."

And it does. In my 6 years of computer programming, I've never experienced software that didn't suck. In fact, I've never written software that didn't suck, and I'm a pretty decent programmer. The best thing that an honest developer can say about her software is "It doesn't suck".

One of my best friends in the whole world is a video game designer. For years I pestered him for advice on how to get a job in the industry, and every time I would mention it he would try to disuade me:

"It's really hard to get a job."
"The pay sucks."
"The hours suck."

Finally, one day I said "Listen up. This has been my dream since I was 12 years old. Don't tell me how hard it is, or how much it sucks. I've got a real job now that's no cakewalk: the pay sucks, the hours suck, crunch time sucks. But that's the job. That's what I do. Why won't you help me?".

And he looked at me the way that only a true friend can, and said "I know. But you love games and I don't want you to lose that. And you will if you start making them.".

He's got a valid point, although we've since talked more about it and he doesn't feel as strongly about it as he used to. We've decided that industry insiders need to view gaming as a relationship rather than a hobby.

It's like when you get married. Before the marriage, everything's all hugs and kisses and romance and candlelight dinners. After a few years and a few kids, the hugs and kisses and romance and candlelight are replaced with passing glances, quick hellos and Dominoes pizza. Does that mean that you don't love each other anymore? Do you give up?

Some might, but if it's real you understand that things change. My wife and I haven't had a romantic trip in years but we love each other more than ever. We understand each other in a way that's beautiful. And that's how you understand games.

Yeah, the cancerous spots in games are more offensive. But the beautiful spots, the games with great gameplay or art are that much more beautiful. You have an understanding of the process and the underbelly that few do, and with that comes a greater appreciation.

So chin up :). It'll get better. Or you'll get a divorce.

[b]Perhaps the key to rediscovering your love of games is to immerse yourself in the truly awful and most off-the-wall games you can find for a while, until you develop an affection for bad work. I strongly recommend any 1980's arcade classic based on a movie or comic book license. :)[/b]

This is exactly what I do, and it totally works. Bad games are much more fun when you play with other coworkers though. And after playing some truly horrible games for a while, the good games that annoy you now will seem like a breath of fresh air.

waka

I think one of the reasons that you might be getting frustrated is from a lot of the talk that comes out of the game development and game-interested crowd about what is and is not important. Mechanics and gameplay have been so over-emphasized as the "heart" of gaming, and looking at them as cultural works or on an aesthetic level have been somewhat dismissed, and while this is understandable (you don't have a good game with bad mechanics, you have a broken promise) it doesn't really give you much to grow up with.

My sense is that game design isn't growing up with its audience, and as you grow out of the audience demographic, you're starting to feel a little let down. If you were working on the videogame equivalent of Citizen Kane, would you still feel the same way?

game design seems to have grown in terms of boobs and bombs and little else, with a few exceptions here and there (deus ex comes to mind as the last really enjoyable console experience i had) but that's a depressing issue for another thread.

as a semi-pro musician i find myself having trouble enjoying a lot of work in my particular genre of expertise (microhouse/IDM/glitch/etc) and only started buying music again by getting into stuff from the opposite side of the spectrum, like spastic metal and arty rock type stuff. by listening to things that i wouldn't or couldn't do by myself in styles that i wouldn't even begin to try to emulate i've found out more of what i like and don't like in my own work and the works of others.

Like the flowers which bloom each spring, your passion for games will return when the circumstances are right.

Amen. Sometimes, we have to accept that who we were lies in the past, and who we are lies in the future. Many's the time I lost interest in games, and many's the times that years later I've come back.

It's only natural, and it's the only way to really appreciate the art in the game, rather than the monkey. (Are there monkeys in games? Not enough, methinks!)

I think one of the reasons that you might be getting frustrated is from a lot of the talk that comes out of the game development and game-interested crowd about what is and is not important. Mechanics and gameplay have been so over-emphasized as the "heart" of gaming, and looking at them as cultural works or on an aesthetic level have been somewhat dismissed, and while this is understandable (you don't have a good game with bad mechanics, you have a broken promise) it doesn't really give you much to grow up with.

Damned good point.

I often get into this with so-called "classic" or "retro" gamers. With a few exceptions, computer & video games just don't age well. The best games are always the ones to come.

Whereas forms of art and entertainment with more settled technologies - like cinema and music - have established a canon of key works that can easily be enjoyed by (and inspire) people born long after their creation, any video game older than, say, 5 years might as well have never existed for the current generation of players.

(Again, exceptions can be made for a few all-time faves and runaway bestseller franchises.)

The focus on the underlying technology and mechanics of the games also, as you point out, de-emphasizes any aesthetic or narrative considerations.

For a timely example, check out almost any gaming website or magazine coverage of video game trade shows. It's all about new video cards, new console specs, broadband enabling, etc. Hardly ever anything "deeper."

Now, this is true of something like the movies as well. There are all manner of cineaste specialist publications to inform you about lighting, new kinds of cameras, film processing, digital editing, CGI, THX and SDDS theaters and so forth.

All worthy subjects, but it's still understood that someone who only watches movies from a technical, "cinematographical" perspective is rather missing the point.

What is the movie about? Is the story any good? Is it the same old, tiresome stuff or is something fresh being attempted?

(In fact, some of the best cinema criticism ever written has come from people who couldn't diagram the parts of a Panaflex camera or explain exactly how Dolby Surround works if their lives depended on it.)

So why is the gaming media so often a soul-deadening drone of texture mapping, framerates, polygon counts and hair-splitting over the virtues of the latest Creative Labs audio card...?

Is there so little "meat" to our hobby and passion that there's nothing else to talk about outside of the wires and plumbing?

After I watched Fight Club, I now always see the cigarette burns in the corner of the frame that are supposed to tell the projectionist to skip reels. After simply reading enough about film construction, I wince at bad cuts.

Knowing more about the construction of any medium does make it harder to immerse yourself in the enjoyment of it. Working in game development has done the same for me. I still enjoy the really well done game, but everything else usually falls under the category of "study it's crappitude so you don't repeat it." What's interesting is that I now kind of enjoy watching my friends play games, studying how they interact and play. Most of the large number comments about gender and gaming on this site become painfully obvious in only a few minutes of sitting down and actually watching girls play different games, for instance.

My point is that if you really love games, you'll find ways to appreciate them (at least some of them), even if you have too much insight to fully be immersed in them. The analogy of a marriage is pretty apt, in that your relationship changes, but there's still lots to be gained from it.

I'm a games coder and I've been reading this thread with interest. It's good to hear what other developers feel about the subject. Personally I've seen a lot of people in this business become jaded and burnt out. It's a demanding job. Around crunch time I can feel empty and unfulfilled, but this is a periodic transitional phase that's due to my life overall being unbalanced. Too much work and not enough play makes Jak a dull boy :)

I've found an important difference between coders and artists. Programmers of my generation (I'm now 28) got into their trade as kids, making little games on 8 bit systems back in the 80's. We're still doing essentially the same thing, the act of coding is mostly a technical achievement. mnickel said, "try and maintain a child-like attitude", which is easy for my peers as we're still doing the same kinds of things we did back then, albeit on more complex projects.

As I'm not an artist myself I don't have much authority to talk about how that experience differs. However I'll just say it's my impression that artists need more creative stimulus than coders. A very significant part of contemporary games development for artists is, for example, creating large cityscapes. There's only so much creativity you can put into desiging a thousand buildings that are *supposed* to look *normal*. As a coder I get a 'creative' buzz out of desiging systems that can render these buildings as efficiently as possible.

I feel exceptionally lucky to be in the games business. Most people don't like their job. A certain amount of disatisfaction is to be expected.
They call it 'work' and pay you money for a reason.

I don't play a lot of games anymore. I don't have a computer, console or even a TV at home. I have a HiFi and a bass guitar. When I play games it's at work because there's all the best equipment there. However, I spend a long time working there so I don't like to hang around at night so much. I now spend most of my leisure time involved in other entertainment, particularly those featuring direct human involvement.

I also don't bother playing average games. There's an awful lot of dross out there and I'm looking for things to inspire me. I play hits and obscure off the wall titles that echo the weird creativity of the 80's. Incidentally I've found the later tend to originate in Japan.

As an aside, I love to travel. So far I've made games in London, Adelaide (Australia) and Vienna. I'd be interested to hear how it is in Japan. That's the one destination I've always dreamt about, but expect I'd have to learn the language before I could get work.

I love this industry and am excited by where it's going. I believe we're witnessing the genesis of a new artistic medium. There's more and more academic and critical analysis of games, and this is a very healthy indicator for the future. I believe it's up to us to raise the level of interactive digital entertainment and make it what we want it to be.

I find the following sites inspirational,

Game Studies
Game Research
Ludology

In response to Gareth's comment about getting a programming job in Japan...

I actually have a friend who's working at a small Japanese developer (the guys who made Guitaroo Man). At the time he went over, I believe he had between 1 and 2 years of college-level Japanese. His strategy involved meeting Japanese developers at GDC and getting them drunk until he talked one of them into offering him a job. He's been there about 6 months now, and is still having a good time. Apparently he manages to communicate with his boss in sort of a pigin Japanese-English mix that works well enough.

The moral of the story is: if you are a skilled developer and you really want to work in Japan, you could probably get there inside of 2 years.

Thus endith my tangent.

I've found that since I've worked in the games industry, my passion has shifted from the rush I get from gaming itself, to enjoying the game development process in much the same way. Designing and developing a game is fun and challenging in a similar way that playing a game is - it's all about problem solving and using the tools that you're given, after all.

It is true that I don't enjoy every game that I play like I used to, but since I've become a professional in the industry, there have been more and more and more games on the market, and I play more of them (ostensibly for "research"). I go through phases too, sometimes, no games on the shelves will interest me at all, and then something will come out that I'll enjoy and my passion for gaming as a hobby will be re-kindled again.

I don't think you've killed your hobby. I think you've become sophisticated enough that you will only enjoy games of significant quality, and I, for one, am excited at the prospect of having more and more truly sophisticated gamers out there - it means that there is a market for sophisticated games.

Ah yes, to be a connoisseur of video games. Swirl it around the glass, swish it in your mouth, spit it back out. Linger on the texture and the smell and the qualities of the taste. You know all the intricacies involved in the creation, and an especially good concoction is delighting and invigorating. But why is it no longer fun to get drunk?

Titus: "Ah yes, to be a connoisseur of video games. Swirl it around the glass, swish it in your mouth, spit it back out. Linger on the texture and the smell and the qualities of the taste. You know all the intricacies involved in the creation, and an especially good concoction is delighting and invigorating. But why is it no longer fun to get drunk?"

Not to nitpick, but I find your comparison amusing. Wine testers spit the wine back out, so that the alcohol cannot be imbibed and therefore throw off their concentration. They don't get drunk. :)

Bowler: that's kinda what I meant, actually. It's a pretty inadequate analogy, I guess, but I meant to imply that they spend so much time around the alchohol that they probably wouldn't want to have much to do with it in their free time.

Eh... yeah, don't mind me :-)

Looking at the bells and whistles actually has the same effect one myself as well. I actually sat down and ask myself "Why do I like this game?" and more often than not it was character design and story (+music), the graphics and game engine went out the window. However it seems to me game companies are putting MORE into the stupid engine to run the thing than the actual storyline and graphics (+music) itself. There are some games I've played and said, "Heck with this, the story sucks." and thus dumped the game from my hard drive.

Visuals are important, however wanting to make everything a gavie (game movie) with no story, no good character development I feel is detrimental to the game itself...

I'm a designer of trading card games, and I have seen many of the same problems. However, my solution and the solution of many of my coworkers is to play a *different* kind of game.

We don't play many TCGs in our spare time. When we do, it's usually another company's game. But I know whereof you speak when you say you're too close to your genre.

We spend most of our hobby time playing board games or computer games. Not only are these different enough to not seem like work, but sometimes they spark useful discussions about the games we do work on.

You still love games. You just have to find some games to love that are not like work.

i think every professional in the gaming industry goes through this. At least, I hope so. :)

I have the same feeling too, and I can identify it completely. The thing is I have been feeling like this for a few years already, and I've been contemplating the reason behind my dying, if not already six feet under, hobby. In general, I feel the gaming industry is coming into the age of Enlightenment while I'm already on the Romantic revolt. The emphasis on puzzles, I feel, is not a wrong approach per se but missed the mark completely.

I used to be easily pleased. But what I have come to realized is that I actually found no satisfaction from any game I have ever played. What I have been pleased with was the expectation of something more to the games, which the games at first apparently seem to be able to provide. However, when I finish those games, I was usually left with a general sense of dissatisfaction - something is missing, but what is it? I can point to poor graphics, poor physics, or poor interfaces, and a whole lot of different mechanical factors but none of them were the real answers, not for me anyways. The real problem for me is that none of the puzzles in the game are "authentic." Not authentic as in they are artificial, artificial obstacles created just for the player. The whole affair of playing game is like confirming Berkley's immaterialism - there is nothing behind what is perceived, there is no such thing as matter, and certainly there is not a real system behind the interaction of them.

For me, it isn't just a phrase, and it's very unlikely that it can get better soon. It's not that I have no interest in games anymore but I found them all just too "empty." Actually, it's all a bit like magic - when you're young, you can be impressed by magic tricks, but once you know them as just tricks, you no long find them magical. It's not that you've lost interest in magic. Rather, you simply feel disappointed that the tricks aren't magic, and worse still, that the magicians themselves don't know any magic.

It's almost been 3 years since I started working in the industry and i feel all the pain being described by everyone here. My only real complaint with the whole system is that getting the shot to try something new is damn near impossible these days. Now with movie deals and games being figured into the movie budgets and the such we are going to be forced to create games with more stringent guidelines instead of breaking the mold or maybe we need to be more clever and break the mold with those licensees. I wonder what is was like when Miyamoto went into the board meeting if there even was one and was like "hey i wanna make a game with a fat italian plumber and some creatures chasing him through sewer pipes" I dare any of us to not get laughed out of any publisher meetings with those kinds of ideas today. At any rate time, money, money and too many cooks in the kitchen are killing the creative side of a business built on that very principle... but then again all principles seem to melt away when money is on the line and since indie game dev will surface sometime never we can get out or put up... at the end of the day the job is fun more days of the year than not...

Being a relative newbie to a lot of people on this thread, I hate to espouse my feelings of being burned out, jaded, betrayed, etc by the videogame industry when I'm technically just starting off. With that caveat out of the way, I would just like to say that I feel like everyone else on here, good thing we didn't get into gynocology.

I haven't quite hit the part in my life where I just dissect every game I see and criticize everything that they do and talk about how they suck and I could do better. I try to analyze things and figure out why some of those decisions were made and if possibly they were made for reasons that I should be looking into. Granted there are days when I feel like everything I play these days is no fun but there in lies a completely separate problem. That being - I feel like I got into the videogame industry at the wrong time.

I grew up playing the classics just like everyone else, some of my fondest memories are when Mario was evil kidnapping Donkey Kong (boy does Nintendo try to hide that fact) or trying to see if Baby Pac Man really did exist in the Ms. Pac Man coin op. I grew up on Miyamoto, Will Wright, Jordan Mechner, Richard Garriot, Roberta Williams and countless unknown authors of those 5 1/4 Apple disks that were formatted on both sides due to the magic of a hole punch.

Those are the games I grew up with and love and the reason why I got into the videogame industry. Now that I'm here, it seems like the last thing anyone wants to play let alone make are those games. I don't enjoy First Person Shooters, I don't enjoy collecting 100 coins on every level and I don't enjoy playing an aim chat room with graphics that take up 20 hours of your day.

So while my interest in videogames is waning, I feel like the videogames themselves are evolving into something that I barely recognize let alone want to play. So maybe this is a more complex problem (at least for me) than simply saying I'm burnt out.

I entered the game industry over nine years ago (programming credits on seven titles), although I've been working independently for the last few. The year before I started, maybe I bought six games, and it slowly tailed off after I got into the biz. The last game I bought was Grand Theft Auto (not Vice City); I've played some other games since, but GTA3 was also the last game I finished.

It does seem in part that I'm sensitive to "bad design" more than I used to be, but I feel there's also just a certain degree to which I don't tolerate frustration and tedium entirely independent of my "insider knowledge"; frustration and tedium just aren't fun--perhaps this is just attributable to age and experience. I played The Sims for far too long and eventually realized that I really just wasn't having fun playing it; I was doing the equivalent of the MMORPG levelling-up treadmill, maybe because I wanted to "see the new stuff" or something, I don't know.

So I'm torn between thinking that it's just me and my better design skills reacting, or that it's just burn-out because I'm too familiar with games, versus feeling that it's because there really has been a shift in the industry--due to consolidation and focus on hit-making, there's a continued over-emphasis on eye candy, "user features" (things that nobody actually wants when they play but they think they want), and same-old same-old gameplay. For example, I don't get why people like Halo; it just seems like yet another shooter with fancier graphics and slightly different weapons than the last. But the game sure seems to have plenty of fans, such as certain owners of certain webzines.

Maybe every gamer gets jaded as they get older, but they get replaced by young gamers who aren't jaded--the old ones disappear off the map and aren't around to post on forums anymore; it's only developers who are jaded but still follow gaming sites.

I'm a professional game designer and I know what you're talking about.

I've played Prince of Persia and loved it, all the while cursing against its mistakes. I may be one of only ten people in the world considering that the only 45 degrees jump half way in the game is a major game design faux pas. But it didn't stop me from appreciating the good stuff in the game.

My advice to you is to use your expertise to enjoy the things that only experts can see and not only feel. That's why I still play and still enjoy playing, seeing how Miyamoto, Will Wright or Warren Spector (or whomever you admire) performs his latest magic trick.
Today, it's hard to find a game in which there isn't at least one good idea, even if sometimes it takes a game designer to see it. Luckily, you are one.

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Posted by: outsider on April 11, 2006 08:04 AM